Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture

Extended through January 3 2021

Download this digital Family Guide to explore together: https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/Family-Guides/2020-Family-Guide-Barry-X-Ball-WEB.pdf

Since 1997, Barry X Ball has adapted innovative technologies and traditional techniques to make carefully honed sculptures in semi-precious stones—rarely used due to their difficulty to carve and lack of consistency—that push the physical and conceptual boundaries of sculpture.

The artist reinvents traditional sculptural formats and existing art historical landmarks using state-of-the-art, 3D scanning technology, computer-aided modeling software, and CNC milling machines, in combination with centuries-old craft techniques requiring thousands of hours of detailed handwork. Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture is the artist’s first major U.S. museum survey.

The exhibition features works from the past three decades delving into and providing context for the two main series of that period, the Portraits and the Masterpieces. The Portraits series transforms precise digital scans of carefully tooled plaster casts of his subjects—friends, artists, and art world figures—into strange, evocative sculptures that seem at once ancient and of the digital age.