Todd Merrill Studio Exhibiting at the Salon: Art + Design In New York

TODD MERRILL STUDIO EXHIBITING AT THE SALON: ART + DESIGN IN NEW YORK

Park Avenue Armory, November 12-16, 2015

New York, New York— At The Salon: Art + Design, Todd Merrill Studio will exhibit a collection of unique, material-driven studio works made with today’s most refined and innovative techniques in sculpting and casting across metal and wood. From steel light installations to hand-carved walnut and bronze consoles, the works are unified by their shared inspiration of the human body and its movement as subject matter.

Simultaneously representing movement while also stimulating our own, Niamh Barry’s newest light sculpture, Walking, an 11-foot long, 7-foot tall standing screen, will take center stage illuminating the booth. Following the artist’s His series, consisting of angular, masculine forms, Walking is a sculpted study of the traced steps of man, rendered in mirror polished and black patinated bronze, glass opal tiles, and powered by dimmable LEDs. Complimenting this piece, the booth will also debut Barry’s newest sinuous work, Knotted II, a tabletop light sculpture made in the artist’s latest material, mirror-polished stainless steel.

Exhibiting new artistic achievements in metal as well as in wood, Todd Merrill Studio will premier a group of exquisitely hand-carved consoles by Marc Fish. Extending the booth’s theme of human form, the pieces showcase Fish’s incredible mastery of the most refined practices in micro stack-lamination today, which implement no heat but only cold carving techniques. Fish’s Laminaria, a one-of-a-kind sculptural console made from nearly 400 pieces of American black walnut veneer, takes inspiration from twisted seaweed forms, as its title Laminaria, a genus of seaweed, suggests. Appearing as a crawling figure, the delicate console reveals the artist’s hand at work, while exuding a seemingly organic, unparalleled form. The booth will also feature Untitled 2, the second piece in Fish’s One Piece series, which explores the positive and negative space that a single piece of wood can occupy. Fish has masterfully combined oak, resin, bronze, and squid ink dye in ways never before achieved, yielding exquisite textures and light levels that follow the console’s curves.

Additionally integrating unique works in wood, the booth will display Markus Haase’s latest work, a walnut, marble, and LED wall-appliqué; inspired by the movement of extending arms, the light sculpture appears to grow from the wall.

Further emphasizing works evocative of the body, the gallery will present a frieze of charcoal-on-paper drawings of a nude female by Jan Yoors. Reminiscent of his iconic tapestries, they feature strong dark forms and dynamic plays between negative space and shapes.

Displayed tightly together as a triptych or larger group, the lines from one carry into the next, creating new bold shapes across the wall. Works from Yoors’ charcoal series were recently exhibited at the artist’s retrospective at the FelixArt museums in Belgium and are featured in the catalogue accompanying the current exhibition Jan Yoors: A Retrospective at The Baker Museum in Naples. Similar works reside across museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Art and Design.

Todd Merrill Studio is thrilled to announce that it is now representing artist Soraya Osorio and will unveil her sleek metal furniture pieces at The Salon. Visually extending the masculine and female shapes found in the booth, Osorio’s pieces combine both sharp and rounded forms in single pieces. Ave, a solid brass chaise lounge, features smooth geometric surfaces that unite to form severe open angles, while its soft, scooped back renders the chaise at ideal aesthetic equilibrium. Osorio’s Epic, a majestic desk, will also debut with its new complimentary Epic Chair. Perfected in a semi-circle, Epic is composed of elegant metal curves and lines that appear differently from every angle, and furthers the visitors movement around the pieces. Observed from straight on, its blackened steel legs are broad lustrous planes; from a different vantage point, they appear as thin sheets of metal, disappearing to millimeters and almost invisible to the human eye.

The gallery will introduce a second new Studio Contemporary artist, Erin Sullivan, and present her three solid cast bronze table-stools. Transforming the serpent into a rotating objet d’art or an alligator into a multi-layered three-footed sculpture, Sullivan creates hyper-interpretations of naturalistic surfaces and bodies. Beautifully contrasting Osorio’s smooth metal surfaces, Sullivan’s Bronze Feather, Bronze Serpent, and Bronze Alligator are intricately textured and tactile works; made with the absolute highest quality and labor intensive process of lost wax casting techniques known today, they offer incredibly realistic interpretations of organic subject matter.

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