No Hard Feelings: Ross Bonfanti, NYC

Canadian sculptor Ross Bonfanti uses concrete, hardware materials and found children’s toys to create sculptures that subvert Pop disposability with personal pathos.

Redefining their sumptuous bodies and studding them with nails and screws, Bonfanti deliberately retains the toys’ fluffy seams, their felt noses and their glass eyes. The sculptures stand in a striking state of in-between: a sense of personality lingers in a creation fortified for modernity and urbanity.

No Hard Feelings is an exhibition that explores this very relationship - the personal versus the urban. Bonfanti pushes his concreatures into unchartered psychological territory. New creations, such as Emotion Detector Rabbits and Unconditional Love Dogs symbolise his humorous commentary on modern man as a social animal, and its confrontation with the metropolis. The soft animal, newly hardened by its cement exoskeleton, becomes a metaphor for today’s city dweller, their façade toughened by the social pressures of contemporary living.

Bonfanti’s work has received wide international acclaim, appearing on the front page of the New York Times and being acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum, at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington.