The Southhampton press

A Conversation iwth Mel Kendrick and Carroll Dunham

Jan. 9, 2023

Artist Mel Kendrick, whose work is featured in a new, comprehensive exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, and his longtime friend and fellow artist Carroll Dunham will discuss their careers as artists and approach to artmaking on Saturday, January 14 from 3 to 4 p.m. at the museum.

Kendrick and Dunham were both former studio assistants to Parrish collection artist Dorothea Rockburne. The talk is presented in conjunction with “Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things,” the first major survey of Kendrick’s (American, b. 1949) work highlighting his four-decade career that explores how the artist pushes the limits of materials including wood, rubber and concrete to create sculpture that lays bare the process by which it was made.

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The Brooklyn Rail

Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things

December 31, 2022

Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things

By Joyce Beckstein

Less is more, or is it? A young Mel Kendrick would find his own answers to what was, back in the day, an essential element of Minimalism: stripping art down to its basics. No excesses. No narratives. No emotions. No pedestals. Simply put, art was about the object. Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things presents a riveting survey of works, from 1983 to 2022, by an artist who absorbed Minimalism’s quirky mystique as he unabashedly broke most of its codifying rules.

Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Dorothea Rockburne, and Carl Andre, iconic practitioners of the movement, are among the mentors and friends with whom Kendrick alternately studied, worked, and schmoozed with at Max’s Kansas City, a favorite sixties and seventies haunt for the New York City avant-garde. The impact of Minimalism, its rationale, and the alternative paths Kendrick took to chart his own course are clear in the Parrish Art Museum’s reception gallery, where a recent wall relief, Thinking of What (2022), nods to Black Dots (1989–90), a soaring, free-standing wood sculpture.

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ArtForum

Mel Kendrick

December 08, 2022

For more than five decades, sculptor Mel Kendrick has created visual puzzles by taking things apart and putting them back together again. The resulting works invert spatial oppositions, giving dimension to feelings of inner conflict.

The artist’s retrospective, “Seeing Things in Things,” is an invitation to enjoy the traces of this conflict, which can be found in every gap, slip, and break of the art on display. While fundamentally abstract, early pieces such as Nemo, 1983, and Sculpture No. 2, 1991, flirt with figuration, transforming solid blocks of wood into forms that want to move and grow. The sculptures of the past twenty years, however, are far more distilled, reflecting an artist more willing to consider the material constraints of his medium. In Untitled (Green Block), 2007, Kendrick starts by drawing a web of calligraphic lines across each side of a hewn block of wood; the lines serve as a blueprint for cutting into the whole. The internal parts are then removed and placed on top of the remaining structure. The result is a mirrorlike sculpture where a negative image projects its solid counterpart, crossing a line of division embedded within each form. More recently, in Double Lock, 2015, and Standing Block (Black Concrete), 2020, Kendrick has applied the same procedure to expanded polystyrene, which he used to cast the results in black concrete. These sculptures are more self-contained, absorbing the heat of their surroundings and transmitting a solemn calm.

Like Narcissus gazing down at his reflection, the sculptures’ empty and solid forms create both harmonious and uneasy images. Infinite variations emerge, some coherent and some less so, yet each one makes the case that opposition is not something to be overcome, but something to be sustained and enjoyed.

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Art & Object

Mel Kendrick on Seeing Things in Things

November 28, 2022

Mel Kendrick on Seeing Things in Things by Barbara A. MacAdam

The title of sculptor Mel Kendrick’s exhibition “Seeing Things in Things” at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York is particularly apt. At 73 years old, Kendrick is famous for taking things apart, reassembling the fragments, and then reapplying them to create composite sculptures, letting his materials be his guide. He is what he does.

Most recently, Kendrick’s exhibition at the Parrish follows its debut at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The choice of these two venues has allowed Kendrick to explore context as an element and inspiration in his creations, much as his materials are.

 

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Bomb Magazine

Mel Kendrick

June 23, 2021

Dear Readers,

Mel Kendrick’s work has always been mysterious and exciting for me to see.

I met Mel Kendrick through my father, the artist Tony Smith, when I was in my mid-to-late teens and Mel, being several years older than me, was already a grown-up.

I like Mel’s work very much. I think it is engaging in a way that is unique, as it is not sculpture trying to represent or copy the world. His work retains the integrity of the wood he uses and at the same time makes radical interventions and visceral formations.

I was very excited to be able to ask him questions. We talked this spring just before he installed a retrospective of his work, Seeing Things in Things, at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts.

As we spoke, I was leafing through Mel’s beautiful monograph, published by Rizzoli to accompany his exhibition.

All my best,
Kiki

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The Boston Globe

Stepping into the material world of Mel Kendrick

May 13, 2021

ANDOVER — The title of Mel Kendrick’s first-ever major career retrospective is “Seeing Things in Things,” which sounds like a dodge because, at least partly, it is. Kendrick is noncommittal in that old-school Modernist way: For him, the work means nothing because it is nothing beyond, as the old saying goes, the thing itself. Kendrick, an alumnus of Phillips Academy, home to the splendid Addison Gallery of American Art, which mounted the show, might borrow from fellow Phillips artist alum Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see,” Stella once said when asked about his work, the ultimate verbal shrug. It’s an explanation by way of non sequitur.

Let’s not mistake the lack of commitment to language for the same in the work. Just the opposite: Kendrick’s oeuvre, almost all of it sculpture, is robust and imposing, alive with a zeal for making. The largest gallery here — “Seeing Things in Things” spans a half dozen rooms across the museum’s entire second floor — is a communion with giants. The hollowed trunk of a monstrous maple tree perches on angular timbers, like an ancient, crippled beast on crutches. Another work, composed of swoops of textured heavy wood beams, rears up like a startled cobra.

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The Last Artists of SoHo (and TriBeCa)

T Magazine

April 17, 2018

In the late 1950s, when artists started moving downtown, the area was a sprawling wasteland of low level buildings anchored by two largely industrial areas — what we now call SoHo and its neighbor immediately to the south, TriBeCa. Both had begun in the 1600s as colonial farmland; by the 19th century, both had transformed into a shopping and entertainment district, with large hotels, upscale department stores, theaters and hundreds of brothels. After the Civil War, the area became an important manufacturing center for textile firms and other industries, and the brothels were gradually replaced by clusters of cast-iron warehouses. By the 1950s, these warehouses were mostly being used for storage or sweatshops, and the neighborhood, increasingly decrepit, earned the nickname Hell’s Hundred Acres.

In retrospect, it seems destined that artists would colonize this place — for whom were these cavernous, empty spaces built if not for artists, like Donald Judd playing around with new and unwieldy ideas? — though it’s hard to overstate just how difficult it was to do. Living in these buildings, which were not zoned for residential occupation, was illegal, and the conditions were bleak: In some cases there was no working plumbing, water, heat or electricity. Artists were required by the city to post warning signs on the exteriors of these buildings that read A.I.R. — Artist in Residence — so that if there were a fire, the fire department would know to rescue them.

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The New Yorker

Mel Kendrick

October 23, 2017

The New York sculptor’s memorable black-and-white woodblock prints, which he made in the early nineties, suggest pages of closely set type—if those pages were nine feet tall and seventeen feet wide. The interplay of chalky woodgrain patterns and speckled blacks is enlivened by sharp white lines, notably in “10 Loops 3,” in which two long, serrated shapes descend against a dark background. Anchoring the half-dozen prints is Kendrick’s jaggedly energetic “Black-Oil Sculpture No. 4,” a poplar construction darkened with lampblack—a dramatic drawing in three dimensions.

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The Brooklyn Rail

Mel Kendrick: Woodblock Drawings

November 2, 2017

Based in New York since 1971, Mel Kendrick is best known as a sculptor, though he has consistently worked on drawings. This practice goes back a long time—the six woodblock works on exhibit date from 1992 to 1993. As Mark Pascale, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, explains in an accompanying catalogue essay, the imagery in these compositions result from being printed from “horizontally aligned sheets of plywood.” The application of ink is heavy, and the imagery looks thoroughly abstract. But, even so, Kendrick’s drawings display a lightness of being we might not expect from a body of work so dark in color. The group of drawings—Kendrick call these efforts “drawings” despite their having been printed—possesses a subtlety and a fineness that seems to lean slightly toward Asia. But it is impossible to culturally pin down their effect. Whatever cultures the artist may draw from, it remains clear that in both his sculptures and his two-dimensional works, he is an independent.

One of the most immediately striking qualities of 10 Loops 3 (1992) is its highly visible woodgrain, seen as thin white lines against a black background in the two trunk-like verticals that dominate the composition. The title refers to the ten loops that occur both inside and outside these massive-seeming tree trunks. Those loops inside the trunks are black, while those outside them are whitish. In the black expanse that forms the background, one sees myriad flecks of white, which give the impression of sweepings floating in cosmic space. Although the composition is abstract, given that Kendrick usually works with wood when he sculpts, we can take a leap and suggest that natural imagery is being implied by the two tree-like images. The curvilinear white outlines defining the loops give definition to what otherwise might be an inchoate presentation of form.  But this close description doesn’t do justice to the elegance, and also the mystery, of what we see. We might well expect such critically reticent work from Kendrick, whose art has often seemed self-referential and thematically contained.

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The New Criterion

Gallery Chronicle

October 2017

Mel Kendrick has staked his career on exploring the positive and the negative in drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. With the eye of a photographic plate, he finds the black in the white, the projection in the emulsion, the print in the press, and the shape in the void. Most known for his sculptures carved out of blocks that form their own pedestals, Kendrick has a varied studio practice that may find his stamps turned into sculptures turned into photographs, all in a flipping, tumbling performance of process and materials.

Now at Chelsea’s David Nolan Gallery, “Mel Kendrick: Woodblock Drawings” reassembles a series of large-scale woodblock prints created in 1992 and 1993 along with a single spidery wooden construction. What from far away resemble surrealist drawings are revealed, upon closer inspection, to be enormous paper sheets printed with equally enormous plywood stamps. Closer still and the manufacturing of these stamped objects becomes apparent, with the swirling jigsaw cuts and metal hardware, down to the Phillips-head screws, that must have held the stamps together. In the paper print of this wooden matrix, cuts become lines and woodgrain becomes shading, with the wood’s textural variations now transformed into the stark contrast of a black print on white paper. Kendrick calls these prints “drawings:’ and in the silky lines of the woodgrain they draw out a startling impression.

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Additional Articles and Reviews

