Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh

Artist Biography

Teaching herself to carve stone in the tradition of Moore, Hepworth and Arp at the age of 46, Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh slowly transformed the principles of modernism into a style of her own. Characterized by rounded sensual shapes, Kavanagh’s sculptures highlight the synergy between what is removed and what remains to create intriguing visual harmonies with the interactions between light and shadow. Kavanagh has carved her sculptures using a range of stones from alabaster to steatite to Carrara marble. 

She began carving polystyrene flotation billets after finding one washed up on the beach below her studio in Connecticut. Kavanagh’s first large polystyrene carvings were plaster-coated sculptures of interpretations of themes she found in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1961), a seminal treatise on art history written by her father George Kubler. Most of her diverse output is now produced from carved polystyrene, hard-coated, faired and finished to a high degree of refinement with automobile paint to ensure perfect castings in bronze, aluminum and stainless steel. 

After her works were shown at the 51st Biennale di Venezia in 2005, Kavanagh joined the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York. Over 12 years, she had four solo exhibitions there, covering topics related to global warming, natural disasters, aquatic life-forms, Greek mythology, and the female form. During this time Kavanagh’s sculptures were made in plaster, polystyrene, Aqua Resin ®, and bronze. Works from the series shown at Blue Mountain Gallery were later presented at Art Basel Miami Beach (2007), the American Museum of Natural History (2009), the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2011-12), and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2013-16). Her work has also been shown at Yale University’s Peabody Museum (2018-19). Current installations include the Smilow Cancer Hospital of Yale-New Haven, Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, NJ, the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, NJ, and the Lancaster Winery in Healdsburg, CA.

Most recently, Kavanagh has been revisiting modernists who originally inspired her. Selections from her continuing Deconstructing the Oval series were shown at Graham Shay 1857 (2023). Kavanagh’s recent AfterMoore series, while still being developed, references Henry Moore’s use of voids in reclining figures, and her latest Modernist Musings draw from Picasso, Lipchitz, Miro and others to generate pared down expressions of “essence” through stylized birds and female forms.