Richard Jolley

Since the beginning of his career in the early seventies, Richard Jolley has consistently defied categorization, paradoxically defining and refining his iconoclastic objects and images. Jolley is a pioneer in intellectualizing the studio-glass movement where he is recognized as a primary figurative artist.Jolley has employed the human body as his fundamental subject matter incorporating modernist and abstract concepts through works in glass, stone, bronze and paper. Throughout his artistic explorations Jolley has placed “the body” at the center of a complex discussion incorporating themes of science, metaphysics, nature, fetishism and narrative.Jolley’s seminal works—from the Busts and Torsos to his Totems, Monoprints, and Tabula Rasa series—are reproduced here in full color. The author discusses Jolley’s diverse involvement in subject matter that includes: gender identity, symbolism, and the subtle ingredients of thought in relation to metaphysical time and space. Through beautiful photographs and authoritative text, the volume presents a balanced overview of one of the world’s most innovative narrative artists.In conjunction with the publication of this book, the Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, Tennessee) has organized a retrospective exhibition which will open (qui ho tolto “in Knoxville”) on December 6th 2002 and will travel to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana; the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, Tennessee and the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia.Sam Hunter is Emeritus Professor of art history at Princeton University. He has written many individual studies of modern and contemporary artists as well as general art history surveys, most recently, the revised third edition of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture