Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Ron Nagle: Necessary Obstacles, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. 

The exhibition features eighteen new sculptures and six related drawings. Each sculpture is meticulously crafted by hand in the artist’s San Francisco studio in a variety of materials including clay, catalyzed polyurethane, epoxy resin, and wood. Despite their intimate scale, Nagle’s works have an outsized visual presence. Evoking otherworldly landscapes or surreal architectural arrangements, Nagle’s diminutive sculptures are  “invested with the grandeur of the Taj Mahal” as the critic Dave Hickey has written. With their unexpected combinations and forms, Nagle’s inventive works elicit a vast range of associations. “The thing you want people to feel,” Nagle has said, “is something they haven’t felt before.”   

Nagle (b. 1939) began working with ceramics in the 1950s, while still in high school. His first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then his work has been shown at numerous museums around the world, including most recently “Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter” at the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as one-person exhibitions at the Vienna Secession, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Perimeter in London.