Tracery

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, "to getting 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.