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Tony Matelli — MFA (Sculpture, 1995)

Tony Matelli was born in 1971 in Chicago, Illinois, and received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1995. The artist frequently focuses on themes of time, ambivalence, banality, and wonder. In Matelli’s work, the physical laws of objects are often reversed, upended or atomized. With these deft manipulations of matter and gravity come profound reorientations in perspective and ultimately, states of being.

Matelli’s artistic practice contrasts the ancient and the topical, the classical and the common. Foot is a scaled-down adaption of the artist’s distinguished garden statues, which he describes as as modern-day memento mori — a still life that suggests transience and the decay that begins at the pinnacle of perfection. The degenerating yet urbane human foot is set against the tantalizing richness of ripe fruit, presenting a contradiction of culture versus nature as both objects decompose. The series was born one day when Matelli passed a scrapped car at a junkyard on the way to his studio; on a whim, he placed a strawberry he was carrying with him on the hood: “The two objects spoke to one another in a powerful way. It reminded me of those ‘Death and the Maiden’ paintings from the Northern European Renaissance. It seemed somehow erotic and strange and spoke very clearly to me about youth and old age. I started developing the idea using statuary instead of other objects to more clearly implicate the viewer in the work,” says Matelli.