In American sculptor Rona Pondick’s first UK solo presentation, animals and humans are fused together in uncanny hybrid figures, while trees bear human heads in the place of fruits or flowering buds. The stainless steel and bronze sculptures, presented on the ground floor of the gallery, span the evolution of this significant body of work within Pondick’s oeuvre, reflecting her experimental approach to materials, technique, process and imagery.
Foregrounding ideas of metamorphosis and transformation, Pondick draws upon a rich body of literary, art-historical and scientific references: from Ancient Egyptian sphinxes and Ovid’s retelling of classical mythology in the Metamorphoses to contemporary cloning technologies, the 1984 cinematic cult classic The Terminator and, an enduring touchstone for Pondick, Franz Kafka’s giant insect.
From the beginning, my work has been about a metamorphosis. It brings me back to Franz Kafka and the idea of transformation, something in flux… things mutating… Each piece was about an evolution. Within each sculpture, the form would start shifting, and, as the form shifted, the meaning changed.
— Rona Pondick
Pondick established her reputation as an artist in 1988 with the site-specific installation, Beds, at SculptureCenter, New York, followed by a major solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1989. Her work is now housed in prominent international collections including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and SFMoMA, San Francisco.
Rona Pondick: Selected Work (1998–2022) press release
Download
