Robert Lazzarini’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, recently resembled a crime scene lab or a product-safety research facility. In one corner was a full-scale hotel room door in a freestanding frame, ready to be violently kicked in so the artist can take notes on the damage for a forthcoming sculpture. There’s also a large windowpane, likewise due to be smashed and studied for a piece that will be included in the artist’s exhibition this month at Marlborough Chelsea in New York.

Material destruction, attention to the most minute detail, and obsessive research are all hallmarks of Lazzarini’s practice, which results in intricately altered sculptures of skulls, violins, pay phones, brass knuckles, guns, and signage. The artist distorts the contours of the original object with computer modeling to arrive at a new form, then fabricates the sculpture using appropriate materials: A sculpture of a hammer, for example, will be made of wood and steel, and a skull cast from actual bone powder.

A boyish-looking 47, Lazzarini has for more than a decade occupied a studio in a large industrial building on the banks of the notoriously polluted Newtown Creek. There he is aided by a team of assistants whose individual expertise ranges from 3-D modeling to welding. In the main studio space there’s a partially finished sculpture of a tilted, broken-open safe; a paper mock-up of a shot-up Dead End sign; and, hanging on a wall, an enormous printout of a drooping Liquor sign. For the upcoming exhibition, Lazzarini says he’s aiming for “a kind of American landscape, a bit of Badlands sensibility,” referring to the 1973 Terrence Malick film. “It’s not just about ‘the street’ or ‘the home,’” he adds. “It’s a collage of spaces and things.”

Lazzarini recently took over an additional, lower space in the building in which to construct a monumental sculpture of a chain-link fence, composed of more than 200 individually cast steel pieces and topped by a length of fabricated, curled razor wire. Several dozen constituent elements are arrayed on shelves, waiting to be slotted into a custom-made wooden jig and welded together. This will be the largest piece he’s realized, surpassing the nine-foot-tall pay phone sculpture shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and subsequently purchased by the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. In the past, Lazzarini has exhibited sculptures that share a theme — for example, the weaponry in “guns, knives, brass knuckles,” a 2010 show presented at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles and the Flag Art Foundation in New York — but the new suite of works has a more subtle cohesion that stops just shy of offering an actual narrative. “Viewers are absolutely going to try to create some sort of story line between the objects,” Lazzarini predicts, “and there just isn’t one. This is a disjointed, fractured scene.”

The artist grew up in northern New Jersey and was introduced to art history early on via family trips to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He earned an undergraduate degree in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts and later worked for five years at the Met’s bookshop, using that opportunity to more deeply immerse himself in the art of the past. “I would spend six months in Southeast Asia, nine months in front of the Rodins,” he recalls.

Lazzarini was always an avid draftsman, and it was his work on paper that led him to create visually complex sculpture: He experimented with projecting his drawings and radically shifting their perspectives. (As many critics have noted, there are various two-dimensional precedents for Lazzarini’s three-dimensional distortions, most famously the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein the Younger’s Ambassadors of 1533.)

After toying with a process of altering form in a more handmade fashion — “free-form, biomorphic distortions and manipulating molds” — Lazzarini turned to the computer as a means to subject objects to strictly mathematically determined alterations. He began with violin, which occupied him from 1995 to 1997 (a period that also included employment in Jeff Koons’s studio, with mold-making and finishing among his responsibilities). Lazzarini’s violin is based on a 1693 Stradivarius instrument in the Met’s collection. “That was the first object in which I eliminated material translation,” he says of the straightforwardly titled work, which is made of flame maple wood, ebony, and bone, all materials found in the actual instrument. “It was a 1:1 scale, a compound mathematical distortion, and there was a figure/ground relationship,” Lazzarini sums up. “It was the fulfillment of a lot of formal and conceptual concerns in this one sculpture.”

Lazzarini was also intrigued by the “life span” of the original object and how to replicate the marks of age and time in his own sculpture. This interest in material decay is distinct from Koons’s preoccupation with polish. The 1:1 ratio allowed Lazzarini to avoid what he considers a “facile sculptural device: Make things bigger! Make things smaller!” While computer modeling was integral to the process, materials were no less important. “I was always suspicious of computers and computer art,” he says. “I started using the computer only as needed—it was the best way to skin a cat, and only a part of the equation in the initial design phase.”

Following this creative breakthrough, Lazzarini had a series of pivotal exhibitions: at Pierogi Gallery, in Brooklyn, in 2000, where he showed distorted sculptures of a chair, a telephone, and hammers; in the 2000 digital- and tech-art “Bitstreams” exhibition at the Whitney, where he debuted sculptures of skulls; a 2003 exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond; and solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut; Deitch Projects and Paul Kasmin, in New York; and Honor Fraser, in Los Angeles. In 2011 he joined the roster of Marlborough Chelsea under the leadership of Max Levai. “The challenge with Robert’s market is creating a supply to meet the demand,” says Levai. “We get a phone call a week at the gallery asking about the possibility of purchasing one of Robert’s skull or gun sculptures.”