Chris Caccamise

CHRIS CACCAMISE October 23 – December 4, 2010 | 11 Rivington St, NY

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculptures by New York artist Chris Caccamise, on view from October 23 – December 4, 2010.  This is the artist’s second exhibition with gallery and his fifth solo show in New York, and will feature a dozen new wall-mounted word sculptures made in his signature medium of cut and painted Bristol paper.  Caccamise will be included in SML, a group show of text-based paintings and sculptures, at Greenberg Van Doren, opening October 28, 2010.

For almost 10 years, Caccamise has developed and honed a signature practice which involves cutting Bristol paper into three-dimensional sculptures. He then paints these paper sculptures in Flashe – a vinyl paint in a matte finish – and high gloss enamel colors.  His meticulous craftsmanship – each work is planned and constructed by hand without the aid of stencils or templates – belies an intuitive approach where each word or phrase is spelled out in a typeface entirely of the artist’s own design and making.  While in the past he has invented seemingly simple and practical objects (a suitcase to carry Tony Smith sculptures referenced his experience as an art handler for Matthew Marks Gallery), or iterations of actual ‘stupid’ objects (a calculator made of a ‘rock’ titled ‘Stone Tool’), for this exhibition he has focused on a collection of text, some universal, while others highly specific, but all poetic and distinctly personal.  He takes phrases and choruses, lifts them from their original contexts, and invokes them with new or different readings. In its media and shape, Caccamise's sculptures self-referentially evoke the spirit of sign painting—the undisputed breeding ground for American Pop's grand vision; its sharply relevant content casts a tenuous but playful balance between the democratic and the esoteric, and culls cultural information from gossip magazines to art criticism. The result is an oeuvre which speaks clearly about American art and the cultural condition of today.  In the works for this show, he mostly strips away any extraneous past devices (shelves, frames, props) and concentrates on the authority – and, in some cases, the ambiguity - that words can convey. In this way, the weight and meaning that language can carry is further highlighted and subverted by the economy of means and actual lightness of artist’s chosen medium of painted paper.

Born in 1975, Caccamise was educated at Rutgers University and the School of Visual Arts, and currently lives and works in NY.  Previous solo exhibitions include Eleven Rivington, NY; La Montagne, Boston; Galleria Glance, Turin; and Sculpture Center, LIC.  His work has been featured in The New York Times; Flash Art; Art and Auction; The New Yorker; and ArtNews, among other publications.