19/08/2026
MARUANI MERCIER is delighted to present Tony Matelli: Sideways Dinner, the second solo exhibition of the artist, opening in our Knokke gallery on 8 August 2026.
Presenting a series of new sculptures, from an extraordinary life-size self-portrait to his iconic series of Weeds and Arrangements of inverted flowers painstakingly executed in painted bronze, the works in Sideways Dinner reorient one’s perception of the everyday and upend the ordinary angle of visual and social experience.
The exhibition takes its title from a new sculptural work that stages an upright arrangement of dinner plates, bottles, and glasses in a humorous take on the iconography of still-life painting. Forming a kind of pictorial plane or relief, the traces of human gathering in Sideways Dinner are at once resolutely familiar and uncanny in their defiance of the laws of physics and time. Drawing on readymade objects, the artist employs a wide range of techniques and materials, such as bronze, silicone and resin, to achieve exacting recreations that separate the trompe l’oeil realism of the surface from the object’s intended function. The works in the exhibition thus hover between the opposites of immediacy and reflection, the permanence and transience of both objects and human relations.
Featured:
Tony Matelli
Arrangement (584), 2022
silicone, epoxy, urethane, hair, clothing
170.2 x 88.9 x 61 cm - 67 x 35 x 24 in
