Steve Tobin (b. 1957, Philadelphia) is a conceptual artist whose academic background has focused intensively on mathematics and physics and peripherally on fine arts. A Pennsylvania native, he studied theoretical mathematics and physics at Tulane University and the structure of matter at the University of Pennsylvania. Tobin’s science-based worldview has informed his art practice rather than traditional art-historical references. Tobin creates unique visual axioms rather than following contemporary art trends. By incorporating natural forms and mathematical patterns into his sculptures and installations, Tobin has created a unique body of work—in his words, “monuments to the blending of visual science practice and formal artistic expression.” For Tobin, “nature as art and nature as science” are one and the same.
Tobin started the making phase of his life by blowing laboratory glass apparatus for experiments when he was 13 years old. While studying science at Tulane, his parallel pursuit of glassblowing led him to build a glassblowing studio in Murano, Italy, and create monumental glass installations up to 30-feet high and 100-feet long, forever changing the field of glassmaking. Working in twenty countries around the world, Tobin created installations incorporating recycled materials, commenting on issues of ecology, industrial waste and humankind’s relation to the environment. Existential transformation of the viewer was his objective.
After a fifteen-year retrospective in Finland in 1993, Tobin traded glass for bronze, steel and stone allowing him to experiment with monumentality in more traditional sculptural materials. One-of-a-kind bronze works cast in his own unique foundry directly from nature range from his towering Ghanaian Termite Hills to the huge underground systems of the Bronze Roots series and 1,000-part castings of buffalo bones for Bonewall. His best-known work, Trinity Root, 2005, memorializes the sycamore tree that sheltered St. Paul’s Chapel on 9/11 and was installed on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in New York City.
Tobin’s Squeezes reveal the mysterious unseen space inside a closed fist. Detailed 3D-printed molds allow these intimate hand-size pieces to be cast up to 14-feet tall. Like the Root series and the bones, Tobin’s intent is to show the power of the unseen thus changing viewers’ relationship to themselves and the natural world.
After completing Trinity Root, Tobin moved from naturalist castings to modernist constructions using steel pipe recycled from the oil industry, giving his Steelroots series a pared-down, metaphorical character. Inspired partly by Asian calligraphy and his time teaching art in Japan, these animated sculptures suggest romantic dancers, martial arts movements, families united and demonstrate, again, his gift for melding organic forms with industrial materials and processes.
Tobin’s work has been collected and exhibited worldwide and in many museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; White House Permanent Collection, Washington, DC; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Lausanne, Switzerland.