Carl D'Alvia: Outdoor Works | HESSE FLATOW

Known for his hyper-textured sculptures in resin, bronze, and marble, D’Alvia explores the limits of traditional sculpture, making work that is at once minimal and maximal, humorous and tragic. For his “Liths” series, D’Alvia continues to explore sculptural dichotomies with monumental works in painted aluminum that appear both hard and soft; serious and funny; masculine and feminine. Drawing from ancient monoliths as well as 1970’s works by Tony Conrad, Elizabeth Murray, Alexander Calder, and John McCracken, D’Alvia looks at the concept of the statue or monument—a trope he simultaneously reveres and pokes fun at—with a contemporary lens. D’Alvia softens the severe form of the monolith, introducing playfulness and humor, bridging old traditions together with the new to point to the work’s heavy, serious, and darker qualities. Chosen mediums like marble and bronze not only situate D’Alvia’s oeuvre within art historical trajectories, notably taking cues from Italian Baroque exuberance and Brancusi-esque essentialism; but the nature of their respective processes – carved versus casted; handmade versus industrial – also play into the multitude of dialogues surrounding visual, tactile, and emblematic associations that D’Alvia activates throughout his sculptures.Carl D’Alvia (b. 1965 in Sleepy Hollow, NY) is a sculptor that lives and works in Connecticut and New York. D’Alvia’s bronze, marble, and post-pop resin sculptures range from the abstract and geometric to the figurative and anthropomorphic. His work often explores dichotomies such as minimal/ornate, hard/soft, animate/inanimate, and comic/tragic. D’Alvia won the Rome Prize in 2012. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York as well as internationally, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; HESSE FLATOW, New York; American Academy in Rome, Italy; Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; and Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton.