Gallery at The Boca Raton

The stainless steel and aluminum sculptures created by Massachusetts artist, Rob Lorenson are a compositionally rich interplay of formalist elements.  They exist in suspended animation and are situated to freeze a moment in time; hovering effortlessly in space.  The work is constructed of sturdy, permanent materials but lives in contradiction to the impermanent sense of the composition.  He strives to emphasize the compositional qualities of the work, to create dynamic movement with static, solid objects.  

In 2002, Rob was commissioned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create two editioned works to be given as Awards to Innovator of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year.

The stainless steel and aluminum sculptures created by Massachusetts artist, Rob Lorenson are a compositionally rich interplay of formalist elements.  They exist in suspended animation and are situated to freeze a moment in time; hovering effortlessly in space.  The work is constructed of sturdy, permanent materials but lives in contradiction to the impermanent sense of the composition.  He strives to emphasize the compositional qualities of the work, to create dynamic movement with static, solid objects.  

In 2002, Rob was commissioned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create two editioned works to be given as Awards to Innovator of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year.

Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia. His father was a salesman who traveled by horseback and his mother worked as a seamstress.  At the age of four, his father died and an uncle took a major role in his life, including his education. In 1944, he was sent to a school for matadors for two years.  Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutions, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and the rich life of the city.

Though he spends only one month a year in Colombia, Fernando Botero considers himself the "most Colombian artist living" as he feels insulated from the international trends of the art world.  He shares his time between homes in Pietrasanta, Itlay and Paris with his wife, Greek artist, Sophia Vari.

His style has an unmistakable identity. Botero depicts women, men, daily life, historical events and characters, milestones of art, the still-life and animals, all united by their exaggerated and disproportionate volume, and accompanied by fine details of scathing criticism, irony, humor, and ingenuity.

Jun Kaneko was born in 1942 in Nagoya, Japan and came to the United States in the 1960’s. Particularly drawn to sculptural ceramics, Kaneko studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art during a pivotal time when ceramics as functional craft was expanding to embrace the highest levels of contemporary artistic expression. After studying with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Ken Price in California, Kaneko emerged during the time now identified as the “America Clay Revolution.”

Jun Kaneko’s work is defined by its overwhelming scale and exquisite form, implying a spatial relationship between the object and viewer. Evidence of Kaneko’s early years as a painter exists in the richly glazed surfaces and rhythmic pulse of his marks and patterns. The artist’s recent body of work continues this feeling with a series of larger than life bronze heads. Their sheer size combined with the artists hunger to push the physical limitations of his material, generate an undeniable presence.

Carole Feuerman’s sculptures are like minutes from a slice of life, frozen for pause and contemplation. And unlike looking at real people you get the chance for an up-close, unblinking gaze.

Feuerman says that her “work inspires the viewer to look closely at what stands before them.”  She wants the viewer to “complete the story, to reflect and feel touched”.   She explores universal feelings and emotions that are captured in a single, fragmented moment of time. Carole Feuerman’s sculptures are just too believable and she doesn’t forget a single detail. Casting figures from live models in her studio, she then adorns them with every attribute of life-likeness, applying tiny eyelashes, wisps of hair and painting the most convincing skin tones, freckles and veins. 

Because of its faithfulness to reality, her life-size and realistic sculptures are uncanny in that they are simultaneously familiar in their lifelike appearance and yet strange as static works of art.

Born in 1967, Julien Marinetti spent his youth in Paris between the workshops of great artists and national museums. He fed his imagination on cinema, classical music and punk rock. He only spent one day at the Beaux-Arts (French Academy of Fine Arts) before dropping out and devoting himself to art.

In 2004, after years of oil painting, Marinetti renewed his relationship with sculpture. This masterpiece, “Doggy John” rapidly earned him a name in the artistic world.  He is a master of shape and material, but any classicism ends there: the sculpture unexpectedly becomes a three-dimensional canvas or “support-surface” for his imagination.

Painted in the colors of Pop Art and Expressionism, his sculptures embody the swing of the temporalities and natural progression of time.  Sculptures of dogs in unexpected colors, enameled and varnished as a car body, are representations transformed into radiant life-inhabited objects. The colors are the litmus test of his mood, each expressing a state of thought.

Bernar Venet is a Conceptual artist best known for his versatility in multiple mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, as well as stage design and musical composition. Venet became well known in the 1960s for his amorphous installations made by piling up loose gravel, coal, or asphalt; and “industrial paintings” from cardboard reliefs or tar. (Around that time, he decided to drop the last letter from his given name, Bernard.) Shortly after, inspired by the works of Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre, Venet began to produce wall-mounted and freestanding metal sculptures. Among the best known are his torch-cut steel plates and beams resembling scribbles, lines, and arcs. Venet says that his sculptures are about “how metal resists. They are a test of strength—a battle between myself and the piece of metal.”

Dennis Oppenheim’s Garden of Evidence series comprises sculpture, ceramic tiles, and landscape elements distributed throughout the entry plaza of Scottsdale’s District 1 police station and crime laboratory. Six architectural, scale prickly pear cactus forms are placed within landscape shadow forms on the ground plane. The ceramic tiles and other artistic and landscape elements are inspired by the evidence analyzed inside the lab. These tools of investigation combine with the interlocking cactus and bench forms create pieces of a thematic puzzle.

Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington. He received a bachelor of fine arts from the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and a master of fine arts from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. After graduation, Oppenheim lived and worked in New York City. He first achieved recognition for his conceptual work in the 1960s, traversing through earth art, body art, video, and performance. Using his body as a site to challenge the self, he also explored, through numerous gallery and museum installations, the boundaries of personal risk, transformation, and communication. In the 1980s, he used machine factory installations to create metaphors for the artistic process. Since then, the artist has concentrated on permanent public sculpture. Through this work he fused a longtime interest in architecture with public sculpture.

Sophie Ryder's world is one of mystical creatures, animals and hybrid beings made from sawdust, wet plaster, old machine parts and toys, weld joins and angle grinders, wire 'pancakes', torn scraps of paper, charcoal sticks and acid baths. These art objects are direct products of her working methods, and as such they have an inherent fascination - people are naturally intrigued by unusual processes. It is still necessary, however, to see beyond them and recognize that the materials are a means to an end: the communication of ideas. They lie at the center of all the artist's creations, and they are fed by a spring that never runs dry. Indeed, the ideas emerge so quickly that she never has enough time to implement all of them. The ability to retrieve and develop an idea will depend not only on how other projects are progressing, but also on the resolution of any technical hurdles she may have set herself, especially in relation to her larger sculptures.

To the artist, the imagery of the sculpture is that of a book. “The geometric shapes are the pages as well as iconic images representing the World Trade Center, while the organic shapes are in motion,” Barrett said. What sort of motion, he leaves to the viewer to decide.
  
Barrett began by crafting many more organic shapes than he used, giving weight and mass to his emotions and finding catharsis in the act of self-expression. Then, like a writer penning a history, from all these many lives he selected the few that would best tell the story of them all; of the men and women in the buildings and of the first responders in the streets, of every citizen of the United States of America and, of course, of his own fear, anger, and hope.
 
And it’s okay to see what you need to see, says the artist. “Abstract art is like music in that when you listen to a song, everyone has different ideas about it, feels different emotions because of it. Even the same person listening to a piece at different times will feel differently. That’s true of abstract art. As a viewer, you can interpret it for yourself as well as seeing what the artist made. That’s what I like about abstract art: you get a chance to participate.”