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For the last 40 years I have worked with the body.
In the 1980’s I began working with objects and fragments that invoke the body- including shoes, baby bottles, and teeth – trying to make wholes that were suggestive and psychologically acute. In the late 1990’s I made my first hybrid sculptures, marrying my own body parts with animals and trees.
I often say that “I am a material- holic who thinks with my hands.” I like working with a wide range of materials, using both hand modeling and cutting-edge technologies. I see tradition, materiality, and technology as providing tools for my exploration of the imagistic, the metaphoric and the psychologically suggestive.
I’ve had a long love affair with Franz Kafka. For me, metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation are central. I like to draw from art-historical, literary, and scientific references- from ancient Egyptian sphinxes and Ovid’s retelling of classical mythology in the Metamorphoses, to contemporary cloning technologies.
Across the last four decades, I have experimented with materials, techniques, processes, and imagery, focusing on relationships between biography and mythology, the psychological and the bodily, the uncanny and the familiar, trying to embody some of the emotional complexities of human existence.
Rona Pondick lives and works in New York City. Since 1984 she has had 52 solo exhibitions of her
work in museums and galleries internationally, including Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Italy; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands; Rupertinum Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and Upper Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, among others.
Her sculptures have been included in over 250 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 52 museum collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY); 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); Ursula Blickle Stiftung (Kraichtal, Germany); Centre Pompidou (Paris); and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem).
Pondick has received numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant, and others.