In this new series, Arny Nadler’s work on view at Bruno David Gallery, explores ideas of wholeness in physical and psychological forms. In clay and ink, he contemplates the body’s precarity and its ability to adapt.

Many works begin as individual parts that are eventually grafted together in a manner that nods at structural order but disregards anatomical and proportional correctness. Irregular outgrowths in the material signal erratic germination or atrophy—a misfiguration of appendages. The resulting forms acknowledge the limitations of the body and flout conventional response systems. Where traditional figurative sculpture often captures a predictable motion in time and space, Nadler’s work changes as the viewer moves around it. What happens on one side might be wholly unanticipated on the other. By working against symmetry, he confronts the expectations of wholeness for the body.

Nadler has works in the permanent collection of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include the Haggerty Gallery of the University of Dallas, Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2021 he was included in This Moment of Rupture, a national survey of contemporary ceramics at VisArts Art Center in Rockville, MD. He is an Associate Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis.