De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of artist Robert Lazzarini, which commences with the upcoming exhibition titled “Inflorescence.”

Inflorescence utilizes mechanisms of the changing image and object as a way of thinking about the static nature of painting and sculpture. The silkscreen paintings are based on appropriated images of a gravidus Sharon Tate, the actress and tragic victim of the Manson Family killing spree. With this exhibition Lazzarini further examines his fascination with a specific moment in American history: when counter culture collided with polite society.

The silkscreen paintings confound the standard viewer’s relationship to the work by changing the correlation between proximity and intimacy with a retreating subject and projected black patterning. Here, the artist employs hard optics as a foil to stasis and continues his exploration of the refusal of vision. Interspersed within the front gallery is three quarter inch, three-strand nylon rope. The patterning within the paintings projects onto the physical rope and creates ever-changing interference patterns.

The exhibition also includes a single sculpture, which is based on a circa 1960's Hollywood Regency gold-toned wall decor of a flowering dogwood branch. The meandering forms become seemingly expanding and contracting geometries. The compound mathematical distortion acts as an unseen force applied to the object. That force lends its descriptive name to the sculpture - creepy crawl: the precursor to the murders wherein the Manson family would enter unsuspecting homes at night and rearrange things. These nighttime acts were an infringement upon the homes of the Hollywood elite and convey a larger notion of the violation of the sanctity of the home.

Contemporary visual artist Robert Lazzarini is known mostly for disrupting the habituated processes of visual recognition. Lazzarini’s paintings and sculptures trace their lineage back to 1960s American minimalism and the idea of phenomenology as part of the viewing experience. Lazzarini was born in 1965 in New Jersey, and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Kunsthalle Berne. Some permanent collections include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, the Newark Museum, NJ, The Toledo Museum of Art, OH, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and Davidson College, NC. Lazzarini has an upcoming project in 2018 at the MoCA Madison, WI.