Lawrence Fane

Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933, Lawrence Fane lives and works in New York City, where he has been, for the most part, almost 40 years. Early on he served as an apprentice to sculptor George Demetrios, and his assignments included working at a bronze foundry in Florence on the enlargement and casting of a monumental sculpture. Subsequently he was awarded the Rome Prize that allowed him to travel in Europe while living and working at the American Academy in Rome for three years. During that time he participated in an exhibition Arte Americana Contemporanea at the Palazzo Venezia. Other awards have included grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and membership in the National Academy of Design. After teaching briefly at the Rhode Island School of Design, he moved to New York in 1966, joining the art faculty of Queens College where he taught until 1996. He has been visiting critic and lecturer at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, including Boston University, The Yale School of Architecture, and Duke University.

His first one –person exhibition comprised constructions in forged and welded steel with concrete elements, held at the Zabriskie Gallery in New York City. Subsequently he has had numerous one-person shows in New York, at the Marilyn Pearl Gallery, The Bill Bace Gallery, and the Kouros Gallery, plus many in other locales in the United States, Italy, as well as participating in invitational group exhibitions. In 2002, the University of Richmond Museum and the Muscarelle Museum in Virginia collaborated on a twenty-five year retrospective of Mr. Fane’s drawings and sculpture entitled Machines of the Mind, with a major catalog.

Mr. Fane’s work has been reviewed and discussed in such journals as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, Art News, and Sculpture Magazine.

Most recently, in 2006, he participated in The Whitney Biennial Exhibition as a contributor to the Mark di Suvero Peace Tower. In November of 2006, the Zabriskie Gallery in New York presented a one-person exhibition of his “Purifier “ wall sculptures introduced by an evening of book signing of his recently published artist book M.T./L.F.: A Sculptor’s Dialogue with Mariano Taccola, 15th Century Italian Artist-Engineer, published by The Pont La Vue Press. Following this, Fane had a one-person exhibition in Piacenza, Italy. The show consisted of drawings and sculptures at the Galleria Solaria Arte. The exhibition celebrated the recent publication of an illustrated (bi-lingual) book on Fane’s life and work by Italian poet Luigi Ballerini, entitled Le machine inadempienti di Lawrence Fane, (The Unyielding Machines of Lawrence Fane, (2006, Milano, Editione Gabriele Mazzotta).