Our sculpture projects originated in 2009 with the installation of 15 monumental sculptures placed throughout the grounds of the Boca Raton Resort & Beach Club. A project at The Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne was added in 2012 and The Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove in 2016. Artists on view have included Bill Barrett, Fernando Botero, Peter Busby, Aurora Canero, Lynn Chadwick, Johan Creten, Carole Feuerman, Patrick Hughes, Jun Kaneko, Rob Lorenson, Jane Manus, Javier Marin, Julien Marinetti, Jedd Novatt, Dennis Oppenheim, Mauro Perucchetti, Peter Reginato, Henry Richardson, Sophie Ryder, Ernest Trova, Boaz Vaadia, Hans Van de Bovenkamp, and Bernar Venet.

Works on view at the Boca Raton Resort and Club currently include Metis Atash, Bill Barrett, Max-Steven Grossman, Kim Keever, Wendy Klemperer, Rob Lorenson, Donald Martiny, Jane Manus, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Peter Reginato, David Remfry, Ernest Trova, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan, Boaz Vaadia, Manolo Valdes and Francisco Zuniga. This venue provides museum quality works for acquisition, while adding an educational and cultural enhancement to the property. Our space is located in the main lobby. 

By quoting figures from well-known works of art, Manolo Valdes revitalizes these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure's size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating a lot of roughly applied surface texture.

In this sculpture “Infanta Margarita”, Valdes pays tribute to Spain’s great master painter, Diego Velasquez.  His painting of “Las Meninas” (The Maids of Honor), painted in 1656 depicts Margarita Teresa of Spain in fashion of the era.  The most striking characteristic is the huge expanse of the voluminous dress.

Infanta was the title and rank given in the European kingdoms of Spain and Portugal to a son or daughter of the king.  Margarita Teresa was the favorite child of her father, King Philip IV.

Despite the extensive history of inbreeding between the Austrian and Spanish Habsburg family branches, Margarita Teresa exhibited few or none of the genetic defects inherited by her brother and some other relatives. She was an extraordinarily beautiful child, with porcelain skin, blue eyes, and blond hair.

Metis Atash views her sculpture as a fusion of worldly pleasure and spiritual insight. Upon first glance, their shiny surfaces and bright colors are unmistakable, though much like the human beings they resemble, their complexity lies within. As a child growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Metis was heavily influence by music. She felt drawn to Punk Rock with its rejection of the mainstream and perceived excesses. This feeling continued into adulthood, when Metis chose to relinquish a successful corporate life for an artistic one. She found the source of her artwork in Bali, after much time spent embracing the authenticity and love of its people.

The approach to sculpture requires a form, and Metis’ choice is reflected literally as the form of Buddha. This shape implies a relationship to Siddartha Gautama, and to Buddhism. Siddartha’s teachings were based on the idea that we exist in a constant state of craving, or want. This endless cycle creates an attachment to impermanent worldly things and pleasures. According to Siddartha, only by recognizing these desires may they be extinguished. The physical act of creating these sculptures is also linked to Buddhism’s ascetic fundamentals. Ascetics have historically withdrawn from the world for their religious practice, and adopted a lifestyle of extreme austerity and reflection. Two examples of this practice are seen in the creation of Buddhist sand mandalas, and even Christian illuminated manuscripts. The intensely detailed work offers solitary monks a profound state of concentration. This kind of ‘escapism’ is also found in the repetitive placing of tiny crystals that cover each Buddha sculpture. Although these works are not intended for religious purposes, the simple act of creating them is meditative.

The emergence of a digital world has affected almost every aspect of contemporary life.  New forms of inhabiting the algorithmic world and the physical world emerge through relationships between human and machine.  While many aspects of natural life have become inextricable from digital life, these new coded forms are consistently evolving–avatars look human; online communication between people is referred to as “chatting”; computers have “brains” etc.

Two objects that have punctuated key moments in the history of Western modernity have undergone a process of radical transformation since the advent of the digital: books and photographs. The emergence of print culture in the 15th Century and of mechanically produced images in the 19th Century set certain parameters around knowledge, communications, circulation and truth. It was these ways of constituting knowledge as a method of enlightenment that set the stage for many struggles and forms of freedom, but also a stage of power and control. 

There has been talk of the demise of books and photography for quite some time now. It is unlikely, at least for the immediate future that books and photographs will disappear, but it is a fact that those objects are no longer what they used to be. Our relationship to the knowledge, truth, and power they articulated for centuries has altered. One of the most important changes has been a democratization regarding who makes and collects both electronic texts and images. Millions with access to computers and certain infrastructural needs like electricity and Internet create without thinking of themselves as writers or photographers. This kind of public literacy has demystified the ways in which power, knowledge and truth had been naturalized as intrinsic to technically produced and reproduced texts and images. Today everyone now knows that there is no scientific objective truth behind any printed word or any photograph –only the assurance that a specific point of view was adopted.

