HOLOS / Series 16: No.1 (Gloves)

Jud Nelson has been described as part Pop prankster, part Renaissance master, with a good dose of Minimalist strategist thrown in. Illusion lies at the heart of Nelson's sculptural practice. Here, he portrays a pair of women's leather gloves, one of several carved marble sculptures of apparral he completed in the 1990s. These and other trompe-l'oeil renderings are part of his ongoing series HOLOS, begun in 1971. In Greek, holos means “whole” or “total”; it’s the root of the word “hologram, ” or perfect three-dimensional illusion. Nelson’s sculptures simultaneously embrace both ideal form and its artificially generated analogue.