Arrangements marks the first solo exhibition of American artist Tony Matelli in Taiwan, featuring a total of 26 sculptures and painting. While Matelli is known for his hyperreal, meticulously crafted sculptures, his practice moves beyond mere realistic replication. Infused with a sense of absurd black humor, his work intentionally cultivates viewing scenarios where meaning is suspended and the atmosphere is unstable, unsettling, and disconcerting.
Matelli draws on familiar elements from everyday life, including mirrors, classical sculptures, sausages, fruits and vegetables, weeds, flowers, cups, and ropes. He employs techniques such as inversion, suspension, imbalance, incapacitation, and dysfunction to disrupt conventional ideas of spatial and temporal order, which results in a frustrated, obstructed viewing experience and chaotic visual perception that induces anxiety. This embodies the alternative, idiosyncratic logic of aesthetics that he aims to construct: a challenge to rigid definitions, inviting inquiries into established norms and fostering a space for personal emotional connections and interpretations.
A good deal of my work is born of the friction between the self and society. — Tony Matelli
The exhibition title, Arrangements, comes from an eponymous series displayed on the second floor. Matelli employs a “subversive” arrangement as his artistic strategy across three levels, rearranging forms to rethink the nature of existence and how value and meaning are assigned to things. In doing so, he explores the conflicts and contradictions arising from the collisions between personal desire and social frameworks. The spatial arrangement of Matelli’s work intentionally frees itself from the constraints of physical reality, aiming to evoke both unease and an ineffable sense of freedom through the process of “ascension” in the exhibition.
For more information, please visit Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art's website.
