Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Vincent Fecteau, Simone Leigh, Marisol, the next exhibition in his gallery at 1062 North Orange Grove and Marisol: Works on Paper, the next exhibition in his gallery at 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Vincent Fecteau, Simone Leigh, Marisol brings together three sculptors who are each celebrated for their distinctive artistic vision. This unexpected dialogue centers on the ways in which these artists play with varying degrees of figuration and abstraction.
Vincent Fecteau (b. 1969) is known for his modestly sized abstract sculptures often made from ephemeral materials. The exhibition includes three papier-mâché sculptures that Fecteau made between 2019 and 2022, whose incongruous forms deliberately resist a singular reading, but can be reminiscent of objects or architectural forms seen in the world.
Simone Leigh (b. 1967) is known for her ceramic and bronze sculptures that variously abstract the female body, at times exploring the body as a vessel, removing defining facial features, and reimagining the sculptural traditions of antiquity.
Marisol (1930–2016) is a Venezuelan-American sculptor who first gained recognition in the late 1950s for her quirky figurative sculptures made of painted and carved wood, clay, and bronze. The works in the exhibition exemplify Marisol’s frequent use of self-portraiture, such as in Social Security (1975), in which Marisol cast her face and carved the words “My name is Marisol” and “I have been an artist all my life.” Another sculpture, To My Dead Dog Sebastian (1957), dedicated to the artist’s deceased pet, is equally personal in nature. As Marisol once said, “Whatever the artist makes is always a kind of self-portrait.”
Marisol: Works on Paper includes a group of Marisol’s rarely exhibited drawings and prints from the 1970s. The works on view reflect the fantastical, erotic energy that defined her drawings from this period. As one curator has written, Marisol’s “works on paper constitute a robust and independent practice, on par with her revolutionary sculptures for their timeliness and originality.”