LENOX, MASS.- Sohn Fine Art is presenting Heredity, a solo exhibition of multi-dimensional work by acclaimed artist, Joseph La Piana. The exhibition is on view May 10 – July 28 (69 Church Street, Lenox, MA).

Heredity explores the concept of artistic lineage and transformation through Joseph La Piana’s signature blend of scientific inquiry and material experimentation. In this multi-media exhibition, La Piana examines how each artwork is both a continuation and evolution of its predecessors.

Over the course of two decades, Joseph La Piana established a multi-disciplinary practice as a visual artist, drawing upon a diversity of materials and techniques to investigate the forces, seen and unseen, that act upon our embodied experience of the world. Incorporating methodologies and theories drawn from science (biology and physics, in particular) mathematics, and phenomenology, La Piana’s body of work is at once both process-oriented and ultimately deconstructive in aim. La Piana’s pieces are defined by sequences and processes, akin to the replication of DNA or the recursion of fractals, applied to their creation.


Untitled Grey and Red Spatial Construction.

The exhibition features a selection of La Piana’s renowned series, including Kinetic, Photonastic, Corrugated and Refraction. These works embody recursive processes, where each piece serves as an offspring of earlier creations, reflecting the artist’s ongoing dialogue with his own oeuvre. Understood as inheritors of prior pieces, La Paina’s work establishes an on-going continuum linking his most recent works to his earliest, where ach respective body of work can be viewed as related variants to each other. His kinetic works harness both gravitational and tensile forces to manifest the antagonistic pressures that effectively “push and pull” upon the individual within society. Ultimately, for La Piana, harnessing the physical and elemental forces that define and regulate the embodied world becomes a methodology through which to interrogate their very effects upon us.

Joseph La Piana, born in 1966 in Brooklyn, New York, is a self-taught artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, and site-specific installations. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, Marlborough Gallery and The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. His site-specific installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2011 as part of the Warhol Museum’s “The Venice Text Project”. Notably, his Tension Sculptures were featured along Park Avenue in 2019, presented by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and The Fund for Park Avenue.