press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Come Together, an exhibition of new sculptures by Anthony Miserendino. The occasion marks the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery.

With reverence to process and sensitivity to material, Anthony Miserendino re-presents familiar scenes and objects with heightened significance. In these works, line and form wrestle for visual and conceptual primacy.

The exhibition unfolds akin to a series of letters or postcards written over time. Potent small-scale works, spanning the front and back galleries, function as indelible details accentuated from an implied journey. In Immersed, a piece of yarn, set in sunken relief, travels beyond the edges of the frame through an outstretched hand, which is rendered in shallow relief. The thumb and ring finger come together at the highest point on the surface of the sculpture, as if pinching the yarn in motion. Temporality suggests transformation, and vice versa.

Live/Work, situated in the middle gallery, is a life-size representation of the artist’s own living room. A sculpted bookshelf and a sculpted wall come together in a corner, creating a deep space that may be occupied by the viewer. Moving away from the corner, the relief becomes incrementally more shallow, with careful consideration of illusionistic perspective. Notably, the artist sculpted this work in reverse; he carved and pushed objects into solid slabs of clay, making impressions, or voids, of objects. He then poured and subsequently removed plaster, creating the piece installed in the gallery. This process imagines the clay as an empty volume of air, and pushing it around is like displacing the air to make room for things. Space here is the starting point, alive and fertile, and the objects grow through it. Personal belongings function as both subject matter and sculpting tools, unifying content, process, and form. 

Anthony Miserendino (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014, and his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2007. His work has been featured in exhibitions in Berlin, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and has been featured in Issues 139 and 127 of New American Paintings in 2019 and 2016, respectively.

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