Daniel Göttin, Installation Proposal for MINUS SPACE, 2010

February 6 – March 13, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new immersive installation by Basel, Switzerland-based artist Daniel Göttin entitled Network 45 with Signs. For the past 20 years, Göttin has focused on making temporary, site-specific interventions that examine the subjective nature of perception. His installations, always consisting of common industrial materials, such as tape, carpet, and paint, playfully respond to the specific characteristics of an architectural site and activate the viewer’s relationship to it.

For Network 45 with Signs, Göttin will create a black tape wall installation throughout the entire gallery. At select intervals throughout his installation, he will also install a series of abstract “signs” made of aluminum foil on laminated cardboard, which were informed and inspired by his recent residency in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Daniel Göttin has mounted nearly 60 solo exhibitions and projects since 1990 at museums, galleries, and non-profits worldwide, including throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, and the United States. His work has been presented, commissioned, collected, and written about widely over the past 20 years. In addition to his artistic work, Göttin, along with his partner, artist Gerda Maise, also directs Hebel_121, an experimental exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland.

Daniel Göttin’s installation Network 42 (2008) is also still on view in the café at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate in Long Island City, NY. It was originally created for the exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, which was on view at the museum from October 2008 – May 2009.

SUPPORT
The exhibition Daniel Göttin: Network 45 with Signs is supported by Abteilung Kultur, Basel, Switzerland. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Keira Kotler, September 26 to October 28, 2008
[I Look for Light], 2008
Urethane and varnish on acrylic
18 x 18 inches

March 18 – April 23

Bay Area-artist Lisa Curet’s work channels and incorporates qualities found in pattern painting. Layer upon layer of shapes and color are applied, creating a tension between the varied surfaces. The combined results are flooded with resin, sealing and fusing the multiple applications. Inspired by travel and human interaction, she views her works as metaphors for one’s conscious perception of the world outside.

Keira Kotler is interested in the pure experience of color without the context of a given subject matter. Recently included in two notable exhibitions addressing spirituality and the sublime, her work focuses on light, shadow, and what she describes as the “subtle nuances found in common experiences.” This exhibition debuts a new series of paintings that further her interest with psychological introspection.

Indira Martina Morre applies multiple layers of white gesso on canvas and renders them to a rich satin finish. Here, she creates floating fields of her personalized markings made from graphite, charcoal, and pastel. In suspended masses, they imply an inner space suggesting psychological galaxies. Concerned with the influence of technology upon human cognitive experience, the paintings, while delicately beautiful, whisper an ambivalent tone.

March 11 – April 10, 2010

Don Voisine, Untitled (XX), 2010
Oil on Paper, 4 x 6 inches
Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art, NYC

Curated by James Carroll of the New Arts Program, this three venue survey will feature Don Voisine’s work from 1988 to the present. Northampton Community College will showcase work from 1988 to 2006, in particular paintings on canvas and wood. Reading Area Community College will feature paintings on styrofoam and prints, as well as one diamond shaped painting. The New Arts Program will feature recent work.

Northampton Community College
Bethlehem, PA
March 1-31, 2010

Reading Area Community College
Reading, PA
March 1-31, 2010

New Arts Program
Kutztown, PA
March 19 – May 1, 2010

Installation view

March 4 – May 1, 2010

One might think it easier to photographically reproduce a recent monochromatic painting by John Griefen than a 50’s painting by Ad Reinhardt, as the acrylic paint on a Griefen is textured and thick in contrast to Reinhardt’s matte application. But both Reinhardt and Griefen defy reproduction, and that is just one of the things they have in common. Both demand that the viewer powerfully and authentically engage the actual painting, and both are inextricably bound to the physical act of painting.

This physicality is probably why Griefen prefers a motorcycle to a car, his rustic home in Southwest France to Brooklyn, or wine to water. Life is lived fully in the art of John Griefen, and the viewer can sense this in front of his paintings.

Griefen has been showing in New York City since the 1960s, with numerous exhibitions at Kornblee Gallery, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, and others. His work is in major public and private collections, and has been discussed by writers as diverse as Rosalind Krauss (Artforum, 1969), Hilton Kramer (NY Times, 1973) and Terry Fenton, 1981. Gary Snyder/Project Space is pleased to present its first exhibition of John Griefen’s paintings.

Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication
History, practices, issues and implications
Conference and Exhibition, Portland, Oregon

Sunday, April 25, 2010
University of Oregon in Portland
White Stag Block

From the outside a Donald Judd piece is seamless, hiding all traces of it’s construction. But behind the final piece is a rich history of the artist’s intent and his method for fabrication. Join us for a groundbreaking discussion of Judd’s art, lead by contemporary art scholars and Judd’s longtime fabricator, Peter Ballantine. The day-long conference in Portland, Ore., will look at Judd as an icon of the American minimalist movement, as well as issues of authenticity and fabrication that continue to have lasting implications for artists today.

A related exhibition will be presented in the University of Oregon in Portland’s White Box visual laboratory.

Conference Speakers:
Robert Storr — Dean of the Yale School of Art and past curator at the Museum of Modern Art, art critic and painter
Peter Ballantine — Curator, lecturer, restorer and Judd’s longtime fabricator
Bruce Guenther — Curator of modern and contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum

Curators:
Jeff Jahn — Judd Conference Consulting Curator
Arcy Douglass — Judd Conference Director

Registration (includes boxed lunch):
$65 early registration by March 22; $85 after
$35 for students

To register, visit www.juddconference.com

The event is sponsored by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts

Richard Bottwin, Facade #5, 2009
Wood, Acrylic Paint, Textured Acrylic Sheet
15 x 15 x 4.5 inches

“Brent: As a sculptor you work fairly pure, neither adorning pieces with mounts nor placing your presentations on pedestals. If a “work” sits on the floor and only grows to somewhere around or below the knees, well, that is where it sits.

You suspend. In this case the body becomes very aware of its own mechanisms; how it values weight, position; how this operates within the sense of the temporal.

Smaller scale: The eye moves in and latches onto visual sensations that convince, though also deceive. And while no guesswork is needed to place the vocation in the realm of the sculptural there is a question to whether the form adds more, or if there is more to what there is?

Richard: My very early freestanding sculptures, although stable, looked like they were always about to fall over. Now I strive to make it very difficult to get a vertical fix on what you’re looking at. Walk around them and any expectations you had during your first scan will be subverted. Some recent pieces create a slight sense of anxiety in my gut when I look at them. Not a panic response exactly, more fun than that. Confronting a human-scaled construction that is standing on the floor, does engage the body of the viewer as you suggest. In contrast to this, I have found that the import of gravity is not such a big deal in small, pedestal size pieces. Maybe that’s why I moved them to the wall and used them to explore other issues long ago.

I’ve always been suspect of the conventional “modern art” solutions to gravity; Sculpture on a pad, sculpture on a stick, sculpture on a hidden pad (underground) and sculpture hanging on a wire doesn’t interest me. I like things to stand alone, solidly on the ground without artifice. Recently, I’ve been very conscious of wanting the things to stand in a thoroughly inevitable way, like junk casually left on a construction site. This allows the environment to intrude upon the sculpture and the sculpture to engage the environment.

The environment may be the “More” in your question. I’d like to have several sculptures in an installation working together, or, a single built environment one can enter that remove the viewer from this reality. I’ve always been moving toward architecture and have brushed up against it a few times. I feel like I’m collecting information to eventually build a pavilion or a “house” of some sort again as I did a few times in the past.

One vice I have is a passion for the decorative. For a brief period, around 20 years ago, I threw 22k gold leaf on my sculptures and sometimes glazed it with color. I learned a lot about pigments and transparency that way and then got over it. Now, I employ that love of decorative surface to create allusions to functionality. Veneers make the sculptures look like furniture and that confuses expectations. Figuration in a veneer also initiates visual activity that I can play with in the form of the sculpture…”

Charlotte Posenenske, Vierkantrohre Serie D, 1967
(Reconstruction 2009)

March 12 – May 30, 2010

The initial exhibition at Daimler Contemporary in 2010 will show major 1960s trends in German abstract art from the Daimler Art Collection: Constructivism, Zero, Minimal Art, Concept and Seriality. Starting with 1950s predecessors – such as Josef Albers, Norbert Kricke and Siegfried Cremer – the show considers abstract art developments in the cities of Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich, but also looks at contiguous Swiss positions. About 60 works by 28 artists are being presented, all developing a specifically German Minimalism in the period from 1954 to 1974 in various media (sculpture, painting, film and drawing).

Participating Artists:
Karl Heinz Adler, Josef Albers, Joachim Albrecht, Peter Benkert, Hartmut Böhm, Siegfried Cremer, Hanne Darboven, Karl Gerstner, Imi Giese, Mathias Goeritz, Kuno Gonschior, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Hajo Hangen, Erwin Heerich, Gottfried Honegger, Norbert Kricke, Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack, Karl Georg Pfahler, Verena Pfisterer, Charlotte Posenenske, Christian Roeckenschuss, Peter Roehr, Ulrich Rückriem, Eckhard Schene, Klaus Staudt, Franz Erhard Walther, Herbert Zangs

In the early sixties in Germany, a new kind of Minimalism developed that was initially largely independent from the developments in America at the time. This German Minimalism was in many cases stimulated by, but also in conflict with, Concrete Art and the European Zero avant-garde, which drew attention to it from 1957 on, starting in Düsseldorf, with unusually staged exhibitions and spectacular projects for public space. The steles, cubes, and picture objects produced by the Zero artists, which lay in the space or stood in front of the wall, represent a significant new step for German art in terms of quality around 1959/60. The Düsseldorf Kunstakademie played an important role in the transition to a specifically German Minimalism from 1962 until around 1970. In the sixties, it provided many of its students with a basis for examining minimalized sculpture. Among them, the young Franz Erhard Walther developed his first proto-Minimalist objects starting in 1962, followed in 1964/65 by Imi Knoebel, Imi Giese, and Blinky Palermo. At the same time, Hanne Darboven in Hamburg, Charlotte Posenenske in Offenbach and, outside academic contexts, Peter Roehr in Frankfurt conceived their first attempts at Minimalist works.

