Jim Perry
Jim Perry received a BA in sculpture from Bard College, where he studied with sculptor Jake Grossberg and painters Murray Reich and Jim Sullivan. He began his sculpture career in the early 1970s in New York City where he exhibited extensively, and in 1975 was included in the Whitney Biennial. In addition to his work as an artist, Jim had a 28-year career as a graphics editor at The New York Times. He left The Times in 2008 to return to making sculpture full time.
Since then, Jim has had solo exhibits at the Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton, NJ; Gremillion & Company Fine Art, Houston, TX (2011, 2013); Morpeth Contemporary, Hopewell, NJ (2010.) and the Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ. He has also been included in numerous juried and invitational exhibitions including those at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Art Center, Dowell, MD; the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Ellarslie City Museum in Trenton; Philips Mill Gallery in New Hope, PA; Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, NJ; Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ; LG Tripp Gallery, Philadelphia. He is represented by Gremillion & Company Fine Art, Houston, TX, Westbrook Contemporary, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA and Calloway Fine Art & Consulting, Washington, DC. He maintains studios in Northeast Pennsylvania and central New Jersey.
About Jim Perry’s work, artist Steven Alexander wrote, “Embodied in the graceful curves, torqued tensions and sensuous materiality of Jim Perry’s sculpture is a fundamental process of transforming feeling into form, and a perpetuation of our ancient fascination with the very nature of being.” Curator Kate Somers observes that “Perry’s sculpture is animated by its contradictions," stating that there is “a sense of stability and movement within the same work.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am fascinated by forms that are both mathematical, like parabolas or spirals, and that also appear in nature, like waves or flight trajectories. In my sculpture, I take the basic principles inherent in these forms and interpret and play with them, allowing each piece to evolve in an intuitive way. I use a process of accretion, creating pieces through multiple layers of wood. By varying the thickness and angle of each layer in minute increments, I make shapes that curve and twist, that both contain and activate space. Through this process, I am striving to pare down form to its fundamental essence.