Marta is honored to host an omnibus of new functional artworks by sculptor Ross Hansen. Tino’s White Horses is the artist’s first solo exhibition in his adoptive hometown of Los Angeles. The show’s title—an allusion to Hansen’s new equine neighbors in New Mexico—and its works are a communion with that other, less familiar desert.

Comprising lighting and seating alongside surfaces and vessels, Hansen’s pioneering exhibition puts forth a selection of furnishings made in remote dialogue with the desert landscape in and around the unincorporated community of Ojo Caliente (NM). Perhaps best known for its mineral hot springs (Tewa tradition holds that its pools historically provided access to the underworld), this particular region of the American Southwest abstractly lends its distinct geological formations and palette to Hansen’s pieces. In these new expressive works, the artist defers to the organic contours innate to the fleeting malleability of the exhibition’s primary surface mediums: pigmented epoxy resin, faux-leather upholstery, and sewn hemp fiberglass.

As Hansen merges the architectonic forms of traditional furniture typologies with a bio-morphism that originates from nature, his works evolve into species, with the gallery space their interim terrarium. Under Lamp, an elemental nod to Italian modernist lighting, sweeps across the room with the grace and scale of a stone archway eroded into shape by sand, wind, and time. Below it, a group of resin-coated hemp Baskets burst from the ground like a cluster of succulents made firm by water retention, while the emerald body of a modular bench (Squish) happily interrupts the tableau: a brilliant shift in the otherwise tonal landscape, like a lone flowering cactus.

Due in part to Hansen’s background as a designer of landscapes, the artist’s ability to create and situate form is deeply instinctual, lending an ease to scenery-making rooted in familiarity, adoration and, in the case of Ojo Caliente, something like longing: the land is understood, already akin to a personal oasis, yet still in question as Hansen develops a timeline for longer-term habitation. Thus, the works act as a preface for the place—a pre-handling of this pastoral environment through formal and textural explorations that reflect the artist’s evolving relationship with this particular corner of the Land of Enchantment, placing him within one of the US’ most hallowed artistic lineages.

Ross Hansen is a California- and New Mexico-based artist and designer. He is a graduate of Iowa State University and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he studied Landscape Architecture and 3D Design, respectively. He is represented by Volume Gallery in Chicago, which hosted his most recent solo exhibition, Super Natural (2020).

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