ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum opened the exhibit Nathan Mabry Old Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration and Parade. Colorado-born, Los Angeles-based sculptor Nathan Mabry has been commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum to create a float for Aspen’s 2006 Old Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration and Parade. Mabry’s skillfully crafted, darkly humorous, figurative sculptures often meld art historical and pop cultural references. While he works with very traditional materials, his work is a sophisticated crossing of formal, material, historical, and cultural concerns. His float will address the vernacular of Americana and feature a large bald eagle, bobble head sculpture.

Mabry received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Mabry has had a solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, and his work was featured in Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Rogue Wave ’05 at LA Louver, Venice, California.

Writing for the award-winning Hammer Museum exhibition, Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, curator Aimee Chang writes, “Nathan Mabry works with traditional materials – clay, wood, plaster – to create idiosyncratic figurative sculptures whose playful use of appropriation and medium-based puns expresses a quirky sense of humor.” Nathan Mabry’s first solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin will include an ambitious new work from his series A Very Touching Moment depicting figures inspired by Pre-Columbian Moche sculpture in an embrace suggestive of not only erotic concerns, but formal and historical ones as well.

Nathan Mabry’s sculpture throws into relief the assumed divide between “ethnographic” sculptural works and those of such American Minimalists as John McCracken, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre. Juxtaposing formal, material and conceptual elements, Mabry encourages the viewer to explore a range of topics including the place of the artist in society, the role of technology and the relationship of a civilization to its past, present and the always-changing vicissitudes of popular culture.