“I am very serious about certain things. Other things I choose absolutely not to care about.”
We met sculptor Tony Matelli in his New York studio – a unique personality combining a jolly and casual outlook on the world with thoughtfulness and dedication.
”I became interested in art and becoming an artist pretty early on as a teenager. As a kid, I was always in a kind of imaginary world. I didn’t like school very much. I daydreamed all day. I would come home, I wouldn’t do school work, I would find an object in the house. And I would imagine that that object was something else. Essentially, it was world-building.”
Matelli remembers an early visit to a local museum when he first discovered the fascination of sculpture.
”And then you turn the corner, and there is a Duane Hanson sculpture of a janitor. At that moment, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t looking back at me. I had almost like an out-of-body experience looking at it.”
Over the years, Matelli has explored the universe of sculpture, challenging its limits, but often keeping a twinkle in the eye:
”I have never felt that I had a moral obligation to do anything. I’ll resist that forever. I think an artwork that reflects too narrowly on a contemporary issue or a political theme or something like this is doomed to be boring or doomed to fail.”
”I see being an artist as almost a kind of resistance in a way. I didn’t think about this when I wanted to be an artist, I think about this now. It came to me over time that this is a kind of resistance, a way of being in the world without really participating in the world.”
Tony Matelli (b. Chicago, 1971) is an American artist who works predominantly in sculpture. He frequently focuses on themes of time, ambivalence, banality, and wonder. In Matelli’s work, the physical laws of objects are often reversed, upended, or atomised, and with these deft manipulations of matter and gravity come profound reorientations in perspective and, ultimately, states of being.
Matelli gained recognition for his meticulous craftsmanship and ability to create startlingly lifelike representations of ordinary objects and surreal scenarios with meta-physical and philosophical implications. Matelli’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, among many others. He lives and works in New York City.
Tony Matelli was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in March 2025. The conversation took place in Matelli’s studio in Long Island City, New York.
Camera: Sean Hanley
Edited by: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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