Mary Ann Unger: Flesh and Bone, Retrospective 1976–1998

Mary Ann Unger Flesh And Bone
January 14–February 20, 2016

Maxwell Davidson Gallery is proud to present Flesh and Bone, a one-woman exhibition of work by Mary Ann Unger. This show, the artist’s second with the gallery, focuses on work from 1976 until 1998. She began her career as an artist in New York City in the late-60s exploring both sculpture and works on paper. As her career developed, her most iconic works were her sculptures. Beginning in the early-70s until her untimely death in 1998, Unger worked with a huge variety of media including steel, hydrocal, wax, clay, bronze, wood, and aluminum creating sculptures on a scale from tiny to monumental.

Unger was a Feminist, and she explored her convictions through her practice as a sculptor, addressing her roles as a woman in society, as a female artist in a male-dominated art world, and as a mother and a guardian. Her work was always strong—imposing and rife with meaning, but never without beauty and accessibility. The works are tough, physical, and dark in many ways, bucking preconceived notions of what a female artist could and should do. Those macho qualities were paired with a sensitivity to form, material, and surface that is decidedly feminine, marrying the two together.

The physicality of her work became stronger and more overt after her first diagnosis of breast cancer in 1985. The female body, and specifically the pull of death on the fertile body, became ever more key to her work. Her diagnosis came through her work as both horrifying and wrenching, and also as a challenge to be overcome and moved through.

This exhibition, and the work in it, is about the life and the battle with illness of an artist who was a woman and a mother. Mary Ann Unger was an artist, and a Feminist artist, yet her work defies qualification of male or female. Those are the vital parts that make up the strength, tension, and anguish of her work over the period of 20+ years represented in Flesh and Bone.