TONY MATELLI

Tony Matelli is an American sculptor famous for his hyperrealist works that reflect the subtle and ever-elusive combination of concept and contemporary technology.

Each of Matelli’s works embodies the artist’s sarcastic pessimism, laced with humor and vitality – his personal experience of living his most vivid emotional states. United by his ironic attitude to himself and to the absurdity of everyday life, Matelli’s works are simultaneously complex, joyful and tragic, just like the emotions and conflicts that inspire the artist.

Challenging the laws of gravity, he completely readjusts optics, thereby giving the viewer a new picture of the objects and phenomena that surround us and transforming the existent reality into something new.

All of his objects incorporate a provocation, a protest against the accepted rules and conventions that exist in the world. His sculptures can be described as anti-monuments, which reinterpret the tradition of hyperrealism in American sculpture and focus on loneliness, defenselessness and, at the same time, resilience and resistance to unfortunate circumstances.

While demonstrating an acute personal response to basic emotions, Matelli is ironic about himself and smiles at the absurdity of what’s happening around him. He is set on questioning all the things that many thought unshakable and on creating the right visual forms to impart subtle philosophical concepts.

Selected public and private collections:

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Aarhus, Denmark), Arken Museum of Modern Art (Ishøj, Denmark), Bergen Kunstmuseum (Bergen, Norway), Bonnier Collection (Stockholm, Sweden), The Davis Museum (Wellesley, MA, USA), Fundacion La Caixa (Madrid, Spain), FRAC Bordeaux (France), Mudam Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Musee d’Arte Contemporain (Montreal, Canada), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany), Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington, New Zealand), Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, Netherlands), Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, OK, USA), Uppsala Konstmusuem (Uppsala, Sweden)

Courtesy Gary Tatintsian Gallery