JUSTIN MATHERLY
NEW BEACHES

CITY HALL PARK, NEW YORK CITY, USA
24 MAY – 20 NOVEMBER 2012

The imagery of NEW BEACHES refers to the ancient sculpture, “Laocoön and His Sons“, which depicts a Trojan priest and his sons being strangled by serpents and has often been cited as the classical ideal of artistic expression. Justin Matherly has adapted a detail of the sculpture, the head and an arm, roughly rendered in cast concrete and enlarged to monumental scale. This colossal fragment is held aloft on an armature of walking frames, which literally provide support to the artist’s contemporary “ruin.“

NEW BEACHES, 2012
Ambulatory equipment, concrete, spray paint
320 x 335 x 183 cm

Commissioned by Public Art Fund, “Common Ground“, 2012.

© Images Jason Wyche

FEATURED ARTIST

JUSTIN MATHERLY

Justin Matherly (b. in 1972 in West Islip, NY, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His sculpture Sunrise was presented in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel. His work has been extensively exhibited such as in recent years with KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, Germany (2013, 2015) at the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2018), with Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland (2020) and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA (2021).

In his work, Justin Matherly’s large-scale cast and concrete installations are inspired by historical artifacts. Using antiquity as a starting point, Matherly creates his own visual cosmos through the rei...