NOVEMBER 14, 2018– JANUARY 4, 2019

Opening Reception with the Artist
Wednesday, November 14, 6 – 8 PM

SOCO Gallery is thrilled to present wound, an exhibition of new works by Robert Lazzarini. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on November 14th from 6 – 8PM. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

In his new series, wound, Lazzarini conjures the relationship between a violation of the home and both physical and cognitive exposures. In his book, The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard positions the house as a place of intimacy and memory. He also establishes relationships between the inside and the outside. A forced entry as seen in these images is as much of a breach of one's psychological habitat as it is of the domicile.

A break-in at its core expresses a certain desperation by the offender and thus revisits common themes within Lazzarini's work, including the complicated mythos of violence within American culture. It also points to an economic divide and the temporal nature of ownership. The body, the home, violence, and the criminal act all convey a picture of America as a place of vulnerability and social unrest. Lazzarini combines these appropriated images of breaking and entering with an optical screen door pattern that varies in scale and suggests to the viewer various physical proximities. That physicality reflects in turn the bodily act of the break in, the body's entry into the home, and the body of the viewer as they navigate a changing image.

Robert Lazzarini (B. 1965, American)

The sculptures and paintings of Robert Lazzarini have been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1995 and are included in major collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Newark Museum, Newark; and The Toledo Art Museum; Toledo. The artist was the Knight Alumni Artist in Residence at The McColl Center, Charlotte in 2015 and has forthcoming exhibitions at the Mint Museum, Charlotte and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1990, and continues to live and work in New York City.