In the studio of American sculptor Adam Parker Smith, antiquity meets the robot. Blocks of Carrara marble, the marble of Michelangelo and Bernini, pass through 3D scanning and robotic milling before reaching the hands of Italian master craftsmen working in a tradition six centuries old. The exhibition draws on Parker Smith’s Crush series, in which he scans canonical Greco-Roman sculptures in three dimensions, digitally compresses them into compact forms, and has them hand-carved from raw Carrara marble. The marble is drawn from the same quarries that have supplied Western sculpture for over two thousand years, including works that today stand in the Roman Forum, the Galleria Borghese, and other major international collections.

The show is a series of compressions. Three Hellenistic myths crushed into marble like cars in a junkyard, the figures still visible but radically compacted: Artemis and the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Jason returning with the Golden Fleece, Venus rising from the waves.  Where the originals are made to be contemplated, these ask to be explored. Alongside the marbles, two pool floats in pink and lime green, each in perfect classical contrapposto. The foundational pose of Greek sculpture turns out to be the natural shape of an inflatable lounger.

YUSTO / GINER MADRID