Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1972 in San Bernardino, CA
Lives in Los Angeles, CA

In Kaari Upson’s recent work, she transforms the soft, flaccid forms of upholstered furniture into solid sculptures. To make the work on view in the 2017 Biennial, she worked from a sectional sofa she found in a Las Vegas tract home and then left in the driveway behind her Los Angeles studio for a year and a half, casting its sections in urethane again and again. The resulting sculptures are still recognizable as furniture, but Upson obscures her sources both by reorienting the forms and by painting the surfaces to abstract the stains the upholstery accrued through use and exposure. Drooping against the wall like a flayed skin or rearing up to tower over the viewer, the sculptures take on a visceral quality, suggesting at once the interior and exterior of the human body.