Rona Pondick in ArtNet News
Sculptor Rona Pondick Has Kept Journalists Away From Her Private Life for Decades. She’s Finally Ready to Talk About It.
On the occasion of a major new show in New York, Pondick divulged biographical details to peel back the layers of her work.
Pac Pobric, March 15, 2022
“Some weeks after I started conducting interviews for this profile of the sculptor Rona Pondick on the occasion of her new show at Marc Straus in New York, after I’d talked with her friends, dealers, collectors, confidants, and twice to her husband, the painter Robert Feintuch, Pondick sent me an email to confirm our next interview. She added: “When I got home yesterday, Robert shared with me what you talked about.” It was largely about Pondick’s childhood. “Must say it is a little weird knowing I am being examined so closely. I am feeling things I didn’t expect.”
It’s true I had been nosy, probably because Pondick, as far as I could tell, has always seemed so guarded. Her published interviews are master classes in precision. You can almost see her marking up texts to clarify the finest of details. She leaves a lot out. She avoids discussing life outside the studio. Family talk is muted. Her medical history, long an open secret, and by all accounts an indispensable avenue into her sculpture, is relegated to footnotes. Every one of my interviewees described her as exacting or blunt or pertinacious, none more diplomatically than Thaddaeus Ropac, her dealer of more than 30 years: “She has developed something very much her own, unimpressed by trends.”
“Or by the market,” he added, perhaps a bit wistfully.
So I understood why Pondick was apprehensive about my probing. I was apprehensive too. Pondick has a powerful personal presence. She speaks at times in a clipped manner, and her steely gray hair, chiseled features, and handsome, starkly shaped eyeglasses suggest sternness. “She doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” Steven Zevitas, one of her gallerists, told me. He admitted that his very first impression upon meeting her was intimidation. “She has this way, when she first meets you, of giving a stare, and you feel like you’re being sized up. It’s like she’s seeing into you.”
Her sculptures did nothing to assuage my anxiety. The first time I saw one was at the Yale University Art Gallery, where Fox (1998–99) robbed me of my calm. As I turned a corner in the museum on a visit one day, the sculpture practically snapped at me, and it was a grisly sight, this human head—cast from Pondick’s—grafted onto a canine body. What bothered me most was that I laughed. I didn’t like being seduced by a monster.”