Martha Russo: coalescere
March 31 – June 12, 2016
@ BMoCA
The first solo museum exhibition of sculptor and installation artist Martha Russo, coalescere, Latin for “come together,” highlighted works created over the course of the artist’s career as well as a series of new works and large-scale, site-specific installations.
Russo’s primary medium is clay, but she is far from a traditional ceramic artist. Her organic, abstract creations push the boundaries of clay, shattering expectations and denying the realities of their heavy and fragile medium. At times anatomical, cellular, botanical, oceanic, or completely fantastical, her forms draw on an encyclopedia of sources and processes.
As an undergraduate, Russo studied developmental biology and psychology. Since then, she has spent decades subverting natural laws and defying scientific certainties through artistic invention. Gravity acts as a counter-medium in her work. Order and crisp typology are mixed with wild abundance and occasional chaos.
With an awareness of the psychology of space, Russo plays with our mind’s ability to react to certain scales and realities. Each element is carefully and uniquely produced by the artist’s hand and amassed into a body that draws us in for closer inspection. Both self-portrait and scientific discovery, her creations span 25 years of intense and exacting labor. Moving through coalescere, we encounter work both unsettlingly alien and achingly familiar. Her work echoes in our bones and guts, and we become another member of the accumulated specimens crawling around the room. It is a dreamscape, petri dish, and archive, and we are invited to explore.
Martha Russo (b. 1962, Connecticut) earned her BA in developmental biology and psychology from Princeton University in 1985. A world-class athlete, she suffered a career-ending injury in 1984 while vying for a spot on the United States Olympic Field Hockey Team. After recovering from surgery, Russo was attracted to the physical nature of sculpture. She studied studio arts in Florence, Italy in 1983 and continued studying ceramics at Princeton University. In 1995, she earned her MFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Russo is represented by the Claudia Stone Gallery in New York and Goodwin Fine Art in Denver.
The exhibition catalog is available in our online museum shop HERE.