LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

Paul Soto is proud to announce Your City, an exhibition of new sculptures and works on paper by the American artist Ann Greene Kelly. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe, and it is organized at La Maison de Rendez-Vous, our shared Brussels gallery.

Ann Greene Kelly has become widely known for her works that repurpose common, everyday forms into semi-abstract, highly associative formal sculptures. Tires, plastic chairs, mattresses, and drains have appeared in her previous works, household items which Kelly restructures and recombines with Modernist sculptural materials like gypsum, plaster, cement, and fiberglass. These materials function like skins covering or draping her found forms, oftentimes featuring collage elements, cavities, and folds that play with front and back, inside and outside. Kelly’s surfaces orchestrate a fluctuating psychological and emotional experience of scale, shifting the viewer from encounters with scraps on the street corner underfoot towards a wider interaction of the body with the surrounding built environment and its debris.

Kelly’s exhibition features three new major sculptural works: an untitled dress piece, an untitled book piece, and an untitled tire stack piece. The dress piece incorporates a large scale drawing into the sculptural work itself, that of a city skyline that transmogrifies into a flowing dress. This element has been embedded into Kelly’s dress volume built in plaster, fiberglass, and metal. Perforated with holes and covered in fixed graphite, Kelly’s dress piece flows and billows from the floor, carrying a backpack strapped to its back while seeming to fly as its bell sleeves float upwards. The dress stands in relation to Kelly’s untitled book piece mounted on the wall. Sculpted in plaster and resin, the book is flipped open to reveal miniature images of liquor bottles, chip bags, diapers, checks, and preserves, which repeat along the plaster formed pages.

The first room of the gallery contains a tire stack piece on the floor in which the fragment of a children’s scooter is embedded, and a large drawing of a kitchen scene filled with pans, vegetables, and overbrimming forms. Kelly’s drawing practice, like her sculptures, features forms that appear sutured into one another, flowing in a continuous and amoeba-like state. The arm of a ghost figure appears from the right to handle what is pictured. This work suggests the dream-like aspect of Kelly’s mise-en-scène.