Toni Grand

This catalogue is the first English-language monograph on the work of this French sculptor, who gained critical recognition as a member of the French movement Supports-Surfaces, founded in 1970. This group viewed the formal relationships between the surfaces and supports of artwork as actual rather than metaphorical manifestations of late 1960’s Marxist sociopolitical thought. For Grand, the group’s principles mandated not only a concentration on the support/surface relationship, but also a return to a simpler means of craft, and an emphasis on revealing the process of fabrication. For his solo U.S. museum debut at The Society in 2000, Grand exhibited two large works, each of which paired a piece of technology with a tangled mass of hundreds of irregular, wooden loops that he hand-carved from tree branches. Grand’s juxtaposition of hand-crafted object and technological ready-made suggests a range of relationships between art and technology, nature and culture. This elegant book features numerous full-page reproductions of both The Renaissance Society installation and Grand’s earlier related works.

The catalogue essay by French critic and curator, Corinne Diserens, traces the formal and methodological development of Grand’s work from1986, when he gave up working with wood, until his return to the material 15 years later.