He called it Tallix, after the second and third syllables of “metallics,” and opened it in 1970 in Cold Spring, N.Y., a Putnam County village on the eastern side of the Hudson River.
Artists in New York City and along the East Coast were soon trekking up to see him. While minimalist sculptors in the 1960s, like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, preferred the clean, smooth results of industrial metalwork, their successors in the 1970s wanted to explore and celebrate the process behind their art and looked for creatively minded metallurgists as partners.
To meet demand, Mr. Polich hired scores of artisans and had to relocate several times to larger spaces, including one along the Hudson in Peekskill. He finally settled further north in Beacon, where his presence helped catalyze the city’s art scene.
The art-market boom of the 1980s was good for him, but the bust that followed forced him to sell his operation, and not long after that to leave it entirely. In 1995, Mr. Polich partnered with Frank Stella to open a 105,000-square-foot foundry, Polich Art Works, in Rock Tavern, on the western side of the Hudson. His first major project was Mr. Stella’s “Amabel,” a 30-ton abstract sculpture for a corporate client in Seoul.
For a decade Mr. Polich was in the odd position of competing against his former foundry, but the two merged in 2006 to form Polich Tallix. Though he was well into retirement age, he continued to work long hours, and did so until he sold the foundry to UAP, an art fabricator, in 2019.
“We are artisans,” he told The Times in 2015. “We have to have an intimate connection with the feelings and needs of the artists who work here and what their projects require. We make no aesthetic decisions, and our goal is to leave no fingerprints behind.”
