Di Donna is getting an early jump on the New York season with the opening of The Life of Forms on October 25th. The show is another example of creating an unusual space within a gallery or art fair to highlight a group of works. This time we’re celebrating biomorphism:
Di Donna Galleries is pleased to announces The Life of Forms, an exhibition that explores how modern artists translated forms found in nature into biomorphic shapes in sculpture. The exhibition will bring together important sculptures by Jean Arp, Ruth Asawa, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi, among others, installed in Di Donna’s Madison Avenue gallery in a setting that evokes an outdoor garden.
The works reveal inspiration ranging from flora (Asawa’s nesting wire mesh pods or the organic “growths” of Calder’s sculptures) to anatomy (Bourgeois and Arp’s depiction of bodily fragments) to living organisms (the amoeba-like forms of Moore and Hepworth’s work). The exhibition features loans from major private collections and institutions, including the Calder Foundation, The Matisse Foundation, and The Noguchi Museum.
The Life of Forms is on view at Di Donna Galleries (744 Madison Avenue) from October 26 trough December 14, with a public opening the evening of October 25. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay that investigates the formal and conceptual motivations that led to the development biomorphic abstraction in sculpture.