Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA

This long-overdue exhibition assembles a full range of works that reflect Kendrick’s provocative, ongoing investigations into the fundamentals and possibilities of sculpture. Active since the 1970s, Kendrick (b. 1949) has produced a large, varied body of work that has inventively pushed the boundaries of sculpture. 

Presenting approximately 60 sculptures as well as a selection of table-top sculptural “sketches,” prints, and photographs spanning this adventurous artist’s decades-long career, this major traveling exhibition will explore how Kendrick exploits the essential properties of his selected medium, whether wood, rubber, or, more recently, concrete, to create sculpture that inherently lays bare the process by which it was made. By leaving visible traces of his trial-and-error process—marks, cuts, paint, oil stains—Kendrick endows his materials with a remarkable sense of immediacy and animation. Moreover, his meditations on the relationships between inside and outside, positive and negative, organic and geometric, nature and culture, sculpture and base, sculpture and sculpture, sculpture and print have led to infinite experimentation.