Piero Golia: Solutions to Mortality

The Ulrich Museum is home to over 600 works by the artist Charles M. Grafly that includes drawings on paper, paintings, plaster casts, and bronzes. Beginning in the fall of 2016, the Museum has invited artists to respond to this collection within the context of the Grafly Commission, wherein they will produce works that will help to place Grafly’s work in conversation with contemporary art.

Los Angeles-based artist Piero Golia engages with such themes as community, the absurd, and the prospect of chance. Much of his work in sculpture, painting and installation is infused with humor and a lyrical romanticism. During his Grafly residency he will respond to the namesake’s practice, while interrogating the site of the Grafly Gallery itself. The limits of the gallery’s architecture, its proximity to both the Grafly Sculpture Garden and the School of Art, Design, and Creative Industries, as well as its existence within an academic museum are all elements that will inform the artist’s creation of a new, site-specific body of work while he considers the reactions to it by those who will be the main viewers of the work: the students of WSU.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website