The Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art is presenting Tony Matelli’s solo exhibition Arrangement from August 9, 2025, to February 1, 2026. This exhibition is Matelli’s first solo show in Taiwan and features a selection of 24 sculptures and one painting. Although Matelli is known for his hyperrealistic and meticulously crafted sculptures, his artistic practice goes beyond simply copying reality. His works, infused with absurd and dark humor, create viewing situations where meaning is suspended and the atmosphere becomes unstable, unsettling, and uneasy.
The artist draws on familiar elements from everyday life—mirrors, classical sculptures, sausages, fruits and vegetables, weeds, flowers, cups, and ropes. Using techniques such as inversion, suspension, imbalance, incapacitation, and dysfunction, he breaks the perception of spatial and temporal order. The resulting experience produces a blocked, obstructed gaze and a chaotic visual perception that induces anxiety. Matelli’s approach reflects the alternative and unique aesthetic logic he aims to build: an aesthetic that challenges fixed definitions, questions established norms, and opens space for personal emotional connections and interpretations. This art of “dislocation” breaks down and reconstructs the essence of reality while inviting viewers to reconsider existence and conditions in the modern world.
The exhibition title, Arrangement, comes from the series of the same name displayed on the second floor. Matelli uses a “disruptive arrangement” strategy across three levels in his art, rearranging forms to question the nature of existence and how value and meaning are assigned to objects. In doing so, he examines the conflicts and contradictions between personal desires and social structures. The spatial composition of his works deliberately distances itself from the limits of physical reality; throughout the exhibition, it aims to provoke in the viewer both discomfort and an indescribable sense of freedom through a process of “ascension.”
Some of Tony Matelli’s works will also be exhibited in Istanbul this September as part of a special selection presented by PİLEVNELİ.