On the occasion of this pioneering exhibition there will be a three-day symposium on May 15 -17, 2010, held at Daimler Contemporary in Berlin. The publicly accessible symposium is inviting protagonists, important collectors, curators and active gallery owners of the time, academics, art critics and journalists, who will give insights in talks, panel discussions and specific lectures. By engaging experts from the respective genres the symposium aims to draw an encompassing picture of the minimalist movement in the field of music, literature, film and dance in Germany.

Douglas Witmer, Things Mean a Lot at the Time, 2010
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 20 x 24 inches

March 4-27, 2010

Blank Space Gallery presents Ring The Bells Anew, an exhibition of recent paintings by Douglas Witmer. This is the artist’s third solo show in New York, and his first with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Witmer has gained increasing attention for his uniquely distilled sensibility related to his paintings’ surface and color. His recent canvases feature one or two rectangles of solid color on top of and interacting with varied gray washes that cascade down the painting’s surface. Though reductive in their attitude and appearance, the resulting works are anything but “minimal.”

Contrary to first impressions, Witmer’s compositions are not planned or diagrammed. For the artist, painting is a process of inquiry; each piece is an individual result of decisions made intuitively and directly.

The critic and art historian Vittorio Colaizzi has written, “Witmer paints the inheritance of modernist abstraction, and perhaps, metaphorically, the more ecumenical spirituality of today, in the openness of his compositions, their perpetual almost-ness, and their refusal of closure or perfection.”

About the title for this exhibition the artist states, “I am trying to underscore the idea that my paintings embody new acts of declaration using long-existing means. Taken further, it communicates a hope in the continued relevance of abstract painting.”

Douglas Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In New York his work has recently appeared at P.S.1/MoMA in the group exhibition “Minus Space,” as well as The Painting Center and M55 Art in Long Island City. Other recent venues include: Pharmaka in Los Angeles, Gallery Siano in Philadelphia, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton in Ohio, Sydney Non-Objective in Australia, and Bus-Dori Project Space in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Brad Killam & Michelle Grabner, Inside Trip, 2009
Silverpoint, wood, metal, enamel

February 27 – April 10, 2010

White Flag Projects presents Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and other Planes of Activity, with artwork by Greg Bogin, Elizabeth Bryant, Anne Eastman, Ib Geertsen, Grabner/Killam, Jean Painleve, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Jonas Wood. The exhibition is curated by Michelle Grabner.

Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and other Planes of Activity will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by Poor Farm Press titled MOBILES, including essays by Nicholas Frank, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam.

Installation view

February 17 – May 2, 2010

A major retrospective of Franz Erhard Walther’s work
From 17 February to 2 May 2010, Mamco will be hosting the most important retrospective devoted to Franz Erhard Walther (1939, Fulda, Germany), one of the artists associated with the museum since its founding. Indeed, Mamco has followed his work for many years. De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 (On the Origin of Sculpture, 1958-2009) will be the largest show the artist has put together to date. Spread out over some thirty galleries on the museum’s four floors, this show brings together several hundred pieces that go back over a half century of making art.

As in other Mamco retrospectives (Martin Kippenberger, Claudio Parmiggiani, Siah Armajani), De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 consecrates an artist whose work has marked the history of the venue, both with an initial show devoted to Walther in 1998 and, since the museum’s opening, the permanent presentation of Werklager, a gallery featuring a large collection of works produced between 1961 and 1972 that includes one of his major pieces, 1. Werksatz (1963-1968).

A crucial artist of the avant-garde in the 1960s
Walther has left a profound and lasting mark on the German art scene by broadening the field of art and proposing new types of work, notably in terms of the role of the viewer as an integral part of a piece. Walther trained at the Offenbach School of Applied Arts and at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie. The artist initially focused on drawing (Wortbilder) before shifting his work towards the object and the new materials that were finding their way into the realm of sculpture such as the body, action, time and space. The early 1960s were a turning point in his output when he declared that the work of art is created in the process of action, the artist’s or the viewer’s. ‘Instead of a material object, be it an image or a sculpture, I proclaimed that the body’s gestures could have the character of a work of art.’

Walther creates cloth sculpture-objects displayed in a variety of ways, spread out in space, folded, filled out by a human body or left as they are, in the state of an object of pure contemplation. Hybrid works of art that verge on painting and sculpture, these pieces invite the viewers to experience their relationship to time and space. Yet whatever the materials or techniques used by the artist – he continues to turn out drawings notably – his work throughout his career has always come down to the importance he places in language, memory and history.

