Giant subway stops, enormous asphalt balls or morphed Mr. Softee truck, New York-based artist Lars Fisk presented last month at Marlborough Chelsea, a group of seven of his signature ball sculptures. Ranging from pea-size to 15 feet in diameter, the works engage mundane subjects from pencil stubs to parking lots. These are fashioned, in their actual materials, into perfected spheres—a transformation that most simply and potently resituates the object as sculpture.
Made primarily by hand in the artist’s Red Hook Brooklyn studio, the sculptures function as a kind of logo for their subject, distilling and encapsulating the physical essence of an object and re-staging it as icon or mascot. Known primarily as a public artist, with numerous commissions across the U.S. and internationally, this is the first major gallery exhibition of this body of work.
Objects at hand, especially ones whose design is so perfected or irreducible as to preempt change, are among Fisk’s favorite subjects. Others are ubiquitous enough to go unheralded, and the artist is keen to ennoble them. In Fisk’s hands a New York City summer staple, the Mister Softee ice cream truck, becomes a symbol for the city itself—an avatar of freewheeling capitalism and boundless appetite.
While his vehicles have been popular subjects, the series actually originated with simpler sculptures of streets—asphalt spheres (a form with no beginning or end and the three dimensional equivalent of an allover composition) painted with yellow and white lines: an embodiment of movement and the continuous fluid interconnection of paved roads. This idea has culminated in Lot Ball, Fisk’s largest sculpture to date, which stands alone, floor-to-ceiling, in the biggest, most dramatic room of the gallery. Approaching a 1:1-scale distillation of the Queens Costco parking lot, with it’s graphic lines and arrows and formal curbing, the work makes a strong case for beauty in the most banal site imaginable.
“In combining the dissimilar, I want to find how we might identify something by seeing it for what it is not,”
