Eli Ping

Aluminum bowls, cast in an enormous wok. Each bowl's exterior is a perfect egg shell, the final form a preserved swish. The extra metal settles, thickening the bottoms of the bowls. Molten light is trapped. Each work is a little moon.

Three freestanding sculptures of cotton and resin alight upon the gallery landscape, touching down on three legs. Made by hanging cotton from a high ceiling. Resin is poured down for a good soak, which hardens into a crystalline form, a frozen canvas sanded into synthetic ivory. The gravity of the pour is felt throughout the piece, from the top down to the delicately hanging feet, just grazing the surface of the floor, yet holding the weight. Titled Monocarp, after the plant that reproduces only once, seeding its progeny by dying.

On the wall, Mote works stand sentry. An ongoing series by Ping, the Mote works were his first resin pour sculptures. Made in the same way as the Monocarp works, but these are wall mounted, symmetrical objects, attached to the wall at a single point, tempting an anthropomorphic interpretation.

Three new polychrome paintings. Each has a central hourglass shaped symmetrical distortion formed from a pinching, then sewing shut, of a canvas stretched on a frame. The canvas is painted with oil mixed with encaustic. Ping colors the interior distortion with contrasting paint colors that enhance the contours, like makeup on a face. The central distortion mirrors the folds of the pulled fabric in the Mote and Monocarp works, or the naval of Ping’s earlier series of bronze works (Aphakic).

In all his work Ping eschews fantasy for the literal, while teasing the possibility of metaphor. Ping’s work affirms sculpture as a sensual possibility that exists wholly in the playground of your head. Suspended between the possibility of sexual references and process based allusion, Ping’s sculptures and paintings adhere to neither, insisting that there is no meaning beyond what we can see. Body horror or not, there is nothing below these surfaces.

Eli Ping (b. 1977) lives and works in New York.