Tony Tasset, The Weight : Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St., Chicago, IL

Kavi Gupta proudly presents The Weight, a solo exhibition of new sculptures by American artist Tony Tasset.

A Post-Atomic visual troubadour, Tasset continues to define the vanguard of Pop Conceptualism. From the monumental stoicism of the massive fiberglass Eye sculpture watching over downtown Dallas like a Neo-Surrealist sentinel, to a slumping, exhausted Paul Bunyan that pays sad tribute to manifest destiny gone awry, to the frailty and nuanced melancholy of a to-scale sculpture of a ripped Styrofoam cup, Tasset has demonstrated, time and again, a unique ability to memorialize the peculiar beauty and pathos of the American visual vernacular.

For The Weight, Tasset mined the innermost provinces of the contemporary human psyche, responding to the anxiety of our times with wit, gravitas, and salt-of-the-earth sagacity. Working in his western Michigan studio like an aesthetic Dr. Frankenstein assembling an assortment of Post-Modernist monsters—part Woody Guthrie, part Robert Crumb, part Jeff Koons, part Louise Bourgeois—Tasset has concocted a confident, unified sculptural statement he describes as “a reckoning, an apocalyptic mix-tape.”