Edel Assanti’s booth presents Oren Pinhassi’s latest body of sculptural work that explores the act of mourning.
Pinhassi’s interest in mourning first emerged in his recent sculpture The Mourner, 2021. Made from sand, methodically layered over welded steel skeletons it somberly insinuates a figure beneath a veil. The works on the booth expand the exploration of mourning as a site of metamorphosis, where emotional and physical states collapse into one another. Veils will be conveyed in the new sculptures through garments sculpted in sand or elaborate vinyl covers, encasing the figures beneath them. Despite their playful shapeshifting, Pinhassi’s totemic figures are ultimately “alone together,” solitary in mutual separation.
The permanence of the sculptures is ambiguous – whilst the timelessness of sand as a sculptural medium evokes antiquity, as an agent of natural erosion it equally foretells the return of these edifices to the earth. Whilst the figures are upstanding, the stance of their feet, curled over the edge of the rock, signal a return to horizontality, as if caught between states of life and death.
Oren Pinhassi’s installations examine the relationship between the human figure, nature and the built environment by conjuring evocative and erotic sites that intersect public and private exchange. His sculptures are frequently a combination of the superfluous and the ergonomic, erring towards the utopian. They mimic familiar objects, seeking to render visible the way that humankind builds the world in its own image.
Oren Pinhassi received an MFA from Yale in 2014 and B.Ed.F.A. in 2011 from Beit-Berl College, Hamidrasha School of Art. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2022); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone, Lissone, Italy, (2019); Castello San Basilio, Basilicata, Italy (2019); Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2019); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, USA, (2018); Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach-Tikva, Israel, (2017); Tina Kim Gallery, New York, USA (2019); Yossi Milo, New York, USA (2019); David Zwirner, New York, USA (2018). Pinhassi lives and works in New York City, NY.
