adam parker smith uses digital and physical methods to craft 'crush' series

six new sculptures at the hole l.a.

The Hole L.A. presents six new sculptures by Adam Parker Smith in the form of Crush, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. While furthering Smith’s stylistic sense of humor and long-standing investigation into the legitimacy of classical forms, this show represents a monumental departure for the artist in terms of both material and scale. Occupying one cubic meter each, Smith’s new Carrara marble sculptures are at first glance both instinctively recognizable and bizarrely uncanny, as though the canon of classical statuary has been run through a trash compactor.

Crush will be on view from June 11th until August 20th, 2022 at The Hole L.A (see here).

Cupid Triumphant, 2022

combining digital and physical techniques

Working with a team of master carvers, a seven-axis reductive robot, and the digital research teams at museums like the Uffizi, Adam Parker Smith (see here) has rendered some of the greatest hits of Hellenic and Baroque sculpture in 3D modeling programs, before compressing each digital form into a compact cube, and meticulously chiseling the sculptures out of a Carrara marble block.

The stone draws a material through-line between the sculpture Smith has chosen for his antic homage — Apollo of Belvedere, Cupid Triumphant, Bernini’s David, and others — the better to defamiliarize these paradigmatic works as they appear before the viewer, radically reshaped.

Cupid Triumphant, 2022

adam parker smith revisits the classical canon

Adam Parker Smith is no stranger to ancient forms and their modern upending — he had previously cast Grecian urns and Meissen vases out of resin, spaghetti and red sauce. The basis of the humor which he says often catalyzes his new works are really an oblique way of questioning how we view and connect with classical objects: often, with a false sense of distancing and veneration over creations still alive to contemporaneity.

David, 2022

Crush also alludes to Smith’s complex feelings for these statues, which he first spent real time with while living in Rome. The artist notes that, whether in imitation of or response to these figure’s deific faces, ancient sculpture often inspires feelings of overwhelming adoration. We look at these perfect bodies as both an ideal and a similar; their scale and positioning suggests that we might attempt to see them eye-to-eye.

In Crush, Smith is doing something else, concentrating these forms into blocks so that specific objects collapse to the form of a unit — the kind that might be shipped, stocked, counted or measured. As he has demonstrated elsewhere with Giambologna’s three-figure Rape of the Sabines, such canonic blocks are stackable. In doing so, he interrupts the admiration and ardor we impose on such forms, allowing us to see them in a profoundly new way.

Venus Rising from the Waves, 2022
David, 2022