Hundreds of works over the museum’s four floors
The Mamco retrospective covers the different facets of the artist’s work. The extent of the space that has been set aside for the show makes it possible to present several groups of large-scale objects like Das Neue Alphabet (1990-1996), a series of twenty-six foam and cotton sculptures that reproduce the letters of the alphabet; and Raumelemente (1973), a large wall installation featuring thirteen elements made of cotton cloth. Juvenilia, unpublished archival photos, major works from the 1960s and ’70s and very recent pieces will be on hand in an exceptional presentation for the museum-going public in Geneva. The artist’s drawing will also command more than its share of attention with the display – for the first time outside of Germany – of the 500 original illustrations that make up Sternenstaub – Stardust (2009), an autobiographical work in which Walther recounts the highlights of his life between 1942 and 1973.

To top off the retrospective, Walther will be present at Mamco on 20 April for a rare event that is open to the public. On that day the artist and art students from HEAD – Geneva will activate Werksatz, a major work by the artist that is part of the museum collection.

Sydney Ball, Zianexis, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 168 cm

March 4-21, 2010

The following extract is taken from ‘Sydney Ball: prophet of abstraction’ by Wendy Walker, Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings 1963–2007, p21

The emergence at the end of the 1990s of an insistent form in Ball’s paintings – reminiscent of shapes in early drawings of rock formations from his landscape works – gave rise to the asymmetrical, ragged-edged motifs in the abstract paintings of Structures 1, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art in 2005. Striking in its formal ascetic restraint, the subtitle of Structures 2 (2007), Abstract Architecture, is an indication that Ball’s point of reference for the new series of work was architectural form in space; specifically, both the contemporary architecture of Zaha Hadid and the reductive modernist constructions of Mies van der Rohe (prior to his art studies Ball’s background was in architecture).

The dynamism of Ball’s paintings is predicated on arigorous attention to the nuances of colour relationships. His selection of colours (secondary and tertiary) is compelling for they are rarely straightforward and frequently unexpected.

From the outset, Ball has maintained that the circle motif – critical to the graphic potency of the highly-resolved Cantos – represented the Chinese symbol for infinity. In the vibrant paintings of the 2007 Structures 2 series Ball reinstates the disc within a square as a strategy (as it was in the 1960s) for the introduction of additional colour.

Ball’s oeuvre may be regarded as a succession of evolutions, in which each concept is comp-rehensively worked through and continually reassessed, so that even within series there is conscious variation. Paralleling the ambitious scale of his paintings is a continual desire to push the boundaries. This willingness to experiment and to take risks propelled his move to New York and, later, his extensive travels in Japan, China, Korea and India, where he sought out sites of spiritual and cultural significance. His journey has resulted in a remarkable body of work of which the enduringly authoritative colour paintings in this exhibition are a significant part.

Studio view

March 4-27, 2010

Anonymous, Legend: The Birth of Speech
near Jodhpur, Rajasthan, 2008

March 4-27, 2010

These small paintings are made anonymously in India by practitioners of Tantra, some of whom are artists, to represent and embody principles of Tantra. Viewing or meditating on these reductive and essential images stimulates specific mental and / or spiritual experiences. While they are centuries old with highly codified forms and colors, they exude such a high level of the artists’ intentionality that they continually appear fresh and alive. Despite their didactic function, they also have a history of being coveted as decorative objects and abstract art.

February 7 – April 11, 2010

For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Max Bense, ZKM will present an exhibition showing his international impact on the fine arts and literature, which can be compared to that of Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan. The exhibition, which carries forth the ZKM series “Philosophy and Art,” presents Bense as poet and author, scholar of the arts and literature, as well as exhibition curator and publicist.

Bense, who was active in Stuttgart from 1949 until his death in 1990, propagated an aesthetic of “technical existence” in Germany of the post-war era, which antedated by decades the media-theoretical turn in literature and the humanities that occurred in the 1980s. His thoughts on literature and art were part of a comprehensive philosophical picture of the world that showed a natural-science and “technical reality” of civilization and was aimed against German post-war culture’s romantic and mythologizing trends. Already back then, Bense established a concept of culture that—in the Enlightenment tradition—included the intellectual history of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Max Bense, who was born on 7 February 1910 in Strassbourg, studied physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, and received his PhD in 1937 with a thesis on “Quantum mechanics and existential relativity.” He first worked as a physicist for I.G. Farben in Leverkusen. After his war duties, Bense pursued an invitation from the University of Jena. But he already fled to West Germany in 1948 and was appointed first as visiting professor in 1949 and then as professor of philosophy and the philosophy of science in 1950 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He also taught at the HfG Ulm, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and in Rio de Janeiro.

