Nathan Mabry was born in 1978 in Durango, Colorado and is an artist with worldwide recognition won with his contemporary art.

Nathan Mabry’s work combines references to art history, South American artefacts, and popular culture, to create provocative monuments entwining high culture, primitive ritual, and contemporary experience.

With iconoclastic fervor, sculptor Nathan Mabry melds antiquity with the contemporary, producing works in wood, plaster, and clay that satirize both ethnographic art and its modernist derivates. Invoking pre-Columbian artifacts, early modernist sculpture, pop culture, Minimalism, and a plethora of other references, Mabry samples and appropriates in order to question the narratives of progress that frame the history of Western art, and to interrogate the values and meanings of his sources. Mabry studied at UCLA under the satirist Paul McCarthy, a major influence on his work and from whom he has taken many of his visual clues.

In A Very Touching Moment, Mabry’s figure – inspired by Pre-Columbian Moche sculpture, and suggestive of Rodin’s The Kiss – sits as a grotesque fertility totem atop a plinth reminiscent of the work of John McCracken or Donald Judd. Through juxtaposing these disparate forms, Mabry points to a totemic ascendancy, tracing a narrative lineage between ancient liturgy and modern day systems of museological value.

Literally using art history as a base for slap-stick humour, Mabry levels cultural hierarchy, disguising modern masterpiece as clownish impostor.

See more contemporary art HERE!