Robert Mallary

Robert Mallary was born in 1917 in Toledo, Ohio and raised in Berkeley, California. He began studying art as a child and developed a fascination with Mexican muralists. This led him to Mexico in the 1940s to study with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Inspired by Siqueiros’ use of industrial materials, Mallary began experimenting with plastics in 1938, laying the foundation for a career grounded in technical invention. In the decades that followed, he worked with lucite, fiberglass, black light, polyester, and acrylic resin, exploring their potential in both painting and sculpture. He taught at institutions across the country, including the University of Southern California, the University of Mexico, and the Philadelphia College of Art, before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1967, where he worked for over 20 years.

In the early 1960s, Mallary began producing aggressive, resin-hardened reliefs made from scrap cardboard, cloth, and discarded clothing. These assemblages, often somber in tone, reflected what he called the extreme situation of modern life, figures caught in states of collapse, contortion, or existential struggle. His tuxedo series, built from shredded formalwear, grew from this sensibility and took form as a sculptural environment of solitary, humanlike entities compressed by internal and external pressures. Though aligned loosely with Neo-Dada, Mallary worked outside fixed movements. His figures combined elements of physical comedy and grotesque anatomy, often presented as hollowed skins, collapsed forms, or contorted gestures resisting collapse. In 1967, he turned to computers and began writing his own software to generate sculpture by code. He developed TRAN2 to model three-dimensional forms from algorithmic input and ECOSITE to design ecological land art. Over time, he built an extensive library of more than 150 subroutines to support his evolving creative systems. His digital works from the Solar Series, Ribbon Series, and Three Arrays extended these earlier formal concerns into algorithmic space, translating physical composition into code-driven pattern, repetition, and movement.

His work was included in the landmark 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art and featured in Life magazine during a period when American sculpture was undergoing radical change. He exhibited widely in the 1960s, including at the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his computer-generated sculpture Quad 3 appeared in 1968. That same year, he was invited to exhibit at Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Throughout the 1980s, his computer drawings, plotter works, and sculptural models appeared regularly in the SIGGRAPH Art Shows and were collected by institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mallary passed away in 1997.