Bense began pursuing his literary and artistic tendencies as publicist and radio playwright during his studies. In Stuttgart, he also began to organize exhibitions, first at the Galerie Gänsheide beginning in 1957, then at the study galleries he founded at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. He wrote about numerous fine artists and poets, among others, about Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Alberto Giacometti, Almir Mavignier, Henri Michaux, Mira Schendel, and Paul Wunderlich as well as Alfred Andersch, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his exhibitions and essays, Bense also created other forums for the arts: i.e., by founding the magazine “Augenblick” (1955) and “reihe rot,” 1960, which he and Elisabeth Walther edited, which published, among others Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Diter Rot. At the same time, beginning with semiotics and news technology, beginning in the mid-1950s he developed an “information aesthetics” that influenced concrete and kinetic artists throughout Europe and made him one of the seminal theorists of the pioneering era of European computer art.

The exhibition with publications by Max Bense and prints, paintings, and sculptures by artists that were important to Max Bense, or were influenced by him, is supplemented with manuscripts and photos, as well as recordings of his radio plays and television appearances. They show the philosopher and his view of “art in an artificial world” (1956).

Artists in the exhibition:
Kurd Alsleben, Max Bill, Hannelore Busse, Pierre Charbonnier, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Bruno Giorgi, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Harig, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Josef Hirsal, Oskar Holweck, Hugo Jamin, Ernst Jandl, Hiroshi Kawano, Reinhold Köhler, Harry Kramer, Kurt Kranz, Theo Lutz, Aloisio Magalhaes, Georges Mathieu, Almir Mavignier, Hansjörg Meyer, Henri Michaux, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Günter Neusel, Heinz Pfahler, Décio Pignatari, Uli Pohl, Francis Ponge, Diter Rot, Bernhard Sandfort, Mira Schendel, Anton Stankowski, Karel Trinkewitz, Timm Ulrichs, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Oswald Wiener, Emmett Williams, Wols, Paul Wunderlich, and Dolf Zillmann

Curated by Margit Rosen, Jens Lutz, Miriam Stürner, and Peter Weibel

Dear friends,

Due to the blizzard, we will be closed to the public today, Friday, February 26, 2010.  We will reopen again tomorrow, Saturday, February 27, during our regular hours 12-6pm.

Outside making snow angels,
Matthew & Rossana

Studio view

“I visited Karen Schifano’s Williamsburg studio in September. I knew her work from the Minus Space website, and from group exhibitions around town, including the summer group show at the Minus Space Gallery in Brooklyn the month before.

Schifano’s studio is a large, well-lit square of a space in a work-only commercial building. To orient you, if you were looking at a floor plan, I entered at the bottom left of the square. Facing me was a wall with large windows. To my left was a viewing wall, and on that wall were the two paintings you see above, with that little row of maquettes between them. Karen and I sat on chairs facing that wall…”

Gary Petersen, Wish You Well, 2009
Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 inches

February 10 – March 17, 2010

Curated by Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama, Color-Time-Space is an exhibition of thirteen geometric abstract painters that highlights the relationship between art and music.

Participating Artists:
James Biederman, Laurie Fendrich, Joanne Freeman, Julie Gross, Ben Larocco, Gary Petersen, Kazimira Rachfal, Jennifer Riley, Yvonne Thomas, Kim Uchiyama, Stephen Westfall, Thornton Willis, Kevin Wixted

“Music is an art of sound interval, time interval, and painting — my painting — is an art of space intervals. One is time, one is space.” — Gene Davis interview, 1981 Apr. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Sound and sight share experiential qualities when interpreted in music and visual art. The rhythm and tones of music compare with the intervals of sight and space in painting. The underlying systems in the score of music, and the grid in painting are comparable structures in the art of composition.

The artists participating in “Color-Time-Space” use color selectively to build intuitively rhythmic, and distinctly diverse color relationships in their creation of the painting space. That space is defined by grids, both actual and implied, and by the repetition of specific color elements. The paradoxical relationship of the intuitive and the measured gives these painters works a variety of contradictory attributes.

In a 1971 interview with Barbara Rose for Art Forum, Gene Davis states, “One must enter the painting through the door of a single color…if the viewer selects individual colors and looks at them across the surface of the work, he’s almost reliving the painting process…the spectator is in a sense, entering into kind of a time experience in the same way that I did when I painted it.”

The “time experience” described by Davis, links the experience of contemplation by the viewer with the process of creation by the artist. The artists participating in “Color-Time-Space” address this link and demonstrate the emotive, visceral space created in painting when color is used with psychology and intention.

Anne Appleby, Little Sweet Pea, 2008
Oil and wax on wood, 36.6 36.6 inches

Both followers of artist and colour theorist Josef Albers, the American painter Anne Appleby and German artist Kuno Gonschior have a common aspiration of capturing colours, by means of abstraction and through analytical observation of natural experiences.

Anne Appleby (born 1954), former Bay area painter, who works and lives in Montana, is often referred to as a Colour Field artist from her use of large “all over” abstract canvases. After graduating in 1989 with an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, she has for 20 years tried to render the subtle variations of tones and light passing through and over the organic subjects she chooses, for nature is her inspiration and concern. The technique she uses by mixing oil and wax on canvas enables her to obtain, layer upon layer, a delicate sensation of translucence and depth observed in nature, from its ephemeral events. Appleby likes to work in large triptychs or associations of panels, which allows the viewer to enter the fields easily. The contemporary art collector Guiseppe Panza, who commissioned her for the Phaeton’s room at the Ducal Palace of Sassuolo (Modena) is one of her admirers: “Her paintings are the landscapes of a nature that is invisible to our eyes but not to our conscience, which goes beyond the visible.” (Memories of a Collector, Abbeville Press, 2007, p.284).

