William J. O’Brien
@ The Renaissance Society
5811 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Sunday, May 15th, from 4PM - 7PM
On view through Sunday, June 26th
Chicago artist William J. O’Brien (b. 1975) works in multiple mediums, including ceramic, textiles, wood, and metal, along with works on paper. His corpus reflects a playful attention to the expected properties of each material, and a subsequent subversion of their ordinary uses. This will be his first solo museum exhibition, and will include approximately 100 ceramic works, many of them never before exhibited.
O’Brien’s increasingly inventive sculpture work displays a messy exuberance that is, on the one hand, distinctly anti-Minimalist in its sensibility. On the other hand, his work resists the sentimentality in the recent revival of “the handmade,” even while using materials, like ceramic or yarn, that are almost synonymous with old notions of craft. While no material appears to be off limits for O’Brien, an important uniting tie is a certain attitude toward the role of the pedestal—the pedestal is not a vehicle for display, but is integral to each work.
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