Michelle Lopez is best known for large-scale leaning and wall-based sculptures that investigate sculptural history, gravity, and the body. Lopez looks to the legacy of Minimalism and through a sculptural inquiry she examines the finish fetish and fascist quality of the monolith. Her sculptures state the obvious about well-established forms in order to unravel how there’s no such truth. Instead the work looks to the bend, where we realize that things are not as they seem.

In Flare (2011), a title taken from a John McCracken work, the individual elements initially appear as linear, serial, wall sculptures with stark and potentially factory-made, industrial qualities. Upon moving around the piece, properties of drawing invade the sculpture and expose a kind of natural, organic form. Through the immediacy of the artist’s hand, and the process of painting each in varying iridescent tones of automotive purple and blue, the familiarity of minimal sculpture shifts.

Lopez has had solo exhibitions at LAXART in Los Angeles, Deitch Projects in New York, Feature Inc. in New York, and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. She has been included group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Public Art Fund in New York, and OCMA in Orange County. She has been awarded a NYFA grant in the category of sculpture.

Courtesy of Simon Preston Gallery