After studying at the art academy of Düsseldorf and Cologne from 1957-1963, Kuno Gonschior (born 1935) started to create series of chromatic experiences. These series, based on capturing colours as a pure element, only differ from each other by their nuances. Gonschior’s works are playful and experimental, studying colour in all its variation and without the association of the psyche. The Mayor Gallery is showing a selection from the first two decades of his research as a Concrete artist. Often painted on small un-primed canvases, Gonschior applied small dabs of paint, as particles, bearing similarities with the impressionists and his palette, without limit, explored fluorescent colours to black.

Gonschior and Appleby, although two very distinctive artists, aim to touch a wider public, who often reject abstract, but as Gonschior explained at his recent museum exhibition in Germany: “It isn’t about having the right education, you just have to free your mind from these constraints and do the one thing that most people don’t do: concentrate and study the painting for a while, give the painting a chance –for say – 5 minutes. That will have an impact.” (in conversation with W. Smerling, “Just for you and me”, exhibition catalogue, MKM Duisburg, p.28)

The Mayor Gallery will also exhibit a number of paintings by Josef Albers to compliment their works.

“Brent: In “Treble II” you have an envelope-proportioned structure that has a fold but not like an envelope. There is a corner missing from one side: And a corner protruding from the other. The whole thing is one sheet of color, and of two forms… how did that come about?

Connie: In the “Treble” pieces I’m working with parts of a whole, hence the single color. As to whether these parts become a single entity or are in the process of individuation, well… it can go either way. That’s the point – the uncertainty.

Transformation, the presence, and a stimulus are all part of the move. There is always a “present”: And there is in every piece a “movement” just as there is a pull to and away from gravity. I work a disturbed equilibrium. And it’s there where I find the accord.

I’ve worked off the square/rectangle shape for years. This four-cornered parallelogram is static, constant, perfectly composed. But I take that parallelogram and cut into it, knock it off balance. I have it strive toward another less stable shape and then strive back for perfect containment. The shape wants to stay intact, but countervailing forces are always eroding and pulling at its perfect equanimity. The differing depths of the components in the piece are intended to enhance the notion that this is a changeable, morphing form…”

Installation views of exhibition Entwicklungen
Clockwise: Manfred Mohr, Anton Stankowsky, Leon Polk Smith,
Camille Graeser, Richard Lohse, Manfred Mohr, Kenneth Snelson

October 31, 2009 – April 5, 2010

Participating Artists:
Camille Graeser, Edgar Gutbub, Heijo Hangen, Matti Kujasalo, Verena Loewensberg, Richard-Paul Lohse, Jan Meyer-Rogge, Manfred Mohr, Aurelie Nemours, Leon Polk Smith, Kenneth Snelson, Jurg Stauble, Anton Stankowski, Norbert Thomas, Martin Willing

Installation by Roland Orepuk

thru February 27, 2010

March 5 – April 24, 2010

An exhibition of art and design from three legends of mid-century Danish modernism:
1950s Krenit bowls by Herbert Krenchel; the Getama Daybeds by Hans Wegner;
and Danish Konkrete paintings by Ib Geertsen.

Kenneth Noland staining ‘Horizontal Stripe’
paper piece at the paper mill
Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, NY, 1978
Photographer: Lindsay Green

“I’ve followed other artists gratefully and I hope I’ve also followed my own path….sometimes along side other artists. I’ve also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist. I love art and I love the life of art and I only wish that the real life of art could affect social change in a good way and that the invasion of commercialism in art and the invasion of entertainment into all areas of our lives hadn’t brought some of the worst features of our culture into the realm of art.

—Kenneth Noland
“The Bennington Years” symposium, University of Hartford, March, 1988

I heard of Kenneth Noland’s death through a text message from my friend and fellow painter Don Voisine: Kenneth Noland RIP. This isn’t the sort of thing artists kid about, not Don’s idea of a practical joke; still, I clung to a small shred of doubt. Moments later, I googled Don’s exact words and found that Noland had indeed passed away. Well, I figured, at least he made it to his 85th year. Not a bad run, not a bad run at all. But it’s difficult to fathom: one of the last great colorists of the 20th century is no more…”

Click to purchase on Amazon.com

By Tracey Bashkoff (Author), Don Quaintance (Author), John Hanhardt (Author), Karole Vail (Editor)

Exploring the origins and early days of the Guggenheim Museum — when it was first known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting — this volume reveals for the first time the Guggenheim’s complex architectural history, drawing on extensive correspondence between Founding Director Hilla Rebay and artist Rudolf Bauer (whose work the Guggenheim collected exhaustively) to reveal the leading role Bauer played in envisioning the collection and the museum. It also explores Rebay’s unusual curatorial conceptions and framing practices at the museum’s early locations. Karol Vail provides biographies of many lesser-known artists in the museum’s collection, while others discuss the museum’s early history and ambitions. Architectural drawings, installation views, photographs and color plates of selected artworks help track the rise of this great museum.

