Rona Pondick valuation
New York sculptor who grafts casts of her own head and hands onto stainless steel animals and trees.
Rona Pondick was born in Brooklyn in 1952, took her BFA at Queens College in 1974 and her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1977, where Richard Serra was among her teachers, and lives and works in New York.
What a work by Rona Pondick is worth
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Bio
Rona Pondick was born in Brooklyn in 1952, took her BFA at Queens College in 1974 and her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1977, where Richard Serra was among her teachers, and lives and works in New York. From the beginning her subject has been the body, cast, fragmented and transformed. Her early work used beds, shoes and baby bottles to make unsettling anatomical forms, and teeth cast from her own mouth set in lumps of resin, wax and earth; Beds, an installation at SculptureCenter in New York in 1988, was followed by a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston the next year. In 1998 she made a life cast of her own head, which has been the basis of her work since: hybrids in which her head and hands are joined to the gleaming stainless steel bodies of dogs, foxes, muskrats and monkeys, or grow from the branches of trees, at every scale from a bud on a bonsai to a full-size animal. Sphinxes, centaurs and Kafka's insect are the forebears she names. More recent work brings colour into heads cast in resin and acrylic, many of them set inside transparent blocks.
The stainless steel hybrids are the core of her market, and the edition number, the foundry and the polish of the surface need checking, since scratches and dulling show at once. The coloured resin and acrylic works should be kept out of direct sun. Thaddaeus Ropac represents her.
Brooklyn, Yale and the life cast
Solo exhibitions followed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1992, the Brooklyn Museum in 1996, the Rupertinum in Salzburg in 1999 and the Groninger Museum in 2002.
Later exhibitions include the Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan in 2003 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
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