Tom Otterness Abstract Sculptures

Tom Otterness Horse and Rider Maquette, 2003 Black Resin Sculpture held in original box 5 1/2 × 3 1/2 × 2 inches Held in original vintage box This rare, highly collectible, limited e...

TOM OTTERNESS Horse and Rider Maquette, 2003 White Resin Sculpture held in original box 5 1/2 × 3 1/2 × 2 inches Signed Tom Otterness Incised signature on the feet (see photos) Limited Edition (exact number produced unknown) This 2004 Horse and Rider black resin maquette is a miniature of famed American public sculptor Tom Otterness's large bronze "Horse and Rider" sculpture located at Texas Tech University's Student Union Gathering Pavilion. Rarely found in the original vintage box - this is a collectors item! The original piece was commissioned by the Student Union to celebrate Texas Tech's famous mascot - "The Masked Rider". Otterness' version of the mascot depicts the Masked Rider atop of the horse, kicking its “feet triumphantly in the quest for truth,” as he describes. (The tradition of the Masked Rider started as a dare in 1936 when an unidentified masked or ghost rider would circle the football field during home games. The Masked Rider became an official Texas Tech mascot in 1954.) The artist made a limited series of white and black resin multiples back in 2003 as a result of numerous requests by students for affordable models of the Horse and Rider. They were only available for sale by the Texas Tech student union and sold out very quickly. Although there is no stated edition, it was a one-off offering, produced by the artist just for Texas Tech students, with no second editions ever made. Once they sold out - that was it. Now Otterness' "Horse & Rider" is a highly desirable vintage collectors item. Created in an unknown but very limited first edition only back in 2003. Horse and Rider is difficult to find, - so if you're an Otterness (or Texas Tech) fan, we recommend you snag this one! About Tom Otterness: Tom Otterness was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1952. He came to New York City in 1970 to study at the Arts Students League, and in 1973 took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 1977 he became a member of Collaborative Projects, a pioneering community of independent artists, and took a leading role in organizing Colab’s 1980 Times Square Show, which was called “the first avant-garde art show of the ‘80s” by the Village Voice. Otterness is one of a handful of contemporary artists invited to design a balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for which he devised a tumbling Humpty-Dumpty in 2005. Otterness lives and works in New York. Otterness may well be “the world’s best public sculptor,” as the art critic Ken Johnson opined in the New York Times in 2002. Public art is his focus, and Otterness has had major outdoor exhibitions of his sculptures on the Park Avenue Mall in New York (2003), in more than a dozen sites in downtown Indianapolis (2005), on the grounds of the Beverly Hills city hall (2005-06) and throughout Grand Rapids, Michigan (2006). His first solo exhibition, held at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York in 1983, featured elements of The New World (1991), a white plaster frieze of 250 nude “Ur-people,” as essayist Hayden Herrera called them, eventually destined for the plaza of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles, a General Services Administration commission. In the U.S., Otterness has completed at least three dozen public commissions, including Life Underground (2004), his celebrated multi-figural bronze sculpture installation for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Agency at the 14th Street station on the Eighth Avenue subway lines. His international commissions include public plazas in Münster, Germany (1993), Toronto, Canada (2007), and Seoul, South Korea (2010), and a large public park in Scheveningen, the Netherlands (2004). In 2013, Creation Myth, a gateway park for the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., was dedicated. Otterness has exhibited his work at John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, and other important contemporary art galleries. His most recent exhibition, Metal on Paper: Silverpoint, Copperpoint & Steelpoint Drawings, opened at Marlborough in September 2015. Works by Otterness are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Eli Broad Family Foundation, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and others. He was elected a member of the National Academy in 1994. Most recently, Otterness has installed The Tables from the collection of the Whitney and 50 new sculptures in niches at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, as part of the group exhibition, The Value of Food. On a personal note, Otterness has practiced Tai Chi, martial arts, and boxing in the school of William C. C. Chen since the 1970s, and his studio features a boxing bag...