A Matter of Discovery: The Art of Luis Perelman

Luis Perelman is a New York–based artist whose career spans over six decades. His work includes sculpture, drawing, painting, and photography. Perelman completed a master’s degree in architecture at Columbia University in 1965 and worked several years in that field and in city planning. At the same time, he developed a true interest in art making, exploring geometry, color interaction, and patterns derived from artistic traditions that range from American quilt practice to Islamic designs. For Perelman, who continues to innovate and create new artforms to this day, art has always been “a matter of discovery.”

His work attracted the attention of the well-known gallerist Leo Castelli, who represented many of the most influential artists at the time, including Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Dan Flavin. In 1964 Castelli and his gallery director Ivan Karp began to showcase Perelman’s resin sculptures. The following year, Roy Neuberger purchased from Castelli Gallery one of Perelman’s first Industrial Petrifications, a title coined by Karp. Industrial Petrifaction #8 (1964) entered the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art when it was founded in 1969.

Perelman has been a pioneer of clear resin sculptures, creating pristine works of art that took the shapes of obelisks, columns, pyramids, and the original, iconic Coca-Cola bottle. His sculptures are filled with a variety of materials, from found objects to industrial supplies, including keys, screws, wing nuts, cans, lightbulbs, typewriters, and shredded currency from the US Treasury Department. The products and materials echo the society in which Perelman has evolved as an artist. The transparent artworks, in some cases tinted with color the artist added to the resin, at times feature an orderly display of layers, lines, grids, and rhythmical compositions of extreme precision, and at others are more abstract compositions featuring an amalgam of objects that have fallen randomly inside their molds.

A skillful draftsman and painter, Perelman has also created since the 1970s several complex paintings and wall compositions that reflect his deep interest in patterns, color combinations, surfaces, and patinas, which he meticulously studies prior to his execution of the works. In the last three years, he has been creating new forms of paper-folded sculptures and digital drawings using Photoshop.