Mel Kendrick’s Wood Sculptures Turn Process Into the Subject at David Nolan Gallery
At David Nolan Gallery in New York, Mel Kendrick’s latest exhibition does something quietly exacting: it lets material, color, and scale do the thinking. “Mel Kendrick: Tilt,” the artist’s ninth solo show with the gallery, gathers new and recent sculptures with older works and cast paper pieces from the 2010s, offering a compact view of a practice that has remained rigorously open to change since Kendrick began working in the early 1970s.
Kendrick, an American sculptor, has long built his work around a disciplined economy of means. Wood remains central, but not as a passive support. He works in conversation with it, rather than imposing a fully fixed plan from the outset. Cuts and carvings are irreversible, and that permanence becomes part of the work’s meaning: each sculpture records the decisions, hesitations, and adjustments that shaped it.
That logic is visible in pieces such as “Walnut Shelf” (2026), a series of intimately scaled works that retain a sense of the block from which they emerged, and “Gemstone” (2026), whose monolithic presence still hints at its original material state. The exhibition also includes standalone sculptures and wall-mounted works such as “Yellow Drum” (2025) and “Withstand” (2026), where Kendrick’s use of color is neither decorative nor secondary. Instead, hue operates as a structural element, in dialogue with form.
The gallery notes that the artist’s chromatic choices draw on the stark visual contrasts of Gothic and medieval churches. In Kendrick’s hands, color functions almost architecturally, helping organize perception while refusing to dominate it. A work like “Red, Yellow, Blue” (2026) makes that balance especially clear: shape and color read together, each sharpening the other.
The exhibition is further extended by cast paper works from the 2010s, which reinforce Kendrick’s interest in color as a material with weight and consequence. Across the show, the emphasis remains on process rather than representation. Nothing here stands in for something else. The work is the work — and the making of it is the point.
That commitment places Kendrick within a lineage shaped by Minimalism, while also distinguishing him from it. The influence of artists such as Donald Judd and Richard Serra is present in the clarity of structure and the seriousness of material, but Kendrick’s sculptures remain distinctly his own: tactile, measured, and alert to the smallest shifts in surface and proportion.
“Mel Kendrick: Tilt” is on view at David Nolan Gallery in New York through June 6, 2026.
