Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Aromi, an exhibition of new sculptures by Anthony Miserendino. The occasion marks the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery.

Aromi, the work that lends its name to the exhibition, is the artist’s most ambitious to date. The central figure, a market attendant, stands amidst his cornucopia of produce and other goods in a relief that sculpturally engages the senses. Using line, shadow, and texture, Miserendino creates a scene that fluctuates between the tactile and the pictorial.

Through a process of modeling, casting, and assemblage, Miserendino’s building of the relief parallels the daily set-up of the attendant himself. Miserendino first made small objects and reliefs inspired by his memory of a roadside market on the Amalfi Coast. These smaller pieces were then cast and assembled into larger clay-based panels constructed with a diverse series of techniques: high relief, sunk relief, objects arranged and compressed onto the surface or removed to leave impressions in the clay, and whatever else experimentation revealed to him. Once composed, he created a single rubber mold from each panel. Layer by layer, he painted acrylics into the mold and then peeled out the finished piece, which hangs like a tapestry. While the work presents as solid, it is a thin film that drapes, folds, and sags, integrating the image with its substrate. In the work’s countless details, close study is rewarded with nuanced interventions that go beyond the immediate perception of the picture.

Following Aromi, the artist created additional works by bending and distorting the flexible rubber molds, and by revisiting and resolving the preparatory objects into finished sculptures. By modeling an object or figure and its space, as relief demands, and then using the results as material for further reliefs, the work itself oscillates between body and environment, complicating and obscuring their division.

Anthony Miserendino (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014. His work was featured in Issue 127 of New American Painings in 2016.