Rona Pondick

Rona Pondick was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1952. She studied at Yale University School of Art and received her MFA in 1977. She lives and works in New York City.

Nearly a decade ago, building on the formal vocabulary of her earlier work, Pondick began experimenting with acrylic, resin, and rich color. Using the language of the body in her sculptures, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, she is interested in the idea of transformation and the elasticity of meaning while being spellbound by the materiality of sculpture. Seeking out cutting-edge technologies and at the same time keeping sculpting as a hands-on process, she explores ideas based on natural phenomena such as metamorphosis and mutation.

This latest body of work that Pondick created in the past two years is about intimacy, introspection, and truthfulness. Concurrent with the transformative times we live in, and after decades of working in large scale often for the outdoors, Pondick eventually surrendered to a long-nurtured desire to create smaller, more personal sculptures. Carrying-on with her signature sculptural component, she incorporates the cast of her head (more precisely a downsized version of it) into small scale polychromatic sculptures. Pondick’s work has always been abashedly personal and self-referential. And yet, they are so powerfully emotional because they speak to our common hopes, desires, tribulations, and even pain.

Since 1984 she has had over 48 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries internationally, including Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Italy; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands; Rupertinum Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.

Her sculptures have been included in over 200 group exhibitions, including numerous biennales worldwide: the Whitney Biennial, Lyon Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale, Sonsbeek, and Venice Biennale. Pondick has participated in group exhibitions at museums internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice; Museo de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Ca’Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Daimler Chrysler, Berlin; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others.

Her work is in the collections of many institutions worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York); Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas); San Francisco Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art (Sculpture Garden); Toledo Museum of Art; The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Fondation pour l’art contemporain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon (Annecy, France); Ursula Blickle Stiftung (Kraichtal, Germany); Centre Pompidou (Paris); and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem).

Rona Pondick has received numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant, and others.

Her work is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (London/Paris/Salzburg), NUNU Fine Art (Taipei), Zevitas/Marcus (Los Angeles), Howard Yezerski Gallery (Boston), Sonnabend Gallery (New York), and MARC STRAUS (New York).