David Altmejd

Canadian sculptor David Altmejd (born 1974) presents his large-scale Plexiglass installation The Flux and the Puddle, a multilayered, structural environment in which werewolves, smashed mirrors and sculpted heads are strategically placed. "I think of the big Plexiglas box as a kind of stage or a laboratory space," Altmejd explained to a reviewer for Art in America. "The work is operatic. It's basically about the making of sculpture. Everything you see was made from inside the box. Ideas germinated from the inside. I let the work evolve and grow as much as possible. There's very little that's premeditated; it's not pre-designed." This publication documents the artist's knack for inventing disorienting and complex architectural arrangements.

David Altmejd (born 1974) is known for his intricate and highly worked room-size installations and sculptures. Seamlessly moving between a variety of aesthetic modes--from an almost ascetic minimalism in works employing plaster and mirror to works teeming with accumulations of crystals, gold chain, thread, taxidermied birds and animals, among other objects--Altmejd's work offers beautifully wrought meditations on the cycles of life and death, interiority and exteriority, sexuality and spirituality. In the most comprehensive consideration of the artist's work to date, the volume includes four essays by a range of writers, who by providing different entry points to Altmejd's art, animate and engage the rich and diverse ideas that characterize his important practice.
The full range of Altmejd's nearly 20 years of work is featured in the book, from his earliest work--where the vast aesthetic vocabulary he has evolved over the years took shape--to his most recent series. Organized roughly chronologically, with an extensive art historical essay by Robert Hobbs as well as pithy contributions from the other esteemed writers forming the connective tissue between expansive sections of color plates, one can trace the many through-lines that the artist has developed and reworked during his career. The book affords a close and intimate view of the inspired and wholly unique work that brought him to prominence in the early 2000s, while also providing a sense of the breadth and scope of his polymath-like creativity and inventiveness in work less well-known or chronicled.