NEW YORK, NY.- It is with the utmost pleasure we announce our representation of Rona Pondick, one of the seminal artists of her generation.

Over 30 years of friendship has brought Rona and me to this point: a wonderful opportunity to now speak for her work as her gallery.

I first saw Rona’s work in 1986. Eccentric, hand-made, funny, challenging, and disruptive: naturally, I loved it immediately. Then came a memorable studio visit where on a table sat five 4-inch roundish pink blobs with yellow and brown rubber teeth in them. I recalled Rona said she had wanted to make 500 of these hilarious, menacing Pacmen creatures, meant to run across the floor in an assault action.

This work, eventually titled “Little Bathers”, was realized and entered Livia and my collection. The bathers poured down two steps into our living room, confronting a large steel Richard Serra, a 14-foot Anselm Kiefer, Richard Artschwager, and Bruce Nauman. The Little Bathers defied these commanding macho works, speaking viscerally in ways that often provoked strong emotional responses in visitors to our home.

Rona Pondick was among an important new generation of women artists including Kiki Smith, Sarah Lucas and Jeanne Silverthorne, whose works featured daring materials and references to the body. They were in the lineage of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, and we recognized their importance.

Pondick’s earlier works with beds, shoes, teeth, chairs, and baby bottles, were tender, humble, emotional and poetic, laying bare our frailties and ordinariness. Then came a series of handmade and highly refined animal/human hybrid sculptures in stainless steel, that merged bodies of foxes, cougars, and monkeys with Pondick’s head, hands, arms and legs. Her hands and heads show up again, seamlessly integrated in lovingly rendered trees, appearing to grow like fruit, or like sprouting buds.

In her new body of work, long in the making, Pondick explores the materials resin, acrylic, and modeling compound, finding ways to use their properties that are alchemical and mysterious. The sculptures combine translucency and opacity, in bright, vivid colors that feel deeply embodied in these materials.

In one, Pondick’s head sits atop an expressively modeled and distorted body made of a bevy of curlicues. In others her head, hands and modeled body are embedded or partially immersed in warped blocks of transparent acrylic. This new body of work comes partially full circle both in the attention to the hand-made and their psychological and metaphoric language and impact. Pondick’s newest work acknowledges a life longer lived with tribulations and joy. They are honest, beautiful, and heart-wrenching.

The importance of Rona Pondick’s original and inventive work led to her early and continued inclusion in scores of museum shows, and decades-long representation by leading international galleries including Thaddaeus Ropac and Sonnabend Gallery.

Rona Pondick has been included in over 45 solo and 200 group exhibitions, including numerous biennales worldwide: the Whitney Biennial, Lyon Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale, Sonsbeek, and Venice Biennale. Pondick has participated in group exhibitions at museums internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice; Museo de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Ca’Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Daimler Chrysler, Berlin; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others.

Her work is in the collections of many institutions worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York); Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas); San Francisco Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art (Sculpture Garden); Toledo Museum of Art; The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Fondation pour l’art contemporain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon (Annecy, France); Ursula Blickle Stiftung (Kraichtal, Germany); Centre Pompidou (Paris); and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem).

Rona Pondick is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (London/Paris/Salzburg), NUNU Fine Art (Taipei), Zevitas/Marcus (Los Angeles), Howard Yezerski Gallery (Boston), Sonnabend Gallery (New York) and MARC STRAUS (New York).