The Landcraft Garden Foundation announces that the 2022 season of its annual outdoor exhibition, Sculpture in the Garden, will present the work of artists Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez. The exhibition is curated by the internationally celebrated artist Ugo Rondinone, a member of the Landcraft Garden Foundation Art Advisory Board and will be on view at Landcraft Gardens from June 4 through October 29, 2022.
A hidden gem on the North Fork of Long Island, Landcraft Gardens offers four acres of botanical gardens surrounded by nearly ten acres of meadows, which are open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays. The Foundation seeks to activate the artistic community of the North Fork with annual exhibitions that provide opportunities to view sculpture in dialogue with natural flora. The inaugural Sculpture in the Garden series launched in summer 2021 with the work of artist Ned Smyth, also curated by Rondinone.
“Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez’s sculptures focus on interactions between the animate and inanimate, between the marriage of sculpture and soil and the ephemeral quality of light, that let us see things,” says Rondinone.
Sculpture in the Garden 2022: Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez will showcase 14 sculptures by the married couple, with 11 by Martinez and three by Moyer. The works date from 2016-2022, and several are monumental in size. Moyer’s work will be installed at the center of round arbors or “rondels” crafted from locust wood harvested from the property. Martinez’s Half Stepping Hot Stepper will be installed in a garden room hedged by Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) at the end of a long view. A second large untitled sculpture by Martinez will be installed at the center of a large flowering bed, near a Linden allée. Smaller works by Martinez will be installed near the subterranean grotto, a slightly below-ground gathering place on the south side of the garden.
Martinez, an influential abstract painter, began creating sculpture in 2013, collecting found objects on the beaches of the North Fork of Long Island and on the streets around his Brooklyn studio, including cardboard, wood, plastic, rubber, bottle caps, and metal grills, along with such marine detritus as old buoys and lobster traps. The raw materials were arranged into improvised configurations and then cast in bronze, transforming their presence while preserving their forms. The sculptures are finished with oil, enamel, and spray paint. While nonrepresentational, they suggest human and animal forms that parallel those found in his paintings.
Ranging from four to six feet in height, Moyer’s Dependents series references codependency, and while it is understood as emotionally exploitative in human relationships, it is an essential condition of sculpture and architecture, which require systems of support such as joints, hinges, and counterweights in order to function. Moyer’s Dependents sculptures from 2021 comprise two separate entities: one made from aggregate concrete, the other a piece of Belgian Bluestone. Married by a rough hand-drawn joint, inspired by Japanese joinery, one cannot stand without the other.
Sculpture in the Garden 2022: Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez includes 14 sculptures by the married couple, with 11 by Martinez and three by Moyer. The works date from 2016-2022, and several are monumental in size. Moyer’s work is installed at the center of round arbors or “rondels” crafted from locust wood harvested from the property. Martinez’s Half Stepping Hot Stepper is installed in a garden room hedged by Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) at the end of a long view. A second large untitled sculpture by Martinez is installed at the center of a large flowering bed, near a Linden allée. Smaller works by Martinez are installed near the subterranean grotto, a slightly below-ground gathering place on the south side of the garden.
As the weekend getaways to the Hamptons begin to fill many art-lovers calendars, a garden in Mattituck promises the perfect stop in North Fork to enjoy another husband and wife’s joint show. Organized by New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone and Landcraft Garden Foundation, Sculpture in the Garden 2022 features works by Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez who are both primarily celebrated for their two-dimensional art. The show however invites visitors to explore the third dimension in their practices, featuring eleven sculptures by Martinez and three by Moyer. The elements of energy and texture in abstraction have been critical for both artists’ approach to surfaces, and with the outdoor sculptures, they further their experiments on similar notions with the vistas of a lush garden.
