Robert Lazzarini: metes and bounds

Robert Lazzarini: metes and bounds features works that reshape familiar objects of state, ceremony, and everyday life through which America understands and represents itself. The exhibition includes three works proposed for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale along with related objects from the past twenty-five years. Two of those proposed works—lectern and Waldseemüller map—have been commissioned by MassArt Art Museum for this exhibition.

Lazzarini’s sculptures mathematically alter familiar objects and rebuild them in their original materials, finished with signs of wear and use. Joined to this authenticity of surface, the distortions read not as design but as fact. The objects appear as faithful records of things that could not exist. They present unresolvable contradictions, as their surfaces carry histories that their geometries deny.

The exhibition title comes from the traditional surveying method used to define property boundaries. Metes are measurements of distance, direction, and physical limits. Bounds are the things that mark those limits: a river, tree, road, or other parcel of land. Together, metes and bounds establish a relationship between measurement and power, translating landscape into something that can be claimed, named, transferred, taxed, and governed. The boundary is walked, marker to marker, and never seen whole. The description does not record the
boundary. It creates it. 

Lazzarini’s work, similarly, occupies a space between thing and representation. A map represents territory but also organizes territory. A sign represents authority but also exercises authority. A flag represents a nation but also helps constitute the idea of the nation. The works in the exhibition speak to each other across the room in registers of authority, territory, the body, and violence. Each one presents a piece of the system by which authority is asserted, recorded, and enforced.

Lazzarini’s objects do not merely represent power. They are things through which power becomes material. Rooted in American history and the everyday world, each work is a record of something that could not exist, holding a contradiction that defies its own physical logic.

Robert Lazzarini: metes and bounds was curated by Guest Curator John Ravenal. MAAM’s unique and imaginative exhibitions, events, and programs would not happen without the support of the MAAM Programs! Funds initiated by gifts from Anonymous, The Jean Gaulin Foundation, The Andree LeBoeuf Foundation, and Elissa and Bill Warner. Thank you!

Robert Lazzarini (b. 1965, New Jersey) is an American artist working in sculpture and printmaking. He mathematically deforms culturally charged objects and rebuilds them in their original materials. The surfaces carry the wear of long use, and the results stay familiar and impossible at once. His work has been featured in major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Lazzarini’s work is represented in leading collections, including The Museum of
Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Walker Art Center.

John Ravenal served as Executive Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum from 2015–2020. He has curated projects with Sol LeWitt, Xu Bing, Andy Goldsworthy, and Sally Mann. In 2016, he organized Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch, which opened at the Munch Museum in Oslo before traveling to the US. A past president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, Ravenal is currently President of the International Association of Art Critics-USA. He also serves on the boards of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond.