February 12, 2025
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April 13, 2025
Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice (German, born 1963) is best known for his humbly constructed sculptures that defamiliarize the ho-hum features of 20th Century functionalist architecture. Working with simple materials like plywood and particleboard, as well as found objects like tires, newspaper clippings, and scrap metal, Pernice creates sculptural forms that quixotically combine aesthetic features of the complex systems that underpin our daily lives but often escape our notice, including trade, waste, and public infrastructure. In the artist’s words, “What one usually only perceives are contexts that make sense – never or seldom contexts of non-sense… In seeking intelligibility, these nonsensical situations usually go unnoticed, even though life is full of them.” Visualizing nonsense in an intimately handmade scale and form, Pernice translates the more all-encompassing contradictions of industry and history into objects that resist logic. This exhibition celebrates the recent gift to the Nasher of four key works by Pernice, presented in the context of works by John Storrs, Jasper Johns, and Ivan Puni from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection.
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