Callan Contemporary is pleased to present Currents and Cycles, our third solo exhibition by sculptor Caprice Pierucci. With their sinuous forms and progressive visual rhythms, the sculptures evoke the fluidity of water and graduated shapes alluded to in the show’s title. A minimalist simplicity informs these artworks, fashioned from pine wood and water-based paints and born of Pierucci’s time- and process- intensive technique. Their components converge like pieces of a complex puzzle, conceived and edited during an improvisational dialogue with materials, which she adds and subtracts from elegant, porous compositions. The forms, along with the intricate shadows they cast, appear to morph and undulate as viewers move around the sculptures, lending a sense of dynamism, kinesthetics, and interactivity. Whether free-standing, wall-mounted, or hanging, the pieces do not just exist in space; they activate it.
Pierucci grew up in the milieu of the textile-art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her mother, Louise Holeman Pierucci, was an important figure in that movement and instilled in her daughter an appreciation of the tactility and maleability of fabric arts. “Sculpting,” Pierucci has observed, “is like weaving with wood.” After graduating with a B.F.A. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, she earned her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she studied with Judy Pfaff and Ursula von Rydingsvard, both of whom influenced her work. Other influences included Eva Hesse, Dominic di Mare, and Leonardo Drew. Like her mother before her, she has combined a studio practice with an academic career and is a senior lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Her work has been featured in more than 100 exhibitions, including Caprice Pierucci: Dream State at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas and the major survey Full Circle: 40 Years of Making Art at Davis Gallery (Austin, Texas). Her works are included in prestigious private, institutional, and corporate collections, the latter including Morgan Stanley, Westinghouse, and The Four Seasons.
With their sophisticated finessing of organic forms and negative space, the sculptures in the Callan exhibition range a gamut of scales and series. Their surfaces, sanded to silky smoothness, embody a variety of chromatic moods, from subtle bone-white and charcoal to clay-red and jade. Although conceived as abstraction, they sometimes recall natural and human-made objects in the process of erosion or oxidation, imparting an emotional poignancy to their supple contours. Meditative, sensual, and serene, they speak to the passage of time, the ephemerality of experience, and the preciousness of life itself.