Mel Kendrick: ‘sub-stratum’ by R. C. Baker, The Village Voice, November 3, 2015
Gallery Chronicle, The New Criterion, February 2014
Mel Kendrick, “Water Drawings”, Time Out New York, January 2014
Inside Out: An Interview With Mel Kendrick by Daniel Rothbart, Artery, January 15, 2012
A Conversation with Mel Kendrick, The Sag Harbor Express, July 29, 2011
From Mary Boone to the Parrish: Mel Kendrick Sculptures Visit the Hamptons by Andrew Russeth, The New York Observer, July 2011
Mel Kendrick by Franklin Einspruch, Art in America, June 2011
Gallery Chronicle by James Panero, The New Criterion, April 2011
Mel Kendrick with Ben LaRocco by Ben La Rocco, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011
Gallery Chronicle by James Panero, The New Criterion, October 2009
Inside Art: “Markers” at the Park by Carol Vogel, The New York Times, September 2009
Mel Kendrick at David Nolan by Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, January 2008
Mel Kendrick at David Nolan by Phoebe Hoban, ARTnews, January 2008
Mel Kendrick at David Nolan by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, November 9, 2007
Mel Kendrick by Ben La Rocco, The Brooklyn Rail, November 2007
Mel Kendrick: Extended Time by Jonathan Goodman, Sculpture Magazine, January/February 2007
Carroll Dunham on Mel Kendrick by Carroll Dunham, Bomb Magazine, Fall 2004
Mel Kendrick by Jonathan Goodman, Sculpture, December 2003
Mel Kendrick : Drawings in Wood. by Ken Johnson, The New York Times, January 17, 2003
Mel Kendrick by Robert Boyce, Sculpture, October 2002
Youth and Experience Transforming a Town by Grace Glueck, The New York Times, August 9, 2002
The Nature of Inspiration by Christine Temin, The Boston Globe, July 4, 2002
Wood Sculptures Romanticize Art, Not Trees by Alice Thorson, Art, The Kansas City Star, Dec 13, 1996
Mel Kendrick at John Weber by Robert Taplin, Art in America, Feburary 1996, p. 88-89
Mel Kendrick’s Ten Loops Slit by Richard Campbell, Arts, The Magazine of the Members of the The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, June 1995, p. 7
New artwork pop up at city’s institutions by Sally Vallongo, The Blade, November 10, 1994, Toledo, OH
Mel Kendrick by Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, Feburary 1994
Mel Kendrick by Donald Kuspit, Artforum, January 1994
6 East End Sculptors at Midcareer by Phyllis Braff, The New York Times, July 26, 1992
Sculpture at Guild Hall Moves Beyond Minimalism by Robert Long, Southampton Press, July 16, 1992
From the Studio, A Far Cry by Rose C.S. Slivka, The East Hampton Star, June 11, 1992
Sag Harbour Sculptors Feature in Show, The Sag Harbour Express, June 11, 1992
Modern and Big, The East Hampton Star, June 11, 1992
Through a Blighted Landscape by Jed Perl, New Criterion, September 1992
Interlocking Parts by Miles Beller, Artweek , no. 13, April 9, 1992, p. 24
Summer Stock by Kay Larson, New York, September 2, 1991, p. 60
In Westchester, Sculpture Meets Nature by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, July 19, 1991, c1
Mel Kendrick’s Calculated Risks by Michael Boodro, ARTnews, May 1991, cover and pp. 104-109
review, ‘Summer Group Show’ by Robert C. Morgan, New Art International, Feburary 1991, p. 82
Portfolio: Mel Kendrick, Bomb, Spring 1990, pp. 74-79
Mel Kendrick at Salam-Caro Gallery by Anne Barclay Morgan, Sculpture, May/June 1990, pp. 98-99
Mel Kendrick and The Well-Adjusted Object by Bruce W. Ferguson, Art in America, February 1990, pp. 146-155
Review, ‘Mel Kendrick’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, May/June 1990, pp. 60-61
Complex Forms by John Dorsey, The Sun, Baltimore, January 4, 1990
Out of Wood by Cynthia Nadelman, Sculpture, May/June 1990, pp. 95-98
Sculpture Shows at Two Branches of The Whitney by Michael Brenson, The New York Times, Dec 22, 1989
review by Lewis Kachur, Art International, Autumn 1989, p. 58
Mel Kendrick at John Weber by Gloria Amann, Cover, Summer 1989, p. 14
untitled by Mel Kendrick, Balcon, Summer 1989, pp. 164-169
Contemporary American Art on Display by Theodore F. Wolff, Bay News, April 17, 1989
Art, The New Yorker, April 3, 1989, 12
Going Beyond Slickness: Sculptors Get Back to Basics by Michael Brenson, The New York Times, March 3, 1989
Museum Show Reflects New Attention to Sculpture by Tom Wachunas, The Phoenix, March 2, 1989
