oren pinhassi

Oren Pinhassi’s first monograph gathers over a decade of work, spanning the entire breadth of his career. At its heart – and at the heart of the artist’s imaginary in general – lies a certain formal and conceptual hybridity, an ability to push an object to act simultaneously as itself and something else. Using materials more typical of construction work than fine art – metal, sand, hardware – Pinhassi's practice refuses realistic figuration, still inviting the viewer to a profoundly phenomenological response. Throughout the book, the documentation of the artist’s large, towering sculptures, with familiar yet not-quite-identifiable traits, invites intimacy and suggests erotic engagement. Shifts in scale give rise to the work’s interpretation as both body and furniture, interior, structure, or landscape. A socio-political dimension appears through the artist’s idea of “sympathy” as a connective power between sculptures and the beholder, exploring how we feel for things and their relations. Finally, his use of the found object reinforces this sense of willing the spectator into a new appreciation of the everyday and for its collective, political potential. Completed with a text by writer and art historian Alyce Mahon and another by Janine Mileaf, the executive director of The Arts Club Chicago, the book is an ultimate exploration of the poetic and erotic capacities of Oren Pinhassi’s wildly original sculptural language.