Metro Pictures

YURI MASNYJ

For his second exhibition at Metro Pictures, Yuri Masnyj introduces new sculptures to complement his meticulously detailed drawings. First shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the sculptures are three-dimensional adaptations of his drawings that reorder the fragmented art historical, architectural and design elements of the artist’s iconography.

Masnyj isolates representative forms of the historical avant-garde to harvest their psychological import, filling suggested interiors with modernist artifacts and cast-offs. In one sculpture, various hand-cast objects are arranged on a raised stage-like platform—skulls, bottles, bowls, cones, books, a beam painted with lines suggesting diminishing perspective and a model of a guitar, a form important to the Cubists because of its resemblance to the body. Another sculpture evokes the body with replicas of Eames stools cast in wax. The stools were originally created for the Time Life Building lobby in 1960 and Masnyj’s sculptures are themselves fragments of such institutional spaces, rendered in his graphic style where grey, black and red predominate, a color scheme similar to that preferred by the Constructivists. In his drawing and sculpture, he uses a panoramic narrative, where bottles, pedestals, paintings, boards, books and bookcases function like features in a passing landscape. Masnyj describes these interiors as “rooms with a view, or views with a room—I’m not always sure in which order.”

Yuri Masnyj was born in Washington D.C. in 1976 and lives in New York City where he received a BFA from Cooper Union. His work was included in “International Paper” at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the 2005 Greater New York show at PS 1, and the Whitney Biennial of 2006. He recently curated a group exhibition at Rivington Arms, New York.