Robert Mallary

Robert W. Mallary (2 December 1917 - 10 February 1997) was an American artist. He was a prominent American sculptor in the 1950s and 1960s, creating Neo-Dada or junk art from found materials. He was also an early exponent of the use of plastics and computers in art. He became less well known in later life, and was a teacher of art at the University of Massachusetts for nearly 30 years.

Mallary was born in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He was interested in art from his youth, and went to Mexico City to study at the Escuela de Las Artes Del Libro (now the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas) in 1938-39 and then at the Academy of San Carlos in 1942-43, where he was inspired by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He also studied at the Painters Workshop School in Boston, Massachusetts in 1941. He started to work with plastics in the 1930s, and exhibited paintings made from liquid polyester at the Urban Gallery in New York City in 1954.

He worked in advertising in California in 1945-48, He taught art at the California School of Art in Los Angeles in 1949-50, at the Hollywood Art Center from 1950 to 1954, and then at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque from 1955 to 1959. He moved to New York City in 1959 to teach at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He was a teacher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Massachusetts from 1967 until his retirement in 1996.

He arranged found objects - discarded cardboard or fabrics - which he covered with polyester resin to create abstract relief sculptures and assemblages. He also produced words using sand and straw hardened with polyester resin. He was selected for a $1,000 preliminary award in the US national section of the Guggenheim International Award in 1960, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. Examples of his works were included in the "Sculpture U.S.A." and "Sixteen Americans" exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1959, and then at its "Art of Assemblage" exhibition in 1961. He did not have a gallery show in New York City for nearly 30 years, from 1966 to 1993.

A retrospective show was held at the State University of New York in Potsdam, New York, in 1968. He exhibited sculptures designed using computers at the "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968, assembling stacked layers of shapes cut out of plywood designed using a bespoke computer graphics program, TRAN2.

He suffered from liver problems in later life, attributable to the toxicity of liquid polyester. He lived at Conway, Massachusetts, and died of leukaemia at Cooley-Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife Margot, three children, and two siblings.