Michael Krumenacker

Michael Krumenacker makes sculptures out of cast-off, scavenged, and cheap, commercially available materials: scrap wood, concrete, fabric, carpet, tile, plaster, and other items that catch his eye. He has worked construction jobs for many years and regularly makes off with bits of job-site rubble and debris, as well as trawling for materials on the streets of Brooklyn.

Krumenacker uses bric-a-brac to make his sculptures somewhat resemble home furnishings or décor. Rather than sleek stylings or a high-end finish, however, his works display a deliberately homemade look, and are often deceptively crude in appearance. Krumenacker uses simple tools and doesn’t try to dress up his materials. This gives the sculptures an ad-hoc, slaphappy look, as though they might revert to their previous state at any moment.

Krumenacker’s Locker Plant exhibition included a large outdoor sculpture, a sort of living room set created from scrap and installed in the back room, and a number of freestanding and “shelf” works in the front. The sculptures’ titles, and sometimes their forms, occasionally reference politics, pop culture, and art-historical predecessors. But the works always steer clear of easy classification. The end effect is sly, as the pieces scramble ingrained visual notions of style, privilege, and taste. They operate in a zone that is at once primitive, sophisticated, and somewhere in between.

Michael Krumenacker was born in New Hampshire and has a BA from Castleton State College in Vermont and a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He has participated in many group shows in New York at venues such as Goliath Visual Space, Taxter and Spengemann, S1 Gallery, Morsel, and the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts. In summer 2005 he was an artist in residence at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York.