This skull is a three-dimensional object that you can hold in your hand, not an image that has been stretched and distorted in Photoshop. It’s one of many visually confusing sculptures by Robert Lazzarini, created in his Brooklyn studio after hours upon hours of research. Lazzarini often smashes objects to see how they change and fall apart before he goes about the process of distorting them with computer modeling and fabricating them anew.
Using bone dust to create his skulls, wood and steel to produce hammers and other materials that are appropriate for recreating the originals, Lazzarini painstakingly crafts each item in an altered form. Previously working with more free-form alterations manually, he now sticks to math for the most accurate results possible, with every detail in scale.
“In terms of subject matter, it’s representational, so people think it’s a type of Pop art,” Lazzarini told Blouin Art Info. “In some ways it is, but I think it really hinges more profoundly on the aftermath of Minimalism… One of the main problems of sculpture for me is its static nature. This kind of animation” [when the object changes as you walk around it] “for lack of a better word, gives the sensation that there’s activity where there really isn’t. It relates back to corporeally navigating something to understand it.”
