April 24 - May 31, 2003

TOM MARIONI

Manhattan Island and Other Works

Margarete Roeder Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Tom Marioni from April 24 - May 31, 2003. A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, April 24, from 6 - 8 PM. The exhibition will consist of works in various media made over the past ten years. The variety of media and practices presented in this selection (assembled by the artist) forms not a linear retrospective but something more akin to an image of ideas and intentions. The title work, Manhattan Island, a wall sculpture, is a part of a 25 year series of works about cities that includes Paris, San Francisco and Kyoto. One of the earliest works in the exhibition, a photographic triptych entitled The Head, The Hand, and The Tool, 1993, neatly encapsulates three areas central to Marioni's work: conception, production and media. The three color photograms, mischievously deadpan in their objectivity, demonstrate Marioni's clarity of purpose and his humor. The "Drum Brush Drawings" are represented in a group of recent works executed in steel on sandpaper or pencil on paper. These drawings are produced by the artist methodically "drumming" with steel wire drum brushes or pencils on a surface. The resultant abstract marks recall images of landscapes and flight while preserving the exact record of their manufacture. These works exemplify Marioni's interest in the cross-pollination of his activities from the performative/gestural to the image of the discrete artwork. His work adroitly admits of a broad range of media (including, but not limited to sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, printmaking, and performance) and practices which adaptively inform and engender the continuing hybridization that characterizes Marioni's work. Marioni (born, 1937, Cincinnati) lives in San Francisco where he has been an essential and defining figure in conceptual art. He has exhibited his work and performed at museums internationally, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; he was the founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art in 1970. Marioni has most recently been the subject of a drawing survey exhibition at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California. For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery. TOP