Robert Mallary
Robert W. Mallary was an American abstract expressionist sculptor and pioneer in computer art. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was renowned for his Neo-Dada or "junk art" sculpture, created from found materials and urban detritus, pieced together with hardened liquid plastics and resins. Mallary's work is represented in permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Modern in London. The computer work has a specific origin. Mallary joined the art department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1967, and in 1968, with his son Michael, wrote a FORTRAN program called TRAN2 for the IBM 1130 in the Amherst College computer lab. TRAN2 sliced a form into thin parallel cross-sections and had a plotter draw each one; the drawings became templates, the slices were cut in plastic — later plywood and marble — then stacked on a metal rod, laminated, smoothed and polished by hand. The results were among the first computer-generated artworks anywhere: QUAD II dates from 1968, and Quad III (TRAN2) appeared in the Whitney's 1968 Annual Exhibition of Sculpture, the first time a museum showed a computer-generated art object. He published the program in "TRAN2 — A computer graphics program to make sculpture."
Works in the collection
No published works yet.
