Richard Rezac: Address

Chicago sculptor Richard Rezac (b. 1952, Lincoln, Nebraska) makes his wood and metal sculptures by hand, combining meticulous geometry with a deep feeling for color and form. Richard Rezac: Address brings together 20 mostly recent works made of materials such as cherry wood, cast bronze, and aluminum. Inviting multiple readings, these simultaneously strange and familiar objects demonstrate the artist’s ongoing engagement with mathematical ordering systems and the elusive mechanisms of memory and interpretation.

Avoiding symbolism or illustration, while at the same time not closed off from the world, Rezac’s sculptures investigate form through their precise construction and precise positioning in space. Their scale is modest in relation to the gallery environment and closer to that of the bodies of audience members who encounter them. As such, the works exude a certain uncanny familiarity, an invitation to explore the many possible readings of each piece. The exhibition title, Address, plays on ideas of sculpture as a public statement and of specific locations, from the artist’s studio, where all of the works were produced, and the places reflected in a number of the works’ titles. Also included is a selection of related improvisational drawings that, along with the artist’s interest in Japanese, European, and American architecture, serve as starting points for sculptures.

Making object-sculptures since the mid-1980s, Rezac has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among others.

Since 2000, he has held 24 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and his work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.