The Laffer Gallery Presents: “Stone | Steel | Paper”
Featuring Artist John Van Alstine
April 8 – May 10, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 11, 5-8pm
The Laffer Gallery is proud to announce its upcoming exhibition Stone| Steel Paper, a solo exhibit featuring John Van Alstine. This exhibition will run April 8 – May 10, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 11th from 5-8pm. Join us for a wonderful evening of thought provoking art, hors d’oeuvres and conversation.
John Van Alstine, widely known for his large scale outdoor sculptures made from stone and found object steel, has notably become one of America’s most important sculptors over the past decade.
For more than thirty-five years, the focus of Van Alstine’s sculpture has been the exploration of motion and balance through the natural forces of gravity and inertia, as experienced in his monumental, large scale and smaller works located in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. The combination of natural elements with the man-made creates a poetic and choreographed visual balance, often referencing figurative, classical, nautical, celestial and western mythological themes.
Van Alstine, born in 1952 in Upstate New York. He received his BFA from Kent State University and his MFA from Cornell University in 1976. Since then he has participated in more than 80 solo and group exhibitions and has won numerous awards, fellowships, and grants from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, Gottlieb Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Yaddo Fellowship, the Louis C. Tiffany Foundation, New Jersey Council of the Arts and most recently the Merit Award in Beijing for his construction of a large-scale public sculpture in the Olympic Park Garden.
Van Alstine’s works are in many major museums, institutions, public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington D.C., Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Museum of American Art, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ and the Phillips Collection Washington D.C. Overseas his work is in the collections of Tsinghua University Museum Garden Beijing, Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Beijing Olympic Park Collection 2008, and in the U.S. Department of State “Art in Embassies” collections in Bolivia, Chile, Jamaica and Nepal.
Since 1970s, his sculpture has been reviewed in several publications such as the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, USA Today, New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, Art News and Sculpture Magazine.