David Baskin, JAG, 2008

February 5 – April 17, 2010

An exhibition of new sculpture by artists David Baskin, Suzanne Broughel, Virginia Griswold, Kent Laforme, Sylvan Lionni, Jaye Moon and Claire Watson. Curated by David C. Terry and Matthew Deleget.

Helio Oiticica & Neville D’Almeida
Block-experiment in Cosmococa, CC1 Trashiscapes, 1973
Room installation with slide projectors, sound, mattresses, pillows & nail files

February 4 – May 1, 2010

The Hunter College Art Galleries presents an exhibition featuring a rare glimpse into the collaboration between artists Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida Beyond Participation: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida in New York.

The collaboration between renowned Brazilian artists Hélio Oitica and Nevielle D’Almeida from the late 1960s though the 1970s changed how audiences perceived art, shifting them from passive viewers to active participants. Exhibited for the first time together, the slide-show environment Cosmococa—Programa in progress, CC1 Trashiscapes (1973) is shown alongside D’Almeida’s film Jardim de Guerra (1967), as well as two of Oiticica’s notebooks from 1973 reproduced in facsimile. The dynamic installation CC1 Trashiscapes comprises two projectors flashing 32 slide-photographs onto opposing gallery walls, accompanied by a soundtrack including forró music (typically from the Northeast of Brazil) such as Luis Gonzaga’s baião, Jimi Hendrix songs, street sounds, and voices. Mattresses line the floor, and nail files are available for use by visitors. The audience is invited to relax and recline horizontally while filing their nails in the dark as they watch the images on the surrounding walls. The slides themselves consist of three distinct photographic series: Luis Buñuel’s face on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, a series of black-and-white photographs of Luis Fernando Guimarães (an actor and friend of Oiticica) wearing Parangolé 30 Capa 23 M’Way Ke, and the album cover for Weasels Ripped My Flesh by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, all manipulated with white line of cocaine by the artists’. This work is an important progenitor of early video and installation art and influenced subsequent generations of artists tremendously.

CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION:
Jocelyn Meade Elliott completed the coursework toward her MA in Art History at Hunter College and is working on her Master’s thesis on the subject of Hélio Oiticica’s filmic work made during his years in New York from 1970–78. She is an independent curator working in New York City.

PUBLICATION:
The exhibition will be accompanied by a color catalogue featuring an essay by Jocelyn Meade Elliott, an interview with Neville D’Almeida, and text and images by Hélio Oiticia and Neville D’Almeida. Images are available upon request.

Helio Oiticica
Vermelho cortando o branco, 1958
Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 cm
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Projeto Helio Oiticica

November 19, 2009 – February 21, 2010

Haus Konstruktiv completes its exhibition programme for 2009 with the presentation of one of the most significant collections of Brazilian Concrete-Constructive art: “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” showcases for the first time in Europe “The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”. Although individual works from Mr. Adolpho Leirner (born, 1935 in São Paulo) have been shown frequently in the past years, this will be the first time the entire Adolpho Leirner collection is exhibited outside of Brazil or the United States. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the MFAH, which owns the Adolpho Leirner collection since 2007.

The Leirner Collection comprehensively documents how starting in the early 1950s, artists from the Brazilian avant-garde assimilated and contested the tenets of international Con-structivism, developing a unique Concrete-Constructive art. “Collecting is like a love affair. It means making discoveries in a huge game of hide-and-seek. Each and every one of these discoveries represents an important part of my life,” says the passionate collector Leirner. Painstakingly assembled since the late 1950s, the collection includes works that trace the beginnings of non-figurative art by artists such as Cícero Dias (1907–2003) and Samson Flexor (1907–1971), as well as works by members of “Grupo ruptura”, “Grupo frente” and Neo-Concretismo in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The latter of which include such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), rediscovered in recent years by the international art world and honoured with large solo exhibitions.

“Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” will enable a broad public to gain fascinating and informative insights into the development of Concrete-Constructive art in Brazil, while sim-ultaneously revealing so far little-known cross-connections and artistic dialogues with Swiss concrete art.

The exhibition directly ties in with Haus Konstruktiv’s incorporation of art history initiated with the grand jubilee exhibition “max bill 100″ (winter 2008/09): the reconstruction of the first Bill retrospective from 1951 in São Paulo already showed how the artistic exchange between concrete artists working in Europe and Brazil intensified from the 1950s onwards with Max Bill as a central figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, is the major publication Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the MFAH. Edited by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (distributed by Yale University Press), the volume assesses the research of avant-garde artists and groups of Concrete and Neoconcrete tendencies in post-War Brazilian art, and generates updated frameworks and new lines of investigation for the interpretation of these interrelated ten-dencies. It comprises of thirteen essays that were commissioned by a group of distinguis-hed artists, critics, and scholars from Brazil and the United States. The publication was designed by the noted Brazilian designer and artist Alexandre Wollner.

