Keith Edmier

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Mother Mold, a survey exhibition of sculpture by Keith Edmier. Ranging from Edmier’s earliest works, such as I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues (1991) through Imagines (2017), Mother Mold presents a select overview of Edmier’s work from the past twenty-six years. This will be the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first in our Upper East Side location. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that details his most recent installation, Imagines, a set of fifty life-cast portraits hung throughout the gallery space.

Physically, a ‘mother mold’ is a hard shell, traditionally made of plaster, which supports a flexible rubber mold and helps the negative impression retain its shape during the casting process. The shell is a perimeter—an encasement for the transformation of material from liquid to solid and in composition, from abstraction to mimesis.

The majority of Edmier’s work for the past twenty years plus has been made through mold-making and the casting of myriad industrial materials: plaster, aluminum, dental acrylic, plastic, glass, resin, polyurethane, basalt. Throughout his career, Edmier has employed non-traditional materials that purposely interfere with each sculpture’s verisimilitude. The artist continues to mold his personal narrative into universal subjects, solidifying themes of autobiography, eroticism, and mortality.

Two of the earliest works in the exhibition mine Edmier’s childhood: Piano Legs I–III (1992/3) is a set of dissembled golden-yellow piano legs cast directly from a baby grand—inspired by Edmier’s memory, at age three, of tearing apart a toy baby grand given to him by his father. I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues (1991), is an oil painting that composites a portrait of the young artist as a child with Janis Joplin. Both portraits are from 1970—Edmier in his striped Halloween tiger costume and the smiling singer the year of her drug overdose and death. Thirty-one years later, the artist would be working in collaboration with the actress Farrah Fawcett; an intimate portrait of their hands intertwined, Untitled (Hands) (2000), finished in carved alabaster, will be shown in this exhibition.

One can read both muse and matriarch into the phrase ‘mother mold’ as well as conception, pregnancy and birth. Central to the exhibition is Edmier’s sculpture Beverly Edmier, 1967 (1998). Cast in candy-like pink translucent resin, Beverly Edmier is a life-sized sculpture of the artist’s mother at twenty-two years old and nine months pregnant with the artist. Caressing her womb with her right hand, she gazes down at her belly in an intimate early exchange between mother and son.

The installation Imagines (2017), comprises fifty life-cast portraits displayed like the ancient Roman life masks known by the same title. One portrait is hung for every year in the artist’s life, with four self-portraits of the artist at different ages. Stemming from his years in Hollywood working as a special effects make-up artist, Edmier’s cast portraits connect in intimate ways: they portray the artist’s family, friends, heroes, and influences. The connection to Hollywood turns the permanence and memorial of the life mask into a starting point for the transformation to come. Michael Jackson becomes a teenage werewolf, Jeff Goldblum—The Fly, David Bowie—a New Wave vampire, and Matthew Barney—a well-groomed Satyr. As in all of Edmier’s work, one can find familiar identities and structures reshaped and transformed.

Keith Edmier was born in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally. He has been the recipient of survey exhibitions at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands (2012) and CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (2007). He has held solo exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (2003) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002). His work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and in group exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in New York (2013), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2012), Kunstwerke in Berlin (2007), Tate Modern in London (2007), Tate Liverpool (2005), Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2007), Kunsthalle Vienna (2004), and Migros Museum in Zurich (2004). His work are in the permanent collections of major museums such as the Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Israel Museum, among others. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2001 Biennial Award.