NEW YORK.- The International Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art: SOFA NEW YORK 2002 returns for the 5th year to the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Ave. Fifty select international art dealers at SOFA NEW YORK 2002 will exhibit the innovative work of major artists and stylistic movements in the contemporary decorative and design arts. Opening Night at the Armory on May 29 benefited the American Craft Museum in New York.



The human figure as subject is reemerging in the contemporary art world, and is the focus of new work by established and emerging artists exhibiting at SOFA NEW YORK. That the human subject has come to occupy a center stage again, reinterpreting the world with reference to itself, dramatizes an age-old tension between self and other, subject and object in Western thought.



Heller Gallery, New York will present a solo exhibit of William Morris at SOFA NEW YORK, which will include the premier showing of new bronzes from the Man Adorned series, which debuted at SOFA CHICAGO 2001 last October. Two figurative glass sculptures by Morris sold for $350,000 each on Opening Night, followed by three others over the weekend for $175,000, $150,000 and $65,000. Of his successful series, Morris has said, "Adornment illuminates ourselves to one another and enhances our distinctions." For Morris, the self invests itself with meaning through ornament like a referent or symbol.



Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York will premiere new figurative work by ceramic sculptor Michael Lucero at SOFA NEW YORK—Lucero’s first New York exhibition since 1999. Lucero’s work was the subject of a major retrospective in 1996 that originated at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, and traveled to the American Craft Museum, New York, and the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, among others. Lucero’s Scribe Crosser—ahuman form with a pre-Columbian face, whose bulbous body is adorned with a painterly sea landscape, a dog’s face (whose nose and ears efface the phallus) and a bar code, among other icons and symbols—abounds in references to cultural, visual and ceramic history. Lucero’s human is the bearer of the very systems that shaped it—and alienated it—as bourgeois subject.



Synderman-Works Galleries of Philadelphia will present an exhibit of glass panels by Judith Schaechter at SOFA NEW YORK. Schaechter has recently been invited to exhibit in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In Schaechter’s Bunker, two figures are holed up beneath the natural world, where even the tubular growths around them are highly constructed artifacts. For if the human subject is to be more than a mere object, it cannot itself be a part of the material world, any more than an eye can be an object in its own visual field.



Also represented by Franklin Parrasch Galley at SOFA NEW YORK is John Cederquist, whose furniture of inlaid and painted wood resembles trompe-l’oeil sculptures, in which one must come closely forward to distinguish façade from true depth. Cederquist’s The Finial That Found Itself, a three-dimensional chair with two-dimensional human attributes, including a hand sawing off a footed leg, begs the question—what is the difference between subject and object, if the material world is no more than our obedient mirror image?

 Ferrin Gallery of Croton-on-Hudson, NY will present a group show of figurative ceramics at SOFA NEW YORK, featuring many artists, including Rudy Audio, Adrian Arleo and Sergei Isupov. Of his delicately rendered and painted porcelain figures, Isupov writes, "When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them; perhaps they create me." For Isupov, as for many of the artists exhibiting figurative sculpture at SOFA NEW YORK, the self is revealed through an object world of its own contingent making.