Richard Rezac at Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Chicago-based sculptor, Richard Rezac. This will be Rezac’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over a decade.

Starting from drawing, Richard Rezac is known to carefully craft sculptures of a distinctly unique character in a variety of materials, including aluminum, bronze, paint, maple wood, cherry wood, plaster, silk, and cotton. They have obvious references to furniture and architectural detail and always insist on their domestic relatability to the human body. The work has a fluid relationship with matter-of-factness, which is where it dovetails into the uncanny. At first glance, it might seem familiar or explainable in everyday terms, but upon closer inspection, it reveals itself to be something much stranger and altogether mystifying. Yet more deliberate sculpture could hardly be said to exist.“At times his devotion,” remarked the painter Thomas Nozkowski, “togetting some little thing right seems most religious in its fervor.”

Of the title of his exhibition, Tracery, Rezac writes:

I gravitate to single words, being more suggestive and open-ended. And while the main definition of tracery is the architectural term of open weave or mullion framing of windows in the European Gothic period or Indian and Middle-Eastern cultures, thus a view through a physical, structured network, the term also implies the transport of one source or idea to another, the basic sense of linear drawing, and rational pattern and structure—so all of these do apply to my thinking and method.

Richard Rezac (b. 1952, Lincoln, Nebraska) lives and works in Chicago. Since 2000, he has had 32 solo exhibitions, including at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, The Renais- sance Society at the University of Chicago and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, Feature Inc., New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Luhring Augustine, New York, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles and James Harris Gallery, Seattle. Until his retirement in 2019, he was Adjunct Full Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in both the Painting and Sculpture Departments. He has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among others. His sculpture is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.