Installation view

January 15 – February 13, 2010

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents the works of Jorge Eielson, Donald Moffett, David Noonan, Steven Parrino and Salvatore Scarpitta. From the 1950’s to the present these artists have stripped, ripped, twisted, draped, stretched and stitched the canvas to create works that push the definition of painting.

For over a century the notion of materiality has intrigued philosophers – debating the hierarchy of form over substance and vice versa. Art critics also joined this debate in the latter half of the 20th Century when artists began tackling these concepts in actual practice, with some artists discovering the possibility of an easy truce. In 1961 with the introduction of the X form in his work Salvatore Scarpitta proclaimed he was “breaking the constriction of the rectangle.” So it is that each of these five artists has broken free from the dimensional confines of the stretcher while remaining true to painting, material and form assuming equal weight as content.

Jorge Eielson is most recognized for his use of the quipus, a knot imbued with cosmic symbolism and used as an ancient Incan counting system. Born in Peru to a Peruvian mother and Swedish father Eielson’s work matured in Italy where he spent the bulk of his adult life. Fashioning his quipus from fabric that was once a shirt or rope or burlap, Eielson twists and stretches his material over the flat surface of the canvas, creating a physical object where both tension and serenity coexist.

The late 1950’s work of Salvatore Scarpitta also appears wrought with tension, but with a visceral edge not readily evident in the more contemplative works of Eielson. The artist has said after his experiences with WWII “I started ripping up the oil paintings, the canvas that had become an utter enemy for me….I needed to run the risk of leaving fingerprints.” The resulting works comprised of ripped raw canvas strips resembling bandages speak of both wounds and healing.

Steven Parrino’s work and persona is often linked to preoccupations of death and nihilism further mythicized by the artist’s own premature death. Despite coming of age in an era Parrino has described as when “the word on painting was ‘Painting Is Dead’. I saw this as an interesting place for painting…and this death painting thing led to a sex and death painting thing…that became an existence thing.” Parrino’s “misshaped paintings,” as he referred to them, are in essence about existence and the possibilities of what painting can be.

Donald Moffett’s recent paintings appear abstract, but upon closer examination distinct corporeal references and orifices emerge. The canvas itself a body. Unlike the punctures and slashes of Fontana, Moffett’s holes are precise with sutured edges and his cuts are methodical and neatly zipped. His flayed paintings are just that – stripped as a body is skinned. A founding member of the Gran Fury collective, Moffett’s measured exploitation of his raw materials concentrates his works pointed political and sexual content.

David Noonan’s work appears more directly figural, silkscreen images on collaged raw linen. The images themselves are often blurred and re-imagined through cutting and re-assembly. The tradition of collage allowing the artist to build a multi-layered narrative in which there is no hierarchy of images. While the narratives are left open for interpretation, the materials themselves imbue the work with an atmospheric antique ambiance, like 19th Century sepia prints.

As Scarpitta aptly stated, “I wanted to make air circulate there where the canvas, with its form had become oppressive.”

Erik Saxon, Untitled, 1996
Watercolor on Arches paper, 10 x 7 inches
Donated to Yale University Art Gallery, CT

For artists, scholars, and art enthusiasts interested in modern and contemporary American works on paper, AboutDrawing provides a unique resource for study and exploration. With a focus on the New York-based drawing collection of Werner H. Kramarsky, this site hosts a comprehensive selection of images, essays, artists’ biographies, and other information about artists and exhibitions associated with the collection.

AboutDrawing also acts as an interactive companion to the definitive volume on the Kramarsky collection, 560 Broadway: A New York Drawing Collection at Work, 1991-2006, edited by Amy Eshoo and published by Yale University Press in February 2008. An engaging reflection on the fifteen years that the collection was headquartered at 560 Broadway in SoHo, this book documents one collector’s contributions to the careers of many emerging New York artists and to the contemporary art world at large.

Both AboutDrawing and 560 Broadway detail, in particular, Wynn Kramarsky’s extensive history of donations to public arts institutions across the country. The site currently limits its scope to materials connected to those artists whose work has been donated. Site visitors may explore images of donated work online and can use the site’s resources to locate objects at their home institutions.

About the Collection
The Kramarsky drawing collection is the result of more than sixty years of interest in Minimal, Conceptual, and Post-Minimal American drawings. With an intuitive attraction to the raw materials and intimate processes involved in making a drawing, a continued interest in developing supportive relationships with artists, and, above all, a commitment to careful looking, Wynn Kramarsky has amassed nearly three thousand works of art, more than half of which have subsequently been donated to museums and other public institutions.

For further information, please see the Fifth Floor Foundation’s AboutDrawing web site.