Steven Urry

Steven Urry (1939–1993) was based in Chicago and New York. Fabricated, as was much of Urry’s work from the late 1960s into the '70s, out of aluminum that had been cast and welded in his studio above the Biograph Theater, the monumental sculpture in _Splatscape_ comes from a period in which Urry was closely associated with the Chicago Imagist artists. His work was curated into numerous group exhibitions with members of the Hairy Who, False Image, and Nonplussed Some, and he showed alongside them at Phyllis Kind Gallery, despite the fact that his oeuvre was virtually all abstract. Biomorphic in the extreme, with unpainted metallic finishes, Urry’s globular, spurting, gooey sculptures often seemed to defy gravity, creeping up walls, dangling from the ceiling, or arcing high into the air. The sculpture featured in _Splatscape_ dates from circa 1969, when a similar work adorned the façade of Loyola University’s library in Rogers Park and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, mounted a solo exhibition of related works titled _Dribblescape_. Urry’s work has not been exhibited since his 2012 retrospective at Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, Illinois.