Museums team to buy Mabry work

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art have jointly acquired a 2008 bronze sculpture by L.A.-based artist Nathan Mabry titled “Process Art (Dead Men Don’t Make Sculpture).”

It’s a large-scale fake cast of Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker,” overlaid with a bronze cast of an altered, rather maniacal latex mask.

In a Times review of Mabry’s L.A. solo show in March, David Pagel described the 7-foot-tall sculpture as “an industrial-strength tchotchke with dopey dunce cap,” comparing it to “a pumped-up version of Duchamp’s mustache-on-a-Mona-Lisa-postcard.”

The sculpture joins 10 other Mabry works in the Hammer’s contemporary collection. Now on exhibit in front of MCASD’s La Jolla location until May 2009, it will move to the Hammer in summer 2009.

-- Lynne Heffley