Biography

Tom Otterness is a prominent international artist who has created a half century of artwork in the private and public realms. His cartoon-like round and geometric sculptures, monumental and diminutive, pique the collective unconscious of fine art social satire.

In 2014 Will Simmons wrote “…Otterness’s work refuses the vanity of the “art object” in order to affect a more powerful, nuanced, and accessible relationship between his sculptures and his viewers. Otterness creates forms that are at once purely formal and entirely embodied, a kind of social formalism. This revolutionary act gives rise to an ethos of understated subversion, a place where we can engage with the critical function of art without the stifling pretention of normative art historical narratives.”

As one of the most prolific sculptors living in the US today Otterness has created over sixty private and public commissions internationally, including Germany, Holland, Qatar, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Italy, Canada, Mexico, the US and elsewhere.

Otterness’s works are included in major museums, foundations and cultural organizations such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, MONA (Museum of New and Old Art) in Tasmania, Museum Beelden aan Zee in the Hague, Netherlands, the Miyagi Museum of Art in Sendai, Japan, Frederic Meijer Sculpture Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, the Isreal Museum in Jerusalem, IVAN Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Brooklyn Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, the Lannan Foundation and others.