Jon Pylypchuk’s Chorus of Loss
Jon Pylypchuk received his MFA from the UCLA Department of Art in 2001. Pylypchuk is a multidisciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation and video. Working with simple materials (fake fur, wood, fabric, sheet metal, beer cans, electric light bulbs, polyurethane foam, etc.), Pylypchuk reinterprets the collage and bricolage practices derived from Art Brut. Often his ‘creatures’ draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships.
Jon Pylypchuk, "Untitled (pieta)" (2020), bronze, 16.5 x 13 x 13 inches (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Jason Mandella) "In 2020, as COVID-19 death tolls rose exponentially worldwide, Jon Pylypchuk faced a separate loss, the unexpected death of a close friend, unrelated to COVID. He responded by making ghosts. For several months Pylypchuk fashioned men’s briefs, ski masks, socks, and other clothing and fabric scraps into rudimentary faces (pareidolia, a recurring motif in his work) and cast them in bronze.
These “ghosts” are the subject of What have we missed, his seventh solo show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The sculptures inhabit the gallery’s Upper East Side location, mounted on white pedestals and walls. The installation, which allows breathing room between the artworks, and the converted townhouse location, cultivate a somber atmosphere that emphasizes the solitude inherent in mourning, the fact that both individual and collective grief are experienced as solitary.
Fittingly, each ghost is individual. Pylypchuk, whose first foray into bronze was in 2008, used the ghosts to experiment with the medium, resulting in a range of shapes, textures, and patinas, from elongated forms with the glossy finish of liquid mercury to stretched and disfigured undershirts with darkened copper surfaces, to gleaming chainmail or matte green. Over the course of several months he made dozens; in addition to those at Petzel, a handful are in a group show, The New Age of Bronze (June 27–August 21, 2021), at Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami, and others remain at his home just outside of Los Angeles.
The press release for What have we missed states, “The sculptures attempt to assure a memory does not fade, to make someone or something exist again in repeated representation.” By Pylypchuk’s own admission, death has pervaded his life; as a child he experienced the deaths of elderly relatives and anxiety about his parents’ mortality. Death has appeared in his art as an adversary, an inevitability, a creeping terror, and a promise. Deterioration is prefigured in the wood, glue, and fabric scraps that comprise much of his artwork.
In this context, the ghosts seem almost inevitable — a chorus of loss that spans a lifetime, and an echo of collective grief. Pylypchuk said by email, “My original thought was they were one individual but I have come to realize it was an individual but also all of us.”" — Natalie Haddad, July 31, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.
HEADER IMAGE: Jon Pylypchuk’s ghost sculptures in the desert, Southern California (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Joshua White)
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