Arrangement 9

Educated at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Matelli is best known for hyper-realist sculpture rendered with extraordinary verisimilitude and precisionist technique. His work upends expectations regarding the suitability of subjects for representation through sculpture—once the province of heroic monuments and monumental abstractions—and reverses the physical laws of objects to reorient matter and gravity. Cast in bronze and hand-painted, the technical facility and the formal elegance of Arrangement 9 are bedazzling. 

“It’s a very iconic image: a simple bouquet of flowers,” Matelli says. “The sculpture itself balances on one single bud, so the whole arrangement sits as though it’s a flipped image. For me it’s about a new type of gravity—a distorted reality. It’s a very precise image in that the rendering is super tight, but then there’s one simple thing, like the fact it’s upside down, that throws it off.”