Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce the release of three new sculpture works by gallery artist YORAM WOLBERGER. The artist has just released a new edition of his trademark oversized fiberglass sculptures. Much like the (now sold-out) “Cowboy and Indian” series and the “Trophy” series of sculpture works, Wolberger’s new “Toy Soldiers” strike a chord for nostalgic Americana and pop culture.
YORAM WOLBERGER
Toy Soldier #4, (Offhand Position), 2016
3D digital scanning, CNC digital sculpting, Reinforced Fiberglass Composite, Urethane
Approximate dimensions: 72 x 60 x 24 inches (182.9 × 152.4 × 61 cm)
Edition: 3 + 2 A/Ps
Price Upon Request
Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.
As the HUFFINGTON POST put it: “Wolberger’s Cowboys & Indians is based on the widely familiar toy figurines with which Wolberger played during his youth, and invites viewers to consider the manufacturing of common cultural stereotypes. Faithfully reproducing the seemingly innocent figurines at life size proportions with all their original design “flaws” intact, the artist compels us to reexamine the cultural attitudes implied by such distorted portrayals.”
YORAM WOLBERGER
From the series Toy Soldier Series
Cast Resin
20 × 10 × 10 in (50.8 × 25.4 × 25.4 cm)
Edition 5/5 + 2AP
Price Upon Request
Yoram Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s (CA) New Genres Department. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), deCordova Sculpture Park (MA), the Aldrich Contemporary Museum (CT), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL) and the Israeli Museum of Modern Art (Israel) among others. His works have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California Riverside (CA) and the McNay Art Museum (TX). The artist lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Frontal View: YORAM WOLBERGER, Soldier Portrait #2, 2016
From the series Toy Soldier Series
ABOUT THE ARTIST – BY ART CRITIC MARK MIAN:
“Wolberger’s body of work encompasses a variety of everyday objects; toys, models, appliances, furniture. His method is the painstaking manipulation of these iconic artifacts. Grossly enlarging, dissecting or reconstructing them, he overthrows their utilitarian context to expose associations normally concealed by their continuity with the environment. His pieces are at times ironic and personal, even tender, while at others they are highly critical.”
“Transformed beyond their expected appearance, construction or functioning, Wolberger’s arrestingly mutated objects stimulate renewed contemplation of their ideological origins and significance. Typically, his sculptural interventions employ three principal approaches for evicting viewers from their comfort zone of habituated perception.”
“By slicing and collapsing familiar household objects, Wolberger demolishes reassuring symbols of domestic comfort and stability. Still standing, a refrigerator cut into layers provokes the uneasy feelings of instability and displacement that arise when trusted relationships are cut. Turning things inside out, deconstructing and reconstructing objects into newly functioning configurations, he exposes the intimate personal space housed within and around them. Through such manipulation he explores the construction of meaning at the junction of our physical, social and personal worlds.”
“Through his process of enlargement, he meticulously magnifies toy figurines and models to expose the flawed faces of our cultural ideals. Gun-slinging cowboys and brutish Indians, the iconic American “good guys and bad guys”, idolize society’s original villains and heroes. His toy soldiers and chromed sports trophy figurines aggrandize our essential ideals of heroism, patriotism, physical prowess and beauty that drive our economy. A life size wedding cake bride-and-groom garishly mass-markets marital love as pure saccharine sweetness. Now, he is enlarging unassembled toy models of war machines to confront us with our society’s industrialized vision of peace through rigidly uniform order.”
“Each of Wolberger’s sculptures is a perfectly rendered tribute to the pantheon of imperfect stereotypes upon which our society’s continuing order is dependent. Seeking a unified view beyond the contradictions of cultural concept and physical form, his art transcends the realms of the trivial and the traumatic.”
YORAM WOLBERGER
Soldier Portrait #1, 2015
Resin cast
20 × 10 × 10 in (50.8 × 25.4 × 25.4 cm)
Edition 3/3 + 1AP
YORAM WOLBERGER is featured in a recent issue of Beautiful Decay Magazine article “Toy Art: Artists Incorporate The Objects Of Our Youth” along with Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Hans Hemmert, Joe Black, Maurizio Cattelan, Jud Bergeron, and Hiroshi Fuji.
Check it out online at the following link.
YORAM WOLBERGER, Soldier Portrait #1, 2015 (detail image)
You can find additional available works by this artist and prices on our ARTSY website at: https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery
For more information on this artist and the Mark Moore Fine Art program please check out our website: www.markmoorefineart.com
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