Gabriels – New Toys for Melancholics @ Toy Art Gallery (5.6)

Toy Art Gallery will present ‘New Toys for Melancholics’ (5.6) featuring some of the most amazing bronze toys I’ve ever had the pleasure to see, created by Italian sculptor and philosopher Gabriels.  His surreal creatures have an overall organic feel laced with a mechanical edge.  Beneath the shiny exterior surface and the eerie glass eyes lies the genius and obsessive nature of the design.  What appears to be one solid piece is in reality an intricately engineered constellation of bronze components that fit together layer after layer, piece by piece – almost like a wondrous puzzle.  

The beauty of these art toys is both the logic and reality of their heavily interconnected underlying elements as well as the fact that their true nature will go unnoticed by casual observers who will see a beautiful gleaming object and stop their exploration at that conventional point.

“Let it be clear: these are not sculptures, but toys and more precisely prototypes of Toys for Melancholics. They aspire to the industrial production on a large scale and to the indefinite propagation, in proportion to the planetary diffusion of the anguishastic-desperative Weltanschauung and of the consequent – very legitimate, although not absolutely incontrovertible – propensity to suicideness. In this sense, our Toys for Melancholics scrupulously respect all the standards of global melancholy quality in a petrified primeval landscape, addressing courageously to a public of adults, kiddies and lithopaedia.”
—-Gabriels

Gabriels || New Toys for Melancholics
Opening: Friday, May 6th 2011 (7-10 PM)

Toy Art Gallery
737 Seward St. #1
Los Angeles, CA 90038
877.910.toys (8697)