"To make the sculptures I scavenge scrap yards and construction sites for evocatively shaped pieces of steel, looking for pre-existing lines and shapes with which to draw. Most of the metal is rebar, the reinforcement rod used in buildings, bridges, and highways. Rendered from the concrete for recycling, it comes in a great variety of curves, shapes, and thicknesses. To begin a sculpture I have an idea of the type of animal it’s going to be, and a rough mental image of the gesture. I sketch loosely, welding steel line to line in the air. Rather than bending every piece, I choose pre-existing curves and cut them free from the pile with an oxy-acetylene torch. If I need to adjust the shape I heat and bend with the torch. The arc welder is immediate: I can tack weld a steel line in place and if I don’t like it can twist it off easily. Only in the final stage is each section welded thoroughly. Since the sculpture is not a solid form all the connections have to be strong; I spend a lot of time on the final welding to make the piece ready for transportation and installation."  -Wendy Klemperer

Her work takes many forms: furniture, outdoor installations, floor- and pedestal-mounted works, and even wall-mounted pieces that allude to the history of reductivist painting and shaped canvases. “A lot of pieces are site-specific,” says Manus, “and I think of every piece in three-dimensional terms, even wall pieces. I always think about furniture from every different angle as well.” Works such as Double Jeopardy (2004), which is mounted on the wall, are reminiscent of the work of El Lissitzky, an early 20th-century Russian constructivist who blended mass production and graphic design with high art and confounded the division between two- and three-dimensional artworks. The sculpture is a highly formal experiment: a diptych composed of two aluminum forms painted blue. The two pieces mirror one another’s shape—a vertical band with a cube mounted on each, pointing outward. The cube on the left element is closed, absorbing light, and the right one open and reflective.

In floor-based sculptures like her Untitled and Openings (both 2014), torqued geometric forms bend at angles that awaken an awareness of space in the viewer. Their dimensions are reminiscent of Manus’s furniture, a portion of her practice that continues a tradition of sculptors who have also created functional objects, such as those by Donald Judd and Yves Klein. Works such as Intro and Will Power (both 2014) allude to usable forms, but with planes that often run counter to expectation—and appealingly so. Manus typically favors bright colors, as in the aforementioned sculpture, or the bright yellow of PC (2012). But she is happy to disrupt this pattern with works such as the matte black Jennifer (2008), or the brushed metal exterior of Company (2014), in which the sculpture is reduced to the bare essentials of dimensional form. The rectangular planes and the bare surface are the artwork’s totality, to be considered in their spare beauty.

Ernest Trova was an artist whose signature creation, a gleaming humanoid known as “Falling Man,” appeared in a series of sculptures and paintings and became a symbol of an imperfect humanity hurtling into the future. Mr. Trova was largely known as a sculptor, but his “Falling Man,” a standard of Pop Art, began life as a painted figure, taking shape on his easel in the early 1960s. Faceless, armless, with a hint of a belly and, its name notwithstanding, of indeterminate sex, the figure struck a variety of poses, sometimes juxtaposed with other like figures, sometimes with mechanical appendages.

What are we to make of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's "Mirrors" — big, bold portraits, confrontationally large, and black and white, like the negative of a photograph, the colors of life enigmatically erased as though in a melancholy underworld? They are clearly masterpieces, but for all the beauty of the female model peculiarly bleak. However well-realized—empirically precise, insistently descriptive—her appearance, she seems peculiarly unreal. The hands that hide her face, yet let her piercing eyes magically see through them, suggest she is a delusion. Ambiguously transparent and opaque, her hands convey the ambivalence built into the artist's "handling" of her.

Boaz Vaadia was born on a farm in Israel in 1951, and moved to New York City to study art in 1975 on a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.  His compelling works have won him audiences worldwide.

His materials, slate and bluestone were formed by layers of sediment compressing over millions of years.  He hand carves slices of the stone with a hammer and chisel, (shaping the layers like a topographical map), and stacks the slabs until the graded silhouette of a person, animal or group emerges.  His process parallels natural transformations in stone, and also recalls ancient methods of construction that relied on the cut and weight of the stone rather than on mortar.

He then pairs them with glacial boulders which function as counterpoints to the figures.  These boulders settled in the New York Bay area during the ice age. Most of them are excavated from construction sites within 20 blocks of his studio.

Donald Martiny's paintings look straightforward--dramatically expressive gestural works, some small and invitingly intimate, most grand and intimidatingly large, all blatantly colorful, sometimes with a singular color in a sweeping shape, at other times with contrasting colors and intersecting shapes, dialectically interacting however at odds, subliminally reconciled however ostensibly irreconcilable--but that is deceptive, for they are as much abstract sculptures as abstract paintings, sometimes suspended in space, sometimes stranded on a wall, as though they were fragments of some grand mural.  If, as Hans Hofmann wrote, "the mystery of plastic creation is based upon the dualism of the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional,"(3) then the mystery of Donald Martiny's plastic creations is that they are two-dimensional and three-dimensional--paintings and sculptures--at once, and as such paradoxically monistic rather than dualistic.  For Martiny painting and sculpture--traditionally separated however often a sculpture may be given a skin of paint, and painterly texture may give a painting sculptural resonance--are implicitly the same.  Martiny's works are subjectively expressive--convey feeling, often intense, as the abruptness of the gestures suggest (they have a meteoric presence, as though articulated on the spur of the visual moment)--even as they show a mastery of the material medium of paint that makes them exemplary modernist works.