Mel Kendrick
Mel Kendrick
Lab Grant Resident
On a studio wall, Mel Kendrick has hung six of twelve new prints—actually, cast paper pulp—and the others lie stacked on the floor. Kendrick carved or cut into blocks of wood, to reveal layers and textures. Oddly, the prints that result appear fragile and lacy and also dense and heavy. There are holes and lines piercing the surfaces, shapes like leaves or ovals, or eggs and sperm, in scant relief, black on white, white on black, black on black. The series, ‘Loopholes’, elaborates on a theme, its leitmotifs deployed with subtle differences. […]
Kendrick’s prints appear concrete, tactile, abstract, with figurative elements; they also seem sculptural. The “surfaces are punctured,” he says, and the prints have in them something about “wounding and repair.” Ideas about human vulnerability, pain, and dependency occur. Kendrick jokes wryly about his “penetrating the inside” of the paper. He comments too that they exist at a “cellular level.”
Now I look at them as bodies—“a body of work.” The prints’ movement is circular, maybe like the circulatory system, or maybe the energy is centrifugal, moving off from the center. Thinking about “wounding and repair,” I wonder about aggressivity—the lightning bolt image tearing at the center of most of the prints—and sensitivity, lines connecting to all of the objects. The “individuals” touch, however tentatively or delicately.
— Lynne Tillman, excerpt from Initial Notes, Later Developments: Seeing “Loopholes”, Essay for Lab Grant Publication Series No. 14, Dieu Donné.
About the Artist
Mel Kendrick (b. 1949, Boston, MA) has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, beginning with his solo debut at Artist’s Space, New York, in 1974. In 1984, his work was included in the “The International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art and the following year in the Whitney Biennial. In 2009 he was commissioned to create five monumental cement sculptures for Madison Square Park. Opening Spring of 2021, Kendrick will be the subject of a traveling retrospective, opening at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA (traveling to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY). His work is included in the collections of numerous major public institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Saint Louis Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Toledo Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; among many others. Kendrick lives and works in New York. (Source: David Nolan Gallery)
For more information, please visit their website:https://www.melkendrick.com