Vincent Pocsik: A Thousand Years

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present A Thousand Years, the gallery’s second solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Vincent Pocsik. On view from May 30 through July 11, 2026, the exhibition will open with a reception on Saturday, May 30 from 6–8 PM.

A Thousand Years features sixteen new sculptural works, including the debut of several functional pieces such as chairs and chandeliers. Working across both floor and wall-based formats, Pocsik employs a recurring visual vocabulary of tools, fruit, flowers, umbrellas, shoes and hands, assembling these elements into hybrid forms that oscillate between the familiar and the surreal.

Crafted primarily from wood, the works extend into cast metals, stained glass, and fiber, resulting in richly varied surfaces that reference longstanding utilitarian materials. Pocsik’s process merges traditional hand-carving with digital modeling, producing objects that retain the immediacy of the handmade while engaging contemporary modes of fabrication.

Throughout the exhibition, the sculptures move between the artist’s signature elongated anthropomorphic structures and compositions informed by the visual language of Shaker furniture, with its emphasis on functionality, simplicity, and precise joinery. Emerging in the late 18th century in the northeastern United States, the Shaker movement developed a distinct design ethos centered on communal living, craftsmanship, and spiritual utility. Shaker design privileges clarity of form, honest material expression, and objects shaped through use rather than display.

The exhibition title derives from a saying commonly associated with the Shaker tradition: “Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.” Frequently attributed to Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), founder of the Shaker movement, the sentiment reflects a philosophy of labor grounded in discipline, devotion, and presence, balancing long-term commitment with urgency. Within Pocsik’s practice, this ethos resonates through an approach to making that values sustained refinement alongside emotional immediacy.

While the anthropomorphic ambiguity of Pocsik’s sculptures disrupts the restraint typically associated with Shaker aesthetics, both practices share an underlying devotion to craft. For the Shakers, making functioned as a form of spiritual meditation grounded in balance, precision, and respect for materials. Similarly, Pocsik’s attention to carving and material specificity of local woods positions craft as an embodied and sustained act of contemplation. Rather than directly inheriting Shaker design philosophy, the artist adopts certain ethical and material sensibilities associated with Shaker craft while pushing them toward a more irrational and expressive terrain.

The exhibition includes new works from several ongoing series, including walnut hands holding bronze tools, flowers, vegetables or fruit, forms that suggest cyclical relationships between labor, leisure, and sustenance. Pocsik also debuts two functional chair sculptures, a rocking chair and a standard chair, both incorporating subtly anthropomorphic elements. Suspended overhead, a series of umbrella-form chandeliers emit light through stained glass panels, further collapsing distinctions between utility and sculpture.

The resulting body of work simultaneously references and destabilizes the visual language of 19th-century American furniture through a distinctly surrealist lens. Across the exhibition, Pocsik engages the sculptural object as a site where form, function, and emotion converge, extending utility into a more psychologically charged register. The human figure, never fully present yet never entirely absent, emerges through gesture, proportion, and material tension. Through this continual negotiation between body, object, environment, and history, Pocsik frames sculpture as an evolving system of relationships shaped through perception, material, and use.

Vincent Pocsik (b. 1985, Cleveland, OH) received an MA in Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles and a BS from Bowling Green State University, OH. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles; Shrine Gallery, New York; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Objective Gallery, New York and Shanghai; and Twentieth Exhibitions, Los Angeles. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at R&Co., New York; Object Gallery, St. Moritz Switzerland and the Marfa Invitational at Room 57 Gallery, Marfa, TX. Pocsik lives and works in Los Angeles.