David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Art Observed

Canadian-born, New York-based artist David Altmejd brings his uniquely executed sculptures and installations to the Musée D’Art Moderne in Paris this winter, the artist’s first career retrospective in France, and one which sees him realizing one of his most ambitious new sculptures to date, alongside a selection of his work from the past twenty years.

David Altmejd, Sarah Altmejd (2003), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Les noix (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Untitled (2011 and 2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, The University 1 (2004), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Altmejd’s style and exectuion is singular, to say the least, rendering immense, reflective crystal structures adorned with body parts, models, fruit, and surreal elements, often paired together to create confounding assemblages that never stray far from a fragmented but recognizable approach to the human body.  Altmejd’s subjects, despite their foreign moorings, are wholly recognizable, and the work’s affect springs from this dissonance, from the break between the recognizable form and the peculiar elements which constantly turn it away from the banal.

David Altmejd, Untitled 9 (Watchers) (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

 

 

 

David Altmejd,  Son 3 (Relatives) (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Untitled 9 (Bodybuilders) (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

 

 

 

David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Untitled 6 (The watchers) (2011), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Here, Altmejd’s often monumental scale is given ample room, and his immense, cube-based sculptures are afforded a wealth of space to circle, investigate and consider.  His most recent piece, completed for this exhibition, The Flux and the Puddle, is perhaps his most indicative, masterful stroke, a multi-tiered expanse of sheeted crystal that spreads body parts, thread, mirrors, fractured pieces of material, and bizarre domestic scenarios to create a sense of the body as a gradual material disintegration, a sensation of the human form in constant change and recomposition.

David Altmejd, Untitled (2009), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Untitled (2009), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Untitled (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Art Observed

The exhibition also includes a series of Altmejd’s sculptural reliefs, damaged, often disturbingly degraded depictions of friends, relatives and other models that infuses a certain fatalistic atmosphere to the artist’s perspective.  One cannot avoid a contention with mortality, with the image of decay as it plays itself out in the artist’s work.  In others, Altmejd renders full-scale works as contingent on the tools used.  Immense sculptures of the human form bear markings from swipes of the hand, often coming to a sharp focus on some particularly bizarre detail, such as a head composed entirely of human hands balled into a cluster.

David Altmejd, Le nouvel espace (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

 

 

David Altmejd, Le nouvel espace (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Le nouvel espace (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

It’s just these sensations that makes Altmejd’s work so unique.  Using the human form the artist seems focused on the notion of the human moving beyond itself, not merely through one’s recognition of their mortality, material composition or cohesive physical structure, but rather in the human ability to make these processes metaphorical, to translate a certain symbolic understanding to the aspects life that renders them not merely visible, but perceptible.

Flux is on view through February 1st.

David Altmejd, Le souffle et la voie (2010), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

 

David Altmejd, La palette (2014), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

 

David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
David Altmejd: “Flux” [Musée d’Art Moderne]

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