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.

“The dual exhibition of Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez is a thought-provoking playbook on contemporary sculpture. Charged with a humanity, and sense of touch, the sculptures are probing further than ever into the core of what makes sculptures exert their powerful effects on individual people,” said Rondinone. “The sculptures focus on interactions between the animate and the inanimate, between the marriage of sculpture and soil, and the ephemeral quality of the light that lets us see things. The exhibition aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive and mystical vision of art and nature.”

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.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, Illinois) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2007. In Moyer’s practice, issues of scale and space are critical, and Moyer is particularly interested in the way architecture functions in tandem with her objects to create dynamic visual experiences. Uniting found textures and object in innovative ways, Moyer manipulates them into beautifully abstract formal works that provoke a new, expanded artistic vocabulary. Moyer’s first solo public art installation, Doors for Doris, commissioned by Public Art Fund, was on view at the entrance to Central Park on Doris C. Freedman Plaza last year. Her works are featured in prominent public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Morgan Library, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris. Moyer has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami; and The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. Moyer has participated in important group exhibitions, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Greater New York Between Spaces at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, New York.

Working in between the lines of representation and abstraction, Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, Groton, Connecticut) paints in oil, enamel, and spray paint while often incorporating found objects picked up from his studio floor, in a fast-paced practice that could be compared to automatism. Noted for his deft draftsmanship, Martinez creates large-scale works that maintain the feeling of drawings. His most apparent visual references are the CoBrA group and Abstract Expressionism. In addition to his paintings, Martinez creates found-object sculptures and works on paper. A number of his works in Sculpture in the Garden 2022 were seen recently in the exhibition Beach Bronze at Lévy Gorvy, Palm Beach and in 2018 at Frieze London in a solo booth at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. Last year, his work was on view at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Perrotin, Shanghai; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Museum exhibitions include the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit in 2019; and The Bronx Museum in New York in 2018. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, New York.

During the run of Sculpture in the Garden 2022, an exhibition of work by Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez will open at the South Etna Montauk Foundation, Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan’s art foundation in Montauk. Comprising new and recent work, this exhibition will open during the first week of July 2022.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Ugo Rondinone’s (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) work is currently being exhibited during the 2022 Venice Biennale at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista from April 20 – September 17, 2022. Most recently exhibitions of his work have been seen at Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Colombia; Kunsthalle Helsinki, Finland; Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Tate Liverpool, UK; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.

In 2016, Rondinone’s large-scale public work Seven Magic Mountains opened outside Las Vegas, co-produced by the Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art. In 2017, Rondinone curated a city-wide exhibition, “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno,” which was presented in twelve New York non-profit institutions: Artists Space, High Line Art, Howl! Happening, Hunter College Art Galleries, the Kitchen, New Museum, Red Bull Arts New York, Rubin Museum of Art, SkyArt, Swiss Institute, White Columns and 80WSE Gallery. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome; SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Belvedere 21, Vienna; Galerie Krobath, Vienna; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Rondinone lives and works in New York City and Mattituck.

ABOUT LANDCRAFT GARDEN FOUNDATION

Landcraft Gardens are a unique resource and living laboratory exhibiting extensive plant collections, celebrating the diversity of horticulture and design, and providing a place to explore human connection with the natural world. Located in the heart of the North Fork’s wine region on Long Island’s East End, the Landcraft Gardens were established in 1992 by founders Dennis Schrader and Bill Smith when they purchased 17 acres of land surrounding an 1840’s-era farmhouse. Landcraft Environments, Ltd, a for-profit horticulture wholesaler, supplies hundreds of thousands of plants to garden centers, landscape designers, botanical gardens and public parks throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Situated on a narrow spit of land, nestled between the Long Island Sound, Mattituck Creek and the Peconic Bay, the site itself provides an unusually long, moderate growing season – perfectly suited for the development of the Landcraft Gardens.

The Landcraft Garden Foundation is dedicated to inspiring, educating and promoting gardening, horticulture, and the preservation of our natural environment. The organization’s mission is to provide a horticulturally diverse garden that offers knowledge of the plant world and acts as a laboratory for experimenting with horticultural techniques, plant diversity, breeding, and design. Ultimately the Foundation’s intention is to provide the experience of peace and stability that gardens bring to people throughout the world.

Visitor Information

Landcraft Gardens, located at 4342 Grand Avenue, Mattituck, NY 11952, will open for the season on Friday, May 6, 2022. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays only. Tickets are available for purchase at the door: $20 general admission, $17 students/seniors, $5 children (age 12 and under), and free for members and children under age two. For more information, visit landcraftgardenfoundation.org.