The Tampa Museum of Art presents the solo exhibition of sculpture by Tampa-based artist Dominique Labauvie and the premier of his site-specific work, Suspended Skylines, August 14, 2010, through January 16, 2011, in the museum’s Farish Gallery.
Labauvie’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. He has been commissioned large-scale public works in France for the cities of Paris, Draveil, Valence, Dijon, Livry-Gargan and Reims among others and for the Vandenberg Airport in Tampa, Florida. In 2009, he was the recipient of an Individual Support Grant from the prestigious Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. His work is included in many private and public collections nationally and internationally. Mr. Labauvie was born in 1948 in Strasbourg, France, worked in Paris from 1969 and moved to Tampa in 1998.
Dominque Labauvie (French, born 1948) Twist, 2008 Forged and Waxed Steel Courtesy of the artist and Haim Chanin Fine Arts
Organized around the introduction of a new site-specific work for the museum’s gallery titled Suspended Skylines that will command the 30 ft. wall on which it will be installed in the Farish Gallery, this exhibition is complemented by approximately seven interior works and three outdoor works exhibited on the adjacent Bretta B. Sullivan Sculpture Terrace. In addition, the exhibition will include a site-specific wall drawing on the Doug and Maureen Cohn Promenade. Finally, a small video presentation of the artist in his studio will be presented in the gallery. The museum plans on documenting this exhibition through a published catalogue that will record the collaboration and the exhibition. It will be available for purchase later this year.
The title of the show Musical Lines in My Hand refers to the numerous allusions that the artist makes to music and sound when talking about the work. The reading of the line through its height, density, expansion and speed will create visual variations marking its area just as different sounds rhythm an environment. The lines of the sculpture react to the surroundings, similar to musical notes of a composition; creating a temporal sequence, leading to a time/space relationship. For Labauvie, the act of forging and shaping metal harkens back to the origins of the relationship between the sculptor and his material. The differentiation between the marks on a musical score and the subsequent sound that is made when these marks are performed and received provide a complex system of form and interpretation. This system is parallel to the resonance created by the relationship of the artist to his material and process.
According to Todd Smith, the Tampa Museum of Art’s executive director and curator for this exhibition, “this is more than an occasion to showcase Dominique’s elegant sculpture in our new building; instead, it is a unique opportunity to work with the artist in a collaborative manner on both the site specific installation for the museum and on the inclusion of works within the gallery space. We are excited to be able to offer this world-renowned local artist an opportunity to exhibit in the new museum. Dominique’s approach to sculpture, his use of a limited palette of material and expression and his modernist sensibility will find a perfect partner in our building. From the beginning we wanted this exhibition to be collaboration between the artist and the museum to underscore how each participant must rely on the other. The end result will be an experience for the viewer that will focus their attention on materials, fabrication, form and space.”
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