Tancredi di Carcaci: Corpus — Tancredi di Carcaci

Palo Gallery (New York, NY) is pleased to present Corpus, the second solo exhibition by sculptor Tancredi di Carcaci at Palo Gallery. Di Carcaci’s latest exhibition brings together works in bronze, porcelain, stoneware ceramic, and mixed media coin panels to examine the relationship between the human body and the objects we create throughout history. In his exploration of this core theme, alluded to in the title, Di Carcaci utilizes tensions between fluidity and weight, precision and chance, and Antiquity and Modernity.

Di Carcaci has always been profoundly influenced by objects of history and in particular, antiquity, though his intrigue is not exclusively tied to the great architecture and objects in the world's museums. Keenly he has an eye for the overlooked vessels, coins, and sculptural fragments that reveal just as much about our distant past. Importantly, his relationship with these historic objects is not one of reproduction but rather a rigorous interrogation and reinterpretation within the context of modernity.

At the centre of this exhibition is a series of ancient vessels that the artist has collected over the last year. Unadorned and stunning in their simplicity, these vessels were often carriers for elixirs and oils used for medicine and ritualistic cleaning. It is these objects that inspired the title of the exhibition, Corpus, and in particular the relationship between vessels and the human body. These receptacles take many of their component names from the human body: neck, foot, and lip to name a few. Inspiring the majority of works in the exhibition, Di Carcaci has imitated his collection of amphorae as the base and then added his invented and classically inspired human figures atop them.

The object-body tension is on display in both the ceramic and bronze works of Corpus. In the bronzes, Di Caraci plays off of juxtaposing motifs of fluidity and softness, seen in Body of Water, against heaviness and fragmentation in Adam. Body of Water emphasises the movement and dynamism of the human body, whereas Adam sits heavy and fragile like an ancient and delicate object. Alternatively, Herm melds human and vessel like forms with a play on the herm sculptures of antiquity, yet the base clearly alludes to the raw clay from which the containers di Carcaci is so interested comes from. The introduction of bronze to Tancredi’s practice has allowed for new forms and energies that would have been beyond possibility in his traditional ceramic medium.

In the ceramic works, Di Carcaci is able to introduce another element, glazing, of his practice to the theme of corporal relation. The unpredictable material process of glazing allows Tancredi’s usually fastidiously controlled practice to embrace elements of chance. Flowing, crystalising, or cracking glazes merge together the body and vessels Di Carcaci is echoing in one another. Moreover, the almost alchemic qualities of Di Carcaci’s glazes reference back to the very medicinal and sanitary oils, such as lekythos, these containers would hold.

The ascription of meaning to antique objects does not end with ancient vessels. Corpus features two new coin panel multimedia works that the artist has been making since 2024. These two panels, one silver and the other gold, continue Di Carcaci’s practice of reshuffling the contexts of real historic coins (100 AD - 1400 BC) in contemporary works of abstraction. The coins mounted and organised become yet another location for the consideration of the changing roles of historic ephemera. Organised in grids these objects, designed for the scale of the human hand, become lexicons of human culture.

In Corpus Tancredi di Carcaci creates a dialogue between ancient and contemporary cultures through the fastidious examination of specific objects. Moreover, Di Carcaci highlights the unseen but ever present bonds between the lives and practices of our forbearers. Across a rich and complex set of material Di Carcaci is able to test the boundaries between our human forms and how we reflect it within the objects we have always made. History and humanity meet and come to life in this exhibition of Tancredi di Carcaci at Palo Gallery.