Gracelee Lawrence

Thierry Goldberg Gallery is pleased to present Finger-Width, the first New York solo exhibition of sculptor Gracelee Lawrence. The exhibition opens May 5th, with a reception from 6 to 8pm, and will run until June 9th.

The title of the show referes to the optimal moment at which to pick asparagus, nodding both to the exhibition’s central sculpture as well as the inherent relationships between body and food that Lawrence explores in her work.

Looking at the contemporary existential bifurcation of our digital and physical selves, where physical experience is often communicated and understood through various screens and filters, Lawrence creates sculptures of cropped limbs and outsized fruits that emphasize touch, and the way that close contact becomes encouragingly compartmentalized in our increasingly virtual spaces.

The scale of the works creates a surprising universal relatability—it’s easy to imagine holding a banana in one’s own hand, while the scaled-up size removes any tether on an individual level. Created via digital fabrication techniques, their surfaces are then laboriously smoothed by hand, erasing their origins stemming from the translation of the digital to the physical.

These generative acts ultimately underpin Lawrence’s belief in the potential and power objects will continue to hold as our technologically focused world continues to shift toward a reality that is less and less centered around physical sensations.

Gracelee Lawrence (b.1989, Sanford, NC) lives and works between New York and North Carolina. She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and her BA in sculpture from Guilford College, Greensboro, NC. Her work was previously exhibited at Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA; Rumpueng Art Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Trestle Projects, Brooklyn, NY, USA