Justin Matherly is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures referencing ancient Greek and Roman statuary. While early works often incorporated wood, the Brooklyn-based artist now largely works with concrete and medical equipment such as walkers and crutches. With these materials, Matherly's sculptures reflect his interests in philosophy, decay, illness, recovery and rebirth.
Read MoreImagery of hands and sculptures that famously lack limbs frequent Matherly's works. His concrete sculpture Every body moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly (Dedicate to everyone) (2012) is an abstracted replica one of the most famous ancient sculptures, Laocoön and His Sons, which was excavated in Rome in 1506. Here, Matherly concerned himself with not only the visual relationships between the serpent and the characters' hands, but also with Laocoön's missing left hand, which has been repeatedly reconstructed over the years. Further, Handbook of inner culture for external barbarians (we nah beg no friend) (2013) is a monumental concrete sculpture that depicts Antiochus I—a Hellenistic ruler of the Seleucid Empire—shaking hands with his ally deities. The sculpture, which is derived from a stone relief found in a temple-tomb site in Nemrud Dagi, Turkey, rests atop an assemblage of ambulatory equipment. The use of medical paraphernalia, which often accompanies Matherly's sculptures, was in part inspired by a Japanese horror film from the 1990s that featured characters with mental or physical disabilities. Matherly recalls begin struck by the attitude in the film that 'these bodies just existed that way.' Overall, his work is centred around the body, humans and sickness, and 'things breaking down and not being able to function on their own.'
Reading is fundamental to Matherly's process, and the ideas of Western philosophers and writers are referenced often in his work. Departing from the writings of Franz Kafka, Marquis de Sade, Kazimir Malevich and others, Matherly's works are often physical manifestations of the interaction between the artist and text. For example, Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator led Matherly to recreate the Belvedere Torso, which he exhibited as the central piece in an exhibition at Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, in 2011.
On the other side of severed limbs and illness are recovery and rebirth. For Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Matherly created a full-scale facsimile of Nietzsche's rock in the Swiss Alps. According to historical records, the rock—located on the shore of Lake Silvaplana—was the place where the philosopher conceived of eternal recurrence. Matherly's duplicate resonated with an earlier solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich in 2016, where he showed sculptures portraying Asclepius—the Greco-Roman god of medicine—and his son Telesphoros—the god of convalescence. In addition to the sculptures, Matherly showed a series of monoprints of Nietzsche's rock.
After collecting ideas and conceiving of a concept for a sculpture, Matherly proceeds to create a foam model. Once the foam model is complete, the artist wraps strips of Treegator—a type of plastic sheet used to water trees—around it to produce a negative mould and casts the form in concrete.
Matherly received a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 2002 and went on to study at Hunter College, New York, where he graduated with an MFA in 2007. In addition to his participation in Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, he has exhibited extensively across the United States and Europe. Solo exhibitions include König Galerie, Berlin (2015) and Bureau at Frame, Frieze, New York (2012). Matherly has been featured in group exhibitions such as Stars + Stripes: American Art of the 21st Century from the Goldberg Collection, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2014) and A Triple Tour: Collection Pinault, Conciergerie, Paris (2013).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2018
