Robert Mallary

Robert W. Mallary (Dec. 2, 1917-Feb. 10, 1997) was an American sculptor and pioneer in computer art. He was renowned for his Neo-Dada or "junk art" sculpture in the 1950s and '60s, created from found materials and urban detritus, using liquid plastics and resins. In 1968 he created one of the world's first computer-generated sculptures.

Mallary was born in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He was interested in art from his youth, and went to Mexico City to study at the Escuela de Las Artes Del Libro (now the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas) in 1938-39, and then at the Academy of San Carlos in 1942-43, where he was inspired by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He also studied at the Painter's Workshop School in Boston, Massachusetts in 1941.

He worked as an advertising Art Director in California from 1945–48, and as a freelance commercial artist until 1954, as he continued to pursue his fine arts career. Mallary's paintings (made with liquid polyester) were shown at the Urban Gallery in New York City in 1954, where he had four other exhibits until 1959. He also exhibited at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco (1953) and the Santa Fe Museum in Arizona (1958).

Mallary taught at the California School of Art in Los Angeles in 1949-50, at the Hollywood Art Center from 1950–54, and then became Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque from 1955-59. He moved to New York City in 1959 to establish himself as a New York artist, and began teaching at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He taught design and computer graphics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for nearly 30 years (1967–96), and also taught for brief periods at Pennsylvania State University (1962), University of Minnesota (1965), and the University of California at Davis (1963, 1967).

Mallary arranged found objects — discarded cardboard or fabrics — which he covered with polyester resin to create abstract relief sculptures and assemblages. He also produced works using sand and straw hardened with polyester resin. A prominent example of Mallary's "junk art" style was his monumental "Cliffhangers" sculpture, exhibited outside the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing, NY. Other pieces of Mallary's work were included in the "Sculpture U.S.A." and "Sixteen Americans" exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1959, and then at its "Art of Assemblage" exhibition in 1961. He was selected for a $1,000 preliminary award in the U.S. National section of the Guggenheim International Award in 1960, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964.

There were four exhibits of Robert Mallary's art at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City between 1961-66. Pythia from 1966 was purchased for The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY. A retrospective show was held at the State University of New York in Potsdam, NY, in 1968. Mallary's first computer-generated sculpture, Quad 1, was displayed at the "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. Both Quad 2 and Quad 3 were constructed by stacking layers of shapes cut out of plywood — shapes which were drawn by a computer sculpture design program, TRAN2 (written by Bob's son, Michael Mallary, under his direction) — before the sections were assembled into a final, laminated piece.

In 1993, Mallary had a show at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City. His sculptures, assemblages, computer graphics, and stereoscopic 3D projection art were exhibited at the Herter Gallery at UMass in 1990, and at the Springfield Museum of Fine Art in Massachusetts in 1995. The Mayor Gallery in London presented the exhibition, "Robert Mallary: The New Mexico Reliefs 1957-58" at Frieze New York in May, 2017. In 2018, The Mayor Gallery displayed Mallary's computer-generated sculpture, Quad 3 [1], along with his computer drawings [2] in the exhibition, "Writing New Codes: 3 Pioneers in Computer Art 1969-1977." The Mayor Gallery sold Quad 3 to the Tate Gallery in 2019.

Mallary had liver problems in later life, probably due to the toxicity of the liquid polyesters he had used to create his abstract expressionist sculptures in the 1950s and '60s. He lived in Conway, Massachusetts, and died of complications due to leukemia at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1997, at age 79. He is survived by four children and four grandchildren.

References

Obituary, New York Times, 15 February 1997
Robert Mallary, compArt Digital Art database
Robert Mallary, The Mayor Gallery
Robert Mallary, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert Mallary, Getty Union List of Artist Names
Robert Mallary, The Box, Los Angeles
Biography, robertmallary.com
Robert Mallary: Pioneer Computer Graphic Artist, robertmallary.com