Mel Kendrick: Essays by Michael FitzGerald, Trinity Reporter, Winter 1989
Pilgrim’s, Process by Nancy Princenthal, The New York Times, March 13, 1987, pp. 76-77
Photos and Sculptures at the Aldrich by Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, November 27, 1988
Witty Art – Historical Quotations by Joan Hugo, Artweek, March 12, 1988
Sculptors-In-Process by Ann Berman, Town and Country, September 1987, pp. 269-272
At Newberger Sculptor Rediscovers Wood in Exotic Ways by William Zimmer, The New York Times, Aug 6, 1987, p. 28
7 Artists in the New Britain Show by Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, April 12, 1987, p. 26
New Britain Exhibit Wisely Avoids Theme and Displays by Matt Damsker, The Hartford Courant, March 22, 1987
Up with Color and Craft by Patricia Degener, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 8, 1987, p. 4c
Kendrick: Process and Experimentation by Phyllis Tuchman, Newsday, New York, February 20, 1987, p. 29
Head, Heart, and Hands by Steven Kaplan, Artfinder, Spring 1987, pp. 96-102
Mel Kendrick at Barbara Krakow Gallery by Thomas Frick, Art New England, May 1986
On and Off the Street by David Bonnetti, The Boston Phoenix, Section Three, April 15, 1986
untitled by Christine Temin, The Boston Globe, March 27, 1986
Sculptor’s Wonderful Way with Wood by Nancy Stapen, The Boston Herald, March 28, 1986
The Road Now Taken by Phyllis Tuchman, Art Criticism, vol. 2, 1986
Le Cienge Area by Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1985, Part V, p. 16
untitled by Susanne Stephens, House & Garden, November 1985, photo of work only
untitled, Bomb Magazine, No. XIII, Fall 1985, p. 67, photo of work only
Review by Thomas McElvilley, Artforum, May 1985, pp. 112-113
Contrasts in Form: Geometric Abstract Art, 1910-1980, from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Including the Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation by Magdalena Dabrowski, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Vitality Emerges from Geometric Abstraction by Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times, February 1985
Concepts in Construction: 1910-1980, a traveling exhibition by Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, February 10, 1985
Sculptors Interviews by Wade Saunders, Art in America, November 1985, pp. 110-111, 122-123
The Whitney Biennial: The MTV of Art by Phyllis Tuchman, Newsday, March 29, 1985
review by Michael Brenson, The New York Times, February 22, 1985
A Decade of New Art by Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, June 8, 1984
A Collection That Breathes The Spirit of Modernism by Grace Glueck, The New York Times, April 8, 1984
untitled by Gregory Hedberg, The Tremaine Collection: 20th Century Masters, 1984, Wadsworth Antheneum, CT
untitled by William Wilson, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1983
untitled by Kate Linker, Artforum, September 1983
untitled by Theodore Wolff, Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 1983
untitled by Wade Saunders, Art in America, Summer 1983
untitled by Stephen Eiseman, Arts Magazine, June 1983
Sculpture: Mel Kendrick by Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, April 15, 1983
James Biederman, Don Gummer, Mel Kendrick by Claire Wolf Krantz, New Art Examiner, Chicago, March 1982
Review of the Artis Club of Chicago Show by Harold Haydon, Chicago Sun Times, February 12, 1982
Entries: Sheer Grunge by Robert Pincus-Witten, Art in America, May 1981
Mel Kendrick at Weber by Bob Knafo, Art in America, February 1981
New Talent/New York by Nina Sundell, Dialogue, January/February 1981
untitled by Michael Klein, Arts, January 1981
What’s Done in New York by William Olander, Live, January 1981
John Weber Artists Reject Traditional Mold by Lillian Dobbs, The Miami News, January 23, 1981
untitled by Thomas Lawson, Artforum, December 1980
review by William Zimmer, Soho News, October 15, 1980
review by Elizabeth Stevens, Baltimore Sun, June 6, 1980
review by Jo Ann Lewis, Washington Post, June 8 1980
review by Deborah Perlberg, Artforum, May 1979
review by Harriet Seine, New York Post, March 10, 1979
review by Hilton Kramer, The New York Times, August 5, 1977
review by Susan Heinemann, Artforum, April 1974