Mary Ann Unger: Dark Icons

MARY ANN UNGER: ''Dark Icons''

27 February - 4 April, 1992

Klarfeld Perry Gallery is pleased to announce its next exhibition', "Dark Icons," sculptures by Mary Ann Unger.

Mary Ann Unger is well known for her sleek, even high-tech public monuments and permanent installations commissioned for sites around the nation. Her public sculptures are, wrote critic Michael Brenson in the New York Times, "cool and architectural .... "  The "Dark Icons" featured at Klarfeld Perry, however, are far more intimate and disturbing manifestations of an urban psyche "inward-looking and expressive," wrote Brenson. " ... the presences of Picasso and Giacometti are unmistakable .... "

Begun in 1987, "Dark Icons" are sculptures, heroic in scale, of Hydrocal over welded steel armatures, patinated with pigments, wax, and graphite. Some have biomorphic forms in the great Surrealist tradition of Hans Arp; others stand like brutal figures in the tradition of Francis Bacon. All are paramountly products of her own feelings about illness and mortality, and her own experience with breast cancer. They are visionary in their raw power.

Pall Bearers suggests two figures mournfully carrying a corpse between them, while the ironically titled Monument to War suggests a towering pieta, with two lumbering figures bearing a gourdlike form between them - a poignant, deposed Christ.

Mary Ann Unger received her MFA from Columbia University in 1975 after graduate study in sculpture at University of California at Berkeley. Her exhibitions include "Communion" at the Sculpture Center (1986) and "Gardens" at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art (1985). She received' fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Yaddo.

Mary Ann Unger: "Dark Icons", will be on view at Klarfeld Perry Gallery from February 27 through April 4 1992. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 6. The gallery is located at 472 Broome Street between Wooster and Greene Streets.

Reproductions and an illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Joan Marter, professor of art history at Rutgers University, are available.