christopher chiappa fills kate werble gallery with 7,000 fried eggs

christopher chiappa fills kate werble gallery with 7,000 fried eggs
all images courtesy of kate werble gallery

christopher chiappa: livestrong
kate werble gallery, new york
now – january 9, 2016

seeping down the walls and extending across the floor, 7,000 handmade fried eggs by christopher chiappa completely permeate new york’s kate werble gallery. the growing infestation of sunny side up sculptures invades its surroundings, turning the all-white exhibition space into an immersive and surreal spacial experience chiappa titles ‘livestrong’.

chiappa’s egg obsession initially began in his studio with drawings and photographs, eventually materializing into a sculptural series. the forms are made through a carefully calibrated process of casting, pouring, sanding and painting plaster, refined into uncannily hyper-realistic sunny side up sculptures.

7,000 fried egg sculptures permeate the walls at kate werble gallery in new york

the symbolic function of the egg — traditionally embodying themes of perfection, purity and resurrection — is distorted by its fried nature. these droopy, cooked variations convey a more unfavorable position — broken, defunct, dead. ‘chiappa’s fried eggs operate squarely within the uncomfortable intersection of two symbolic legacies, mining the darkly humorous vein where perfection and failure meet,’ kate werble gallery describes of the exhibition.‘ the title of his show, livestrong, confronts this duality, using a well-known cultural symbol as a metaphor for belief. this is familiar territory for the artist, whose visual lexicon frequently revisits figures from his suburban childhood – such as weber grills, basketballs, and volvos – to plumb the psychological depths of these gestalt images of mundane but wholesome american exceptionalism.’

the hyper-realistic sculptures drip down the gallery’s all-white walls