Richard RezacGlen Elder

The Arts Club of Chicago is proud to present Richard Rezac’s site-specific installation Glen Elder as the most recent work in our Garden Project series.

In Glen Elder, Rezac subtly eschews a trellis-like structure to disrupt the logic of a familiar form that cites both agricultural and sculptural practices. The structure, standing at 10-feet tall, is situated on a stone-like base in the center of the garden, fanning out through additional posts and cast aluminum footings across the garden’s expanse. The fundamental elements of the trellis reference Shaker-style fence construction; a model the artist first discovered while spending summers during his childhood and adolescence on his grandparent’s farm near Glen Elder, Kansas, inspiring the project’s title. Painted rails cross diagonally between the posts in an unfinished pattern that references Constantin Brancusi’s 1939 proposal for an Endless Column, a sculpture to proceed beyond sight lines into the sky on the shores of Lake Michigan. Together with the staggered posts, these rails provide an implied moiré effect. Altogether, the disparate references to delimiting and impossibly infinite forms imply an instability in the function of the fence itself, both that enclose The Arts Club’s Garden and Glen Elder as it demarcates sections of the space.

In parallel with Glen Elder, The Renaissance Society is showing an exhibition of Rezac’s sculptural works past and present, titled Address.

Richard Rezac (b. 1952, Lincoln, Nebraska) lives and works in Chicago. His sculptures have been exhibited recently at James Harris Gallery, Seattle (2017); the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2016); and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2015). In 2006 the Portland Art Museum hosted a solo exhibition of Rezac’s work. Rezac has received fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. He is an adjunct professor of Sculpture, Drawing, and Graduate Advising at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.