Location: Marin County, CA
Medium: Sculpture
Website: alfarrow.com
Al Farrow was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York, and has lived in Marin County, California for more than four decades. He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco since 1994. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the de Young Museum / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San José Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, 21c Museum Hotels in Louisville, and the State Collection of Israel. He has also been represented by Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels and Forum Gallery in New York, and has exhibited in Europe and internationally.
Farrow works across a wide range of media and periods, generally adopting the visual language of a particular historical era and updating it with contemporary materials to make observations about politics and society. In his best-known body of work, begun after a transformative encounter with a medieval reliquary during a trip to Italy, he constructs intricate three-dimensional models of Christian churches, Islamic mosques, Jewish synagogues, mausolea, and religious ritual objects — using deconstructed guns, bullets, hand grenades, and other munitions as his primary building material. The resulting works are simultaneously seductive and deeply unsettling: objects that require close looking to reveal their construction, presenting religious architecture as both monument to faith and instrument of violence. His earlier Mimbres Bowl Series rendered military imagery — B-1 bombers, tanks, radiation symbols — in the traditional style of the ancient Mimbres people of New Mexico, using a single reed brush to critique the collision of indigenous culture and American military power.
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