Gina Novendstern
A fragment. And everything it carries.
Gina Novendstern grew up in New Jersey, trained in New York, and found her sculptural voice in Mexico, studying at the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Cuernavaca and working in the studio of a Mexican artist producing monumental figurative works. That experience, building figures at scale, shaped everything that followed.
Her sculptures always contain the human figure, or a fragment of it. Heads. Limbs. Torsos. Forms that are anatomically incomplete by design, because the incompleteness is the point. What is left out forces the viewer to complete the meaning themselves.
The work explores how interior and exterior environments shape us, using the human form to map that shaping. Steel, wood, and stone are her materials. The figure, always present, always partial, is her language.
Her work explores the interior and exterior environments that influence our strengths and weaknesses. The figures she makes are usually not anatomically complete. At times they may simply be heads or legs. What remains, stripped of everything else, speaks louder.
She has spent decades asking a single question through steel, wood, and stone: what shapes you? The answer is never simple. The sculptures ensure that.
Bronze, steel, wood, and stone.
