Things: Wheels, Ladders, Teeth, Alps, Gods, Boats, Etc, William Corwin

April 5 - June 8, 2025

Opening Reception: April 5, 2025, 3-5p

Geary Contemporary is thrilled to present William Corwin: Things, an exhibition of cast metal sculpture from the last decade of the artist’s practice on view April 5 – June 8, 2025.  This is the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery.  Things will be held concurrently with a presentation of Corwin’s Mountain pieces at The Re Institute in Millerton, New York on view April 5th to May 17th.

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Corwin has long been fascinated by the lineage of symbols.  He has expanded on his sculpture practice by interviewing and collaborating with archeologists and art historians, investigating how certain tools and ideas move from practical uses to symbolic objects; such as hand axes and ladders, even human teeth.  Corwin casts the works himself, employing open-faced sand molds as his primary method.  This process allows him to work the mold by hand, inventing the negative space of the object rather than making an object first.  This allows him to spontaneously imprint hand gestures as well as improvised textures directly onto the metal itself.

Corwin’s most recent series of sculptures focus on the goddess Artemis.  An equivocal deity, Artemis represents both the creative and destructive capabilities of nature.  Drawing on the famous Hellenic depiction of Artemis in her shrine at Ephesus, Corwin interprets the ancient sculpture, adding in references to the female robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, as well as Paleolithic female figurines.  Also included in this  exhibition are several boats which the artist created for the exhibition Roots/Anchors (a group exhibition with Xaviera Simmons, Katie Holten and Shervone Neckles), which was presented at the Newhouse Gallery at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in 2021, which focused on museum’s maritime history as a rest home for sailors.  Corwin chose to consider Anglo Saxon and Viking Boat burials, and the use of the boat as a symbolic link between this world and the next. 

Where modernist and minimal sculpture have striven to detach from all meaning,  Corwin welcomes it back, propelling viewers back into an era of belief.

Lucy Lippard

William Corwin is a sculptor and writer who has shown his work widely in New York City and in Europe.

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William Corwin

A graduate of Princeton University, where he studied architecture, Will has exhibited  his work at LaMama Galleria, Zurcher Gallery, Geary Contemporary and The George and Jorgen Gallery in London.  Residencies include: the State Department Artist Residency at the Taipei Artist’s Village (2007), The Clocktower Gallery (2010), The Hamburg City Guest Artist Residency (2010), Art Omi (2014), Lower Manhattan Workspace Residency on Governors Island (2014).  Museum shows include Roots/Anchors in at The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor, a four person show featuring the work of Shervone Neckles, Katie Holten, and Xaviera Simmons, with exhibition catalog essay by Lucy Lippard.

In 2019 he curated Postwar Women at The Art Students League, an exhibition of forty-four of the institution’s alumnae active between 1945 and 1965, featuring artists such as Lee Krasner, Lenita Manrey, Mavis Pusey, Perle Fine, Elizabeth Catlett, and Dorothy Dehner. He has also curated a series of exhibitions centering on the midcentury French painters Marguerite Louppe and Maurice Brianchon, at Lafayette College, Albright College, and Seton Hall University, and most recently this past spring and summer at Rosenberg & Co. He is the author of the book &Model, published by Leeds Metropolitan University, and is the editor of the book: Formal Concerns: Collected essays of Saul Ostrow, published by Elective Affinity Press in 2023. He was recently included in three of Phong Bui’s exhibitions, Singing in Unison.