RECEPTIONSATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 6 – 9 PMTHE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT
Urban Beings
Mindy Solomon Gallery is proud to present Dominique Labauvie’s third solo exhibition in Miami entitled Urban Beings. Presenting a combination of drawings and sculptures, Labauvie explores new terrain in terms of scale and his artistic interpretation of man to his environment. Labauvie writes in a letter to gallerist Mindy Solomon:
“This exhibition is of my most recent work all made in 2018 in Tampa, my Floridian city. Here I have pursued a linear sculpture invested by the space it occupies as well as their gestural quality; the utopic levitation and gravity that they generate; their ferruginous material that carries the memory of liquidity and heat, and also their territory marked by a distinct graphic mapping.
Since the time of antiquity, sculpture generates its own life through spatial incision, even in the state of ruin, fracture, erosion, and or segmentation. Sculpture invents its existence through the rhythm of growth, the multiplication of constructive elements, the successive stages of its construction, and its destruction; and even more intensively when the distance between fiction and reality increase and invention becomes king.
The sculptures that will be exhibited in both spaces of your gallery seek to make apparent this art of undoing silence; their reading appears as a letter to the viewer, speaking of their urban-ness using a vocabulary allowing them to touch the invisible if necessary within this context of accumulative saturation. They will open the walls to the environment.
Dedicated to the city, to our immense cities, which we build, the sculptures are of a small scale, because we are small and this change of scale will be witness to the predominant relationship of the human to the city. With a line in color I define humanity in this architectural dimension.”
About Dominique Labauvie
The focus on the line in Dominique Labauvie’s sculpture has a double origin. The first is both classical and French and comes from the work and drawings by Auguste Rodin, particularly the drawings of the Cathedrals of France. Traveling from one village to another on his bicycle he made many studies of the moldings of these churches. The second origin comes from the practice of steel and the forge, creating a work that commences with a drawing on the floor. It also comes from the history of American Minimalism experienced through European eyes and ears.
For Labauvie, a line of steel is a line that is built in segments. The segments interpret a handwriting, the movements of the arm and the hand. It is a line that is strengthened through its interruptions, with each interruption creating intervals and moments of silence. This segmentation leads us to repetition, to rhythm, to music, to a sequence where one passes from the eye to the ear. Labauvie’s recent works are all readings, line by line, of the construction of a time of vision which joins that of listening.
