Jonathan Boos Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012
Catalogue Essay
Mary Callery
Born 1903, New York Died 1977, Paris
1921-25 Art Students League, New York
Selected museum exhibitions: Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey (1999); Dallas Museum of Art (1958); Salon du Mai, Paris (1949); Arts Club of Chicago (1946)
Selected honors: Commission for proscenium arch sculpture, Metropolitan Opera House, New York (1966); Commission for United States Pavilion, Brussels World’s fair (1958)
Selected public collections: Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts; Art Institute of Chicago; Cincinnati Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; Whitney Museum of American Art
Living in Paris from 1930 through the outbreak of World War II, Callery was active as an art collector and a sculptor. When she returned to New York in 1940, she continued to develop her innovative sculptural practice toward greater abstraction. Related to her Horse, 1942, in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, the bronze sculpture Circus Rider, 1942 features a horse with an elongated neck and abstract features that accentuate its vitality. Its dynamic composition features similarly abstracted figures of a man and a woman who stand astride the equine creature in acrobatic poses.