Working in a wide range of media—predominantly sculpture but also painting, drawing, photography, video, and performance—Yutaka Sone’s work revolves around a tension between realism and perfection. Born in Japan, the artist originally trained as an architect and an almost obsessive attention to detail and its relationship to a larger whole underpin his practice at large. Whether architectural or natural, landscapes occur throughout the artist’s oeuvre, and he frequently picks his subjects from actual locations—Hong Kong Island, Los Angeles highway junctions, a mountain range, a section of a rainforest, ski resorts, and his own backyard—recreating these to scale in paint, marble, and crystal, or using organic materials such as plants and soil.

On view in this exhibition will be a selection of marble works, including the two-and-a-half ton Little Manhattan (2007-2009), which from a distance appears to present a large, weightless sheet of drapery, yet upon closer inspection reveals a detailed, intricately carved model of the island of Manhattan. Avenue by avenue, block by block, and building by building, Sone, aided by photographic reproductions, imagery from Google Earth, and several helicopter rides, has rendered the densely-populated metropolis to scale, showing the city’s many skyscrapers as well as the intricate paths through Central Park and the bridges to the east and west. The artist’s adept handling of his medium (Sone creates the sculptures in hands-on collaboration with marble artisans in a village in southwest China) recalls the classical sculptures of antiquity and offers a commemorative portrait of the ever-changing island—a physical replica of its present formation and diverse architectural landscape. Other marble works include Hong Kong Island (Chinese) from 1998 and a new sculpture titled Venezia.

Also on view in the gallery will be palm trees made of rattan, along with new acrylic on canvas paintings of his signature trees. The rattan is woven around a metal armature and the trees are meticulously crafted; leaves and stems have been carefully painted with acrylic paint and even include naturally occurring flaws in their pigmentation. From a distance, they look like their living counterparts, and their almost perfect mimesis offers a poignant counterpoint to the marble re-creations, which flaunt the notion of the handcrafted marble sculptures.