Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce SomeBodies, a summer group exhibition featuring the sculptural work of the following six artists:

Keith Edmier
Medea, 2016
In his new sculpture Keith Edmier approaches the Ancient Greek myth of Medea. The sculpture, cast in pink dental stone, shows Medea rising from deceased Los Angeles artist Lowell Grant’s kiln, holding her child on her lap, preparing to slay him. The sculpture takes its initial form from a 19th Century sculpture by Yannoulis Chalepas, who spent most of his life in an insane asylum. Medea is portrayed by Nancy Kovack, the actress who played Medea in the 1963 Hollywood version of Jason and the Argonauts, a movie that influenced Keith's early childhood. Lowell Grant sculpted a portrait of Nancy Kovack, who played an artist’s model, in the Vincent Price movie, Diary of a Madman, also from 1963. Grant died tragically when his kiln exploded in 1977. The kiln still exists as a ruin on the actual site. Mythological Greek tragedy conflates with real life tragedy.

Georg Herold
Brown Betelgeuze, 1989
Betelgeuze, the brightest star in the constellation of Orion, is used as the source for Herold’s bronze sculpture, as the star is not only brown, but it is also an irregular, elongated structure. The sculpture sits upon a white cuboid form, which is two things at once: a formal antithesis and a pedestal. This sculpture and comparable works by the artist provide an ironic commentary on the heated discussion raging in the 1980s about floor sculptures without pedestals.

Sean Landers
Pan, 2006
Sculpted in wet clay and exhibited underneath the New York City High Line train trestle, Pan was exposed to the elements, for one month in the spring of 2006. On the last day of the exhibition, Pan was brought to a foundry to be cast into bronze. The work embodies the sculptural sensibilities and iconography of Sean Landers, who has used the Greek half-god Pan in painting and sculpture since 1991. Pan’s goatish image recalls conventional depictions of Satan, while his name is associated with the concept of an all-encompassing entity. The name of this Greek god of the wild, nature, and shepherds, is the origin of the word “panic”, the cause of the sudden fear that sometimes comes for no reason, especially in lonely places.

Jon Pylypchuk
allright, i guess i can’t be sincere to you anymore, 2015
“It’s a Pietà. You think you are going to save the world but instead you get old and have kids. And you think your kids are going to save the world. But they will get old and have kids” (Jon Pylypchuk).

Nicola Tyson
Dancing Figure #1, Dancing Figure #2, 2016
Nicola Tyson’s new figurative sculptures, from the series Firewood Sculptures, are made by piecing together dried, chopped up firewood. Tyson minimally carves the wood, stripping the bark and carving out the interior, yet preserves the natural knots and holes on the exterior. The artist constructs each figure with sections of apple, elm and maple woods, fitting them together to create a continuous body in space—finding twisted pieces that stand in for heads and hands. The act of building can be seen to be parallel to her drawing; the artist intuitively finds and creates the figure through the process of making it.

Heimo Zobernig
Untitled, 2015
The model for this bronze sculpture is assembled from 3-D scans of parts of three sculptures: the head and facial cast of a figure exhibited at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris (2008), the androgynously modeled crotch area of the shelf sculpture exhibited at Simon Lee Gallery in London (2009), and the legs, chest and upturned arms of a figure from 2012. The individual parts are digitally cut together in rough sections to produce a classical “contrapposto” position.

Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM. For press inquiries, please contact Janine Latham at janine@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.