North Haven's Mel Kendrick, so familiar on the South Fork scene from various Parrish Art Museum installations and Drawing Room exhibitions, will now receive his full due at the museum beginning Sunday with the first major survey of his four-decade career, "Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things."
Of particular focus will be the artist's relationship to his materials and how he pushes them to the limits, be they wood, rubber, or concrete. In the words of the organizers, "Through his creative inquiry, Kendrick invites viewers to think about the relationships between representation and abstraction, sculpture and the body, organic and synthetic, and natural and made by hand."
In a 2021 profile of the artist, The Star noted that he has "spent most of the last 40 years taking things apart and putting them back together. Most of those things have been single pieces or blocks of wood," often requiring "a chainsaw to joust with them."
The artist attended Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, where he had a retrospective exhibition last year. At Trinity College in Hartford, he realized math was not the path for him, preferring art instead. After Trinity, he enrolled in Hunter College's graduate program in studio art in New York City, working with faculty such as Tony Smith, Robert Morris, and Ralph Humphrey.
A city studio full of old wooden shelves would become pivotal in the material direction of his career, as was the influence of Smith at Hunter and then his work for a time with Dorothea Rockburne and her circle of friends and colleagues including Mel Bochner, Lawrence Weiner, and Sol LeWitt.
The Parrish noted that throughout his career Mr. Kendrick has maintained his focus on the "inherent possibilities of materials in myriad ways." The source of the sculpture remains evident, even after a radical transformation. The museum singles out "Black Trunk" and "Raised Stump" as revelatory in "his process of deconstruction and reconstruction of materials." Sometimes a form is recreated in contrasting materials, as in "Big Daddy Fun/Second Version," from 1995, which are in actuality two distinct sculptures but have long been considered a single work.
According to The Star, his resulting creations are "objects that assume an infinite variety of forms linked by their stubborn refusal to be 'a sign of something else,' as the painter Carroll Dunham wrote for Bomb magazine about the work of his longtime friend."
The survey will take over several galleries in the Water Mill museum building, where 50 works will be on display, including sculpture, wall pieces, models, works on paper, and photographs. The galleries will group works thematically.
On view will be monumental pieces (over 12 feet high) as well as works smaller in scale (less than 12 inches high). Of particular note is an installation of "Nemo," an 18-foot-long sculpture from 1983 that has never been shown in New York.
Along with the show, Mr. Kendrick's career is being celebrated in a monograph that accompanies the exhibition. The book was co-published by the Parrish and Rizzoli Electa, which is the distributor as well. Along with generous illustrations of works from his oeuvre, there are essays in which Nancy Princenthal covers an overview of the work, Allison Kemmerer takes on the artist's photographs, Adam Weinberg focuses on the relationship between Mr. Kendrick's prints and sculpture, and Terrie Sultan looks at one of his black oil sculptures. The book includes a transcript of an interview he sat for with Mr. Dunham.
The exhibition will remain on view through Feb. 19.
