NEW YORK.-Yvon Lambert New York announced the gallery’s first exhibition by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. Two recent sculptures and related drawings will be installed at the gallery, and will be on view from February 21 to March 22, 2008. With this series of recent sculptures, Patricia Piccinini continues her long-standing investigation into the ever more dubious boundary that separates the artificial and the natural. While the artist is most know for her hyper-realistic sculptures of genetically-engineered creatures, these works represent an important and long-standing strand of her practice that is less familiar to a New York audience. These new pieces relate directly to Truck Babies, featured in the 2000 Gwangju and 2001 Berlin Biennales, imagining the extension of ‘biotechnology’ to the point where everyday technologies are given an organic dimension. In regards to Nest (2006), she states: “This work continues my fascination in the ‘life cycles of technology’. I am interested in exploring the tangled interrelationship between the artificial and the natural by imagining the lives of machines beyond their usual ‘adult’ forms.

Nest presents the viewer with a family group of motor scooters: a mother watching over an infant. The work takes its formal inspiration from the depiction of the nobility of animals, which can be seen from the nineteenth century painting to present day documentaries. In doing so, it removes these prosaic vehicles from the industrial processes that usually define them and imagines them as part of the world of ‘wildlife’, making them both more sympathetic and less easy to control.”

Piccinini represented Australia at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Recent solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Des Moines Art Center, IA; the Frye Museum, Seattle, WA; Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand; and ARTIUM Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Spain. In 2009 the artist will show solo projects at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and at the Museo d’Arte Contemporaneo di Roma, Italy. Piccinini’s work has been included in such group show as Global Feminism, Brooklyn Museum, NY; Redefined, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; Long Live Sculpture, Museum for Sculpture Middelheim, Antwerp, Belgium; Becoming Animal, MaSS MOCA, North Adams, MA; Face Up, Hamburger Banhoff, Berlin, Germany; and Prism, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan.