Gilbert Hsiao, Quad Band, 2011
Purple and orange cut paper on purple and orange paper
9 x 9 inches

Brent: We met in the afternoon outside the Apple store, downtown San Francisco. It was March, coolish… and we wandered back to Telegraph Hill. On the way we talked.

It came as a bit of a surprise that you were not really aware of or interested in op/perceptual painting when you first began painting. What, then, prompted you to start making art that way? Or, is ‘that way’ a misnomer?

Gilbert: I was aware of op as a historical movement of course; I was an art history major at Columbia before deciding to move into fine art. And op is one of the most distinguishable styles out there. Even if it wasn’t around to be seen first hand (which it certainly wasn’t in the 1960s in the town of Terre Haute, Indiana where I grew up) its influence was everywhere; you didn’t have to go to a gallery or museum to experience it. I bought record albums (a habit which lasted for four decades and resulted in thousands of LPs from all over the world) and studied the covers and the posters in the head shops that were full of op influences. My mother even gave me a fascinating Richard Annuskiewicz puzzle when I was a kid. However; I never intended to make art related to op; what I’m making is just where I ended up.

At the same time, in the last quarter of the 20th century op was pretty much invisible in the New York arts scene, where I had moved in 1974. When Phillip Taffe was appropriating Bridget Riley in the eighties, Riley herself was nowhere to be seen. After the Responsive Eye show at MOMA in 1965, she did not have a solo show in New York until her retrospective at DIA in 2000. One could see an occasional Vasarely here and there, though rarely his best work, and I was totally unaware of the work of figures like Julian Stanczak, the members of the Anonima Group (Ernst Benkert, Ed Miezkowski, and Francis Hewitt), Edna Andrade, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Francis Celentano, Tadasky and Jesus Raphael Soto. And of course there are the many Europeans, who seemed to have had a comparatively more receptive audience on the other side of the ocean, but who remain pretty much unknown here. My introduction to these people came through the Internet, and later, in person at the Optic Nerve exhibition in 2007 in Columbus, that was the first major museum exhibition in America that focused on the movement in decades, and through an excellent ongoing series of exhibitions at Dee Wigmore’s gallery in New York, which continues to this day.

When I was studying art history, I became interested in what I saw as musical elements in the work of artists as diverse as Uccello, Cezanne, Mondrian, Stuart Davis and Pollock, and I wanted to find a way to make work that incorporated similar elements. I also had a radio show at WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, and was exposed to a wide array of music including, most influentially for me, the minimalist music that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were writing at the time. The basic structural motif of this music seemed simple enough, but the simplicity was deceptive, and from these simple structures emerged a complicated music that was mesmerizing, but not overwhelming or overdone. For me, it was an aural counterpart of what I call perceptual abstraction, which is how I refer to my work.

Continue reading.

Installation view (Li Trincere at right)

May 6 – June 10, 2012

Did You See Heaven?

In a conversation with the artist Mary Heilmann at the Art Institute’s Modern Wing a while back, she asked “Did you see Heaven?” in reference to her brushy green painting (titled Heaven) then on exhibit. I remember so well the way she mischievously smiled that question. With big eyes. It still makes me smile.

It is that knowing yet playful attitude that inspires Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA and WYSIWYG, two presentations of paintings at PEREGRINEPROGRAM. Mary Heilmann folds into her work the legacies of Albers and de Kooning, and the two shows of Did You See Heaven? are built from those ideas, taking as their starting points the potential of intimacy with color and gesture in abstract work.

Beyond their essential material, paintings are also conditions for self-awareness. Did You See Heaven? is less about an agreement of recognition than it is about our differences in the presence of these works. Implicit in the statement are two other questions. If heaven is that state of bliss and ecstasy, could we see, or find it in abstract paintings? More importantly, if one agrees that the heady and sublime is indeed within reach from these works, where will we locate it and how will we understand it? Yes, there might be a bit of hyperbole here, maybe, just a little bit, but let’s not forget Heilmann’s big eyes.

– EC

Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA

Just as our “heavens” differ, we will each find our own way of experiencing this display of work. Individuated by form and scale, color in these paintings punctuate and notate, become figures, become experience, echo and contrast each other. In addition, the range of approaches, materials and postures further complicate our perceptions and conceptions. Through a spectra of physical and affective textures these works call our attention to subtle, even unnoticed things, saturating both eyes and mind.

What arrests each of us and how we apprehend the single work and exhibition is unpredictable. We come to these paintings with unique inclinations, memories and cadences. One might draw moth-like to a bright thing, a dark thing, remember the time when, stop a minute for, think an irrational thought, or slow, to imagine the work being made. Abstract works are unending because they are so flexible and indeed, the nimbleness of these paintings invites ours as the forms push, and pull, and the colors wheel.

The artists: Levi Budd and Jack Holström Schneider live and work in Chicago, IL, where they are completing their degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Michelle Grabner is a Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at SAIC. She co-directs the artist project space The Suburban in Oak Park, IL, and The Poor Farm, a non-profit art space and residency in Little Wolf, WI. Ethan Greenbaum lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has forthcoming exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Projects, NY, and the Aldrich Museum, CT. Sam Jaffe lives and works in Chicago, IL. She will open a show at Grand Bizzare Gallery this August. Larry Lee works and teaches at SAIC, and recently had a solo exhibition at Kirk’s Apartment last November. Li Trincere has shown throughout the US and Europe, and has received an NEA grant along with Pollock/ Krasner grants. Trincere recently had a solo exhibition with MINUS SPACE, in NYC. Don Voisine is a member of The National Academy of Art, and president of American Abstract Artists. His work is also exhibited widely throughout the US and Europe. Jon Waites was born in Santa Fe, NM, and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

PEREGRINEPROGRAM presents Levi Budd, Michelle Grabner, Ethan Greenbaum, Sam Jaffe, Larry Lee, Jack Holström Schneider, Li Trincere, Don Voisine, and Jon Waites in Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA.

Gabriele Evertz working in her studio, NY

May 26 – July 8, 2012

Robert Swain, Untitled, 6×7-5A RO#3, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 84 inches

May 18 – June 23, 2012

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, Color Affect, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for painter Robert Swain and inaugural exhibition in its new gallery located in the Santa Fe Railyard Arts District.

Swain has spent his entire career devising a unique system for organizing over two thousand colors and studying how humans interact with and feel color. His study of color is less theoretical and more empirical as evidenced by his highly systematic approach to painting over the past four plus decades. Through his rigorous evaluations, Swain has gone beyond how we perceive the physical effects of color to how we experience the emotional and physiological sensations produced by color in certain arrangements and configurations. Thus, his paintings go beyond physical observation to a phenomenological affect.

Swain thinks of color as energy and a trigger for a series of physiochemical reactions in humans that results in certain sensations. Through abstract painting, Swain can uncouple color from any cultural signifier and cognitive system and examine the pure affect of color on the human psyche.

The emotional and psychological ramifications result from the combination of the particular colors, their values and degree of saturation as well as adjacency to other colors, overall organization and scale. In this exhibition, two series of Swain’s paintings will be presented: the well known meticulous grids with their flat pristine surfaces and his newest all-over paintings with their lush painterly surfaces referred to as the “Brushstroke” series.

Robert Swain received a BA Degree from the American University in Washington, D. C. in 1964. Currently, he lives and works in New York City and is a Professor at Hunter College. He has had eighteen solo exhibitions, the most recent being a major retrospective at Hunter College / Times Square Gallery in 2010. His work has been included in over sixty group exhibitions, including The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In 1968 he was included in The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Thirty-First Biennial and again in 1998 for The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Forty-Fifth Biennial. Advertise with EyesIn Magazine

Swain’s artwork is represented in over 284 private and public collections, including The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Milwaukee Art Center, The Everson Art Museum, The Denver Art Museum, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Julian Jackson, Crossing 12, 2012
Oil on panel
24 X 24 inches

May 17 – June 16, 2012

A solo exhibition by NYC painter Julian Jackson.

Lynne Harlow, Measuring a Summer’s Day, 2012
Blue and orange latex paint and vinyl, dimensions variable
Installation view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca – a museum with impunity

When a public institution conducts itself in an unprofessional and unprecedented way that does injustice to artist, curator, partner institutions, and the general public, it is a story that deserves to be known.

The exhibition Minus Space en Oaxaca was conceived by artists Emi Winter and Matthew Deleget. Deleget is co-founder and director of Minus Space in Brooklyn, New York, one of very few venues internationally specifically dedicated to exhibiting and promoting reductive art. As co-curators, Winter and Deleget proposed a group show of editions and multiples accompanied by four larger, site-specific works. The proposal was made to a group of Oaxacan cultural institutions that were receptive and agreed to host the shows in a coordinated, simultaneous effort in their respective venues in the city. The planning and initial meetings with the museum directors began in December 2010, with an opening date subsequently set for March 15, 2012. Each institution sent an official letter of invitation to the artist it would host: The Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) acted as lead institution by inviting Matthew Deleget as curator to present the exhibition of multiples at the main IAGO galleries, and further invited Dutch artist Jan van der Ploeg to create a wall painting at a second IAGO venue (Avenida Juárez); the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños (MUPO) invited US artist Russell Maltz to create a work in its courtyard; the Biblioteca Henestrosa invited Swiss artist Daniel Göttin to create a wall work in its exhibition space; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO) invited US artist Lynne Harlow to make a work for its courtyard called Cubo Abierto. The invitation from MACO went out later than the others because the museum had changed directors. Incoming MACO director Ramón Jiménez Cuen signed the letter to Harlow and sent it on January 13, 2012.  Read full article.

We are delighted to announce that gallery artist Gabriele Evertz has received The Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). One of two recipients this year, Ms. Evertz was personally selected by Mr. Alkazzi from a pool of 1,500 applicants. She will receive a cash award of $20,000.

“We live in a fast-moving culture that grows increasingly more abstract, away from the physical touch, away from the physical ground of being – away from the act of creation by hand,” said Alkazzi regarding the creation of the award, which was presented for the first time in 2010. “I want in my own way, to encourage the glorious expressions of pencil, brush, and paint, and to nurture the kind of artist and the kind of art that I like and respect.”

“NYFA is honored that Basil Alkazzi has asked us to oversee this important award, which will have a significant impact on the recipients. It is incredibly moving to see an artist so dedicated to giving back to his community, “ said NYFA Executive Director Michael L. Royce. “To be able to award $20,000 to each of these extraordinary painters is a joy and we are so grateful to Basil for making it possible.”

Ms. Evertz noted, “I received the news of this honor in a letter from Mr. Alkazzi in which he expressed the hope that I ‘will also reach out towards other gifted artists.’ Indeed, whenever possible, it has been my pleasure to curate shows around the themes of color, light, and perception and I intend to continue to present relatively unknown painters who have devoted their life’s work to this particular aspect of painting. This award will also enable me to do the obvious: purchase materials to embark on a major body of work that has preoccupied me. Further, I am preparing for two solo shows this year; one in Riverhead, NY and one in Santa Fe, NM, and the funding will enable me to prepare a publication. Finally, I can now begin to realize the long-term project of documenting and archiving my own work, something every artist ought to do but is not often in the position to do. It is therefore with the greatest joy and humility that I am accepting this award. I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Alkazzi and the New York Foundation for the Arts for this honor.”

About Basil H. Alkazzi
The British artist, Basil H. Alkazzi, is a prolific and, in his own words, a “compulsive” painter. His distinguished career as an artist spans almost 50 years. Six monographs of work have been published, the most recent being Resonant Echoes – The Art of Basil Alkazzi by Dennis Wepman in 2007. His work is held in the public collections of museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum – Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Santa Barbara Museum in California, The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, The National Council in Kuwait, and Centrum Sztuki in Warsaw, Poland. In addition to being a gifted painter, Mr. Basil Alkazzi is also a generous philanthropist. In 1986, he established The Basil H. Alkazzi Foundation Awards, which are presented annually at the Royal College of Art in London. A cosmopolitan, he has travelled widely, and he has lived for long periods of time in London, Athens, and New York. He currently resides in Monaco.

For additional information about Gabriele Evertz, please contact the gallery.

EPITAPHS
A New Book of Poetry & Images
by Gerald Jonas & Sanford Wurmfeld

Please join us for a special reception, reading & book signing:

Friday, May 4, 5-8pm
Short reading at 7pm

Gerald Jonas, who was on the staff of The New Yorker for 30 years, is a poet, editor and writer. The poems in this book began with a question: Who can speak for the dead?

Sanford Wurmfeld is a painter and the Caroff Professor of Fine Art at Hunter College. His images in the book were scanned from a series of watercolors that were made by layering washes of primary colors: cyan, magenta, yellow or black. Wurmfeld’s original watercolors will be on view at the gallery.

The paintings and poetry in Epitaphs, created independently by first cousins, came to speak to each other on the page in unexpected ways.

Epitaphs will be available at the reception for a special discounted price of $30. It is also available online at MINUS SPACE for $40.

David Robbins, Talent, 1986
18 gelatin silver prints
10 x 8 inches each

May 2 – June 16, 2012

Participating Artists:
Alan Belcher, Gretchen Bender, Ashley Bickerton, Jennifer Bolande, Michael Byron, Clegg & Guttmann, Jenny Holzer, Thomas Lawson, Larry Johnson, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Peter Nagy, Joel Otterson, Steven Parrino, David Robbins, Cindy Sherman, Robin Weglinski

In 1986 David Robbins produced Talent, a photowork comprised of eighteen black-and-white headshots. He invited a coterie of artist friends associated with Gallery Nature Morte and early Metro Pictures to have their portrait taken on 46th Street by a studio photographer, James Kriegsmann. Twenty-five years later, Michelle Grabner brings them back together.

Unmoored from its ever-alluring 80s context, Talent and the collection of work constituting 25 Years of Talent, proposes a significant line of questioning today: What does talent look like now? How have signs of production and exchange evolved over the past twenty-five years? Why is commercial success always the first frame we employ to assess the individual artists included in Talent? How is authorship, the artistic persona, and the contemporary imagination shaped in a social field of connectivity? How has that field changed over time? Or has it?

There is no better way to forward these questions than to convene an exhibition of recent work by Talent’s artists. With the exception of Gretchen Bender (1951 – 2004) and Steven Parrino (1958 – 2005), who are represented with older pieces, fifteen of Talent’s artists are featured with examples of new art works. In some cases the work reveals striking conceptual and material departures from 1986. For other artists, systems of ideas have remained fixed for the past quarter century. Robin Weglinski, the only artist in Talent to leave behind art making, is represented in the exhibition with a personal artifact, the thick length of braided hair that she sports in her Talent portrait. The townhouse provides the perfect time capsule in which to study these questions as well as our own modes of judgment and our collective art world’s apparatuses for success.

25 Years of Talent is accompanied by an exhibition catalog that includes essays by Michelle Grabner, Tim Griffin and David Robbins in addition to interview exchanges between Randi Hopkins and twelve of Talent’s eighteen subjects: Jennifer Bolande, Alan Belcher, Clegg & Guttmann, Ashley Bickerton, Joel Otterson, Robin Weglinski, Michael Byron, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Lawson, Peter Nagy, and Allan McCollum.

Eugen Batz, The Spatial Effect of Colors and Forms, 1929

May 3 – August 12, 2012

The biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over 40 years presents the modern world’s most famous art school. From expressionist beginnings to a pioneering model uniting art and technology, this London exhibition presents the Bauhaus’ utopian vision to change society in the aftermath of the First World War. Bauhaus: Art as Life explores the diverse artistic production that made up its turbulent fourteen-year history and delves into the subjects at the heart of the school: art, culture, life, politics and society, and the changing technology of the age.

Bauhaus: Art as Life will feature a rich array of painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and installation. Exemplar works from such Bauhaus Masters as Josef and Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Hannes Meyer, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Gunta Stölzl, will be presented alongside works by lesser-known Bauhaus artists and students.

The Bauhaus: Art as Life public programme also brings to London a host of workshops, talks, films and performances as well as a major Creative Learning initiative for the Bauhaus exhibition, the Art School Lab, an intensive two-week summer school held at the Barbican and led by leading practitioners from all artistic backgrounds.

Hélio Oticia, Penetrável Filtro (Filter Penetrable), 1972
Mixed media installation
99 x 234 x 318 inches

May 5 – June 16, 2012

For the first time in New York, three of the late Brazilian avant-garde artist Hélio Oiticica’s rarely-seen multi-sensorial installations of color: Penetrável PN1 (1960); Penetrável Filtro (1972); and Penetrável PN28 “Nas Quebradas” (1979) will be on view at Galerie Lelong. Oiticica’s invention of the Penetrável (Penetrable) series brought a new dimension to his work, allowing him to create built environments and develop outdoor installations such as the well-known Magic Square series. The Penetrables are considered among the first artistic installations, and have not been credited enough for their contribution to early conceptual art. Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables opens the public on Saturday, May 5, 2012 from 6 to 8pm. The artist’s brothers César and Cláudio Oiticica, who direct the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Brazil, will be present.

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Oiticica investigated color in space in a cohesive, continuous oeuvre, until his untimely death in 1980. He began with the Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema drawings and then liberated his painting into space with series entitled Bilateral, Relevos Espaciais, Bólide, Núcleo, Penetrável, and Parangolé. Not only are the Penetrables a natural progression in his own work, but also within the continuum of the art historical canon. Oiticica avowed, “It is not a matter of copying Mondrian, but of blazing the trail for a painting of pure color, space, time and structure.” Furthering his notion of bringing painting into real time and space, in 1961 Oiticica wrote about the Penetrables:

“Here, color exudes both the decorative and the architectural…so as to become purely aesthetic and intensely experienced [vivenciada] or purely aesthetic in the sense of a heightened experience. They are like movable frescos on a human scale except that (most importantly) they are penetrable.”

What makes the Penetrables stand out amongst Oiticica’s body of work is the viewer’s involvement as a participant and “discoverer of the work.” Oiticica’s first free-standing Penetrable, Penetrável PN1 is a small corridor of bright yellow-hued, sliding panels which the participant can move to activate the work. One of the largest Penetrables, Penetrável Filtro takes the concepts of PN1 to a grander scale in a labyrinthine structure. Penetrável Filtro allows the participant to wander through multiple corridors and curtains of green, blue, yellow, and orange, and end by drinking this color from a glass of orange juice. Created the year before his death, Penetrável PN28 “Nas Quebradas” guides the participant on a gravel path through an architectural structure made of wood, brick, and yellow panels with a jute roof. Here, Oiticica takes inspiration from the shantytowns, or favelas or of Rio de Janeiro, and achieves ones of his primary goals of fusing art and life, providing “vivências” (experiences). Although the Penetrables were created in the 1960s and 1970s, the immediate experience of engaging with the works brings them to the present moment.

Hélio Oiticica’s installation Cosmococa C1 (1973/2010), made in collaboration with Neville D’Almeida, is featured in the exhibition Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space, organized and previously exhibited by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and on view until May 13th at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. His famous installation Tropicália (1967) is currently being exhibited in From Revolt to Postmodernity (1962-1982) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Oiticica’s work was presented in the major international arts festival Europalia in Belgium in 2011, and in the São Paulo Biennial 2010. The solo traveling exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Museu É o Mundo was presented at the Fundação Itaú Cultural in Sao Paulo and the Paço Imperial and Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro in 2010. In 2007 and 2008, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tate Modern, London presented the landmark retrospective Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color.

Kristin Baker, Maximillian and Burgundian Lines, 2012
Acrylic on PVC
100 x 80 inches

May 4 – June 23, 2012

ILLUME-MINE, an exhibition of new work by Kristin Baker, investigates the transformative effects of light, expanded expectations of the painted medium, and the artist’s unique process. An intensified engagement with notions of scale and the physicality of process replaces the dynamic moments of narrative content – racing cars and catastrophic landscapes – that have pulsed through Baker’s acrylic palimpsests. Luminance, color, and material become the predominant institute as Baker engages her interest in the alchemy of paint. Through a duel-action of mining and superimposing, Baker reiterates planar flatness while introducing a third dimension that references many genres but is hindered by none.

Light and shadow, opacity and translucency, the mechanical and the organic collide in works like Relative Vignette. Thick white lines meet diaphanous black swathes and embedded edges pass through various atmospheric densities. We could be visualizing the moment when a hot burst of air hits an icy surface, or when day shifts into night. The vignette, however, doesn’t seem to matter as it is merely the consequence of the interplay between process, color, and material. The Other Side of Non-Actual Potholing visualizes physical dichotomies of unearthing and rubbing with the inclusion of a handprint. The defined form pushes from behind abstraction, bringing to light both human implication -continued on reverse-and the surface’s own anthropomorphic energies. Spectrums of transparency build as paint unmasks its presence through the guise of other mediums.

As shades of photography, printmaking, and other two-dimensional mediums graft and refract, Baker’s diverse acrylic idiom is revealed. The resultant spatial and chromatic tensions disseminate speed and time, further defying pictorial space. These experiental effects are enhanced through an exploration of miniature to monumental scale, physicalized in the shift from 12 by 10 inch to 120 by 80 inch paintings. Playing off an assemblage of homages (Futuristism, Fauvism, Informalism, Abstract Expressionism), Baker creates ‘everywhere’ paintings – their sources and luminous volumes are ambiguous, capricious, and in constant flux.

ABOUT KRISTIN BAKER Kristin Baker was born in Stamford, CT. She now lives and works in New York City. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, she went on to receive a MFA in painting from Yale University. Recently, her work was presented in solo exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Art Center of Tokyo.

Sven Lukin, Disneyesque, 1970-71
Enamel on masonite and wood
84 x 66 x 6 inches

May 24 – June 30, 2012

Gary Snyder Gallery is pleased to announce Sven Lukin, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at 529 West 20th Street. Opening on May 24, 2012, the exhibition is the first since 1978 to present new works by the artist. Seven of Lukin’s recent paintings will be on view, alongside seven of his famed “shaped canvases” from the 1960s. The exhibition will also include a selection of preparatory drawings, many of which have never been shown before.

The exhibition offers detailed views of the artist’s work during the 1960s and the past decade. Works such as Diamond Head (1964), Trafalgar (1965), Piano Lesson (1967), and Janus (2009) illustrate Lukin’s career-long involvement with bringing painting out from two-dimensional space and into the realm of architecture. Unlike his peers Richard Smith, Frank Stella, and Neil Williams, Lukin was not merely satisfied with changing the shape of his stretchers. He wants his paintings to exist in real space, to attack and confront it.

Born in Riga, Latvia in 1934, Sven Lukin immigrated to the United States in 1949. After graduating high school in 1953, Lukin was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. While enrolled, he attended lectures by the influential architect and urban designer Louis I. Kahn. Although Lukin left the program in 1956, Kahn’s ideas had a profound impact on the young artist. Kahn’s celebration of monumental scale, unadorned surfaces, and volumetric forms was a source of endless fascination for Lukin—one that continues to this day.

In 1958, Lukin moved to New York to pursue his career as a painter. During the 1960s, he had solo exhibitions at many of New York’s most influential and prestigious galleries, including: Betty Parsons Gallery (1961), Martha Jackson Gallery (1962), and the Pace Gallery (1963, 1964, 1966, and 1968). During this period, his work also figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as The Quest and the Quarry (1961, Rome-New Art Foundation), Vormen van de Kleur (1964, Stedelijk Museum), The Shaped Canvas (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Color, Image, and Form (1967, Detroit Institute of Arts), Painting: Out from the Wall (1968, Des Moines Art Center), and L’art vivant aux États-Unis (1970, Fondation Maeght), among others. In 1972, at the height of his success, Lukin severed his ties with the Pace Gallery and refused to display his work in a commercial setting. His paintings were not seen again publicly until 1978, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a solo exhibition of his work. In November 2010, a survey of the artist’s early work, Sven Lukin: Paintings, 1960–1971, opened at GARY SNYDER Project Space.

Lukin’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the country, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Installation view.

April 12 – June 2, 2012

I would like the paintings to be their own justification, so that anything asked of them would be irrelevant.
- Frank Stella

L&M Arts is privileged to present Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, and Copper Paintings. This exhibition has been conceived and organized with the support of the artist, and features works dating from 1958 to 1962 on loan from: Glenstone; The Menil Collection; The Philip Johnson Glass House; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; the collection of the artist; and private collections.

Stella had yet to have a one-man exhibition in New York when four monumental, unprimed canvases, painted with bands of black enamel house paint, were displayed in the galleries of The Museum of Modern Art at the end of 1959. The Black Paintings, on view in Dorothy Miller’s Sixteen Americans exhibition, astonished the public. Over the course of the next few months, Stella executed the Aluminum and Copper Paintings with the same methodical rigor. These notched and shaped canvases, painted with industrial, optically impenetrable paint, would be exhibited in his first two solo exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960 and 1962.

L&M Arts has brought together fifteen Black, Aluminum, and Copper Paintings, including the watershed Delta (1958), considered by the artist to be “the first black painting.” Exhibited in Sixteen Americans, the towering Die Fahne hoch! (1959) is now on view in the gallery’s second floor rotunda flanked by rooms devoted to the metallic works. Notably, the identical copper Creede I and Creede II (both 1961) are exhibited side by side.

L&M Arts has published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition with essays by Robert Pincus-Witten and Katy Siegel, as well as a landmark lecture delivered by Stella at Pratt Institute.

Tauba Auerbach, Untitled (Fold), 2010
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 45 inches

May 5 – June 9, 2012

The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce Tauba Auerbach’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery, on view at 521 West 21st Street from May 5 through June 9.

San Francisco-born, New York-based artist Tauba Auerbach has described her work as an attempt to reveal “new spectral and dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception.” Engaging a variety of media, ranging from painting and photography to book design and musical performance, Auerbach explores the limits of our structures and systems of logic (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities.

In her acclaimed series of Fold paintings, first introduced in 2009, Auerbach presents powdery trompe l’oeil surfaces that register the traces of their former three-dimensionality. Painted with an industrial sprayer, the works draw attention to the physical properties of pigment imitating light. Alongside new Fold paintings, this exhibition will include a new series of Weave paintings, presented for the first time in the United States. As with folding, Auerbach uses weaving to reassess and thoroughly transform the flat picture plane. Elusive topographies emerge from the monochromatic works, bringing the viewer into a subtly shifting world of ruptures and continuities, reliefs and recesses.

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition will present new photographs and sculptural objects, including Onyx, a deconstructed material volume printed and bound in book form. As Auerbach once observed, “A book is an X-axis. The format is almost always linear; the content, bound in a prescribed order, marches single file.”* Inspired by a desire to upend this theory, Auerbach resorts to tomography (the method of producing images of the internal structure of an object), allowing the viewer to slice through a solid block of onyx layer by layer, revealing the twists and turns of a mineral narrative.

Tauba Auerbach lives and works in New York City. Her one-person exhibition, Tetrachromat, which opened at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway in November 2011, is now on view at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, through June 10, 2012 and will travel to Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels. The Museum of Modern Art will show a selection of drawings and sculptures by Auerbach in the group exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, on view May 6 – August 27, 2012. Her paintings will be included in The Painting Factory at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, opening April 28, 2012. Her work has also been exhibited in a number of major museum shows, notably the Walker Art Center’s Lifelike (2012); The Indiscipline of Painting at Tate St. Ives (2011-12); the 2010 Whitney Biennial; MoMA P.S.1’s Greater New York (2010) and the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus (2009). In 2011 she received the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist Research Fellowship Award.

Brice Marden, Ru Ware Project, 2007-2012
Oil on linen
9 panels, each 24 x 18 inches; overall 24 x 162 inches

April 21 – June 23, 2012

On view in the gallery at 502 West 22nd Street is a painting called Ru Ware Project, 2007-2012, made up of nine small panels painted in different shades of pale blues. The legendary Ru ware is the rarest of all ancient Chinese pottery. Considered amongst the finest ceramics ever made, only 79 complete pieces have survived. Marden saw an exhibition of Ru ware in Taipei in 2007, where he traveled after his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York. When he returned home, he began work on this painting, trying to paint from memory the colors of the 11th century glazes, once described as “the color of the sky after rain”.

In the gallery at 526 West 22nd Street, fifteen new paintings in oil on marble, which Marden completed last year on the Greek island of Hydra, will be on view. Reflecting the light and landscape of Greece, these paintings feature vibrant colors and geometric compositions, which subtly incorporate each piece of marble’s natural variations. Marden’s earlier series of paintings on marble, completed over a six-year period between 1981 and 1987, played a principal role in the transition from his early monochromatic paintings to the later calligraphic work.

Also on view will be a new large oil on linen painting, Polke Letter. An homage to Marden’s contemporary, Sigmar Polke, this painting is a continuation of the Letters series, first exhibited in 2010, the year of Polke’s death.

Brice Marden (born 1938) lives and works in New York. His work was the subject of a 2006 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In addition, he has had one-person exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Gallery, London, among others.

Brice Marden: New Paintings will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery at 502 West 22nd Street and 526 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), from April 21st through June 23rd, 2012. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

Lucio Fontana at his exhibition opening, Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, 1964

May 3 – June 30, 2012

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major and unprecedented survey of the work of Lucio Fontana. Six of his groundbreaking environments, known as Ambienti Spaziali, have been faithfully reconstructed, providing a completely new perspective for the rich and varied retrospective of more than one hundred major works that surrounds them. Curated by Germano Celant, assisted by Gagosian director Valentina Castellani in close collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, the exhibition includes many works that have rarely been seen and reunites important series from public and private collections.

Fontana’s fascination for the advancements of science and technology during the twentieth century led him to approach art as a series of investigations into a wide variety of mediums and methods. As a sculptor, he experimented with stone, metals, ceramics, and neon; as a painter he attempted to transcend the confines of the two-dimensional plane. In a series of manifestos, beginning with the Manifesto blanco (White Manifesto) of 1946, Fontana announced his goals for a “spatialist” art, one that could engage technology to achieve an expression of the fourth dimension in a radical new aesthetic idiom that melded the categories of architecture, sculpture, and painting.

A sculptor trained in classical techniques, Fontana was initially known for grand and innovative sculptures produced for trade fairs and exhibitions promoting the ideology of Fascism in Italy. But these early examples already contained a rationalist abstract language that pointed to an awareness of the most daring rationalist architectonic experiments of Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe Terragni

Upon his return to Milan from Argentina in 1947, Fontana found his studio and works completely destroyed in the Allied bombings of Milan. Due to this abrupt tabula rasa, he considered himself to belong rather to the post-war generation of Italian artists: thus the story of his career is, effectively, the story of his last twenty years. In Buenos Aires, with his students at the newly founded Academia of Altamira, Fontana conceived of an art that could reflect the excitement of contemporaneous discoveries in science and physics and thus continue evolving its very means. Inspired by, but surpassing, the language of Futurism, they advocated doing away with the traditional supports of painting and sculpture. With the act of cutting a thinly painted monochromatic canvas with a sharp knife, Fontana exploded the definition—or at least the conventional space—of art. This act challenged the entire history of Western easel painting and led him to the understanding that painting was no longer about illusion contained within the dimensions of a canvas but, rather, a dynamic concept that blended form, color, architectural space, gesture, and light. Thus the concept of spazialismo was born.

From this moment on, Fontana entitled his works Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), among which a progression of categories unfolds, predicated on the fertile dichotomy between the hole and cut. His assaults on the canvas were not merely physical; they were ways of making the viewer look beyond the fact of the painting into what he called “free space.” Around the same time, he created his first environmental work, Ambienti spaziali a luce nero (Spatial Environment in Black Light), which consisted of a small black room in which several large, fossil-like forms made from papier maché hovered overhead, their fluorescent painted surfaces picked out by black light. As the exhibition demonstrates, it is significant that this first environment was made in 1949, the same year that Fontana introduced the Buchi (Holes), in which he punctured the surface of the canvas in order to access the physical space—and with it the metaphysical dimension—behind the picture. With the Pietre (Stones) series that followed, he fused sculpture with painting by encrusting the surface of the canvas with heavy impasto and fragments of colored glass.

Fontana’s second environment Luce spaziale (1951) is an elaborate, looping neon sculpture originally designed for the ceiling of the Triennale di Milano. It has been reconstructed in its entirety for this exhibition. With these first two Ambienti spaziali, he already broke with the tradition of Dadaist and Constructivist environments and anticipated advanced research with fluorescent light. In 1958, he began making Attese (Waiting), monochrome surfaces that he sliced open with a single gesture or inscribed with multiple cuts at irregular intervals across the canvas, exposing backgrounds that had been artfully darkened with black gauze to create a mysterious sense of illusion and depth. In subsequent Ambienti made between 1961 and 1967, the same aspiration towards purity and the absolute that led him to slash the canvas gives rise to empty rooms where light is the sole element used to suggest and generate space, thus anticipating the revolutionary Space and Light research of the 1970s.

In the momentous egg-shaped canvases that comprise the series La fine di dio (End of God) of 1963–64—several key examples of which have been brought together for the exhibition—all of Fontana’s concerns seem to coalesce in perfect resolution. These extraordinary works, with their punctured, blasted, gouged, and lacerated surfaces, were his literal response to the anticipation of man’s first flight into outer space. With their surfaces literally torn open by hand, they present a vision very different from his earlier optimism of a new spatial era driven by new scientific knowledge; La fine di dio suggests the physical and psychic harshness of the reality of man confronting the moon for the first time at close range, at once hero and martyr of the extraterrestrial age that he had first imagined, then made.

Trinità (Trinity) (1966), on loan from Fondazione Giorgio Marconi, consists of three large white canvases punctuated by lines of holes. In this exhibition, it is presented for the first time in the way that Fontana conceived it, embraced in a theatrical setting made from ultramarine plastic sheets vaguely resembling wings. This idea of a theatrical, eccentrically shaped space is echoed in a varied series of Teatrini (1965–66) with their characteristic black frames that create a void around the canvas. The exhibition culminates in the Ambienti Spaziali that Fontana created in 1968 for “Documenta 4″, a complex labyrinth of glaring luminosity in which the viewer loses all sense of direction and time and ends against a wall cut by a single slash.

This exciting and complex exhibition has been expertly designed with the collaboration of architect Annabelle Selldorf.

Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) was born in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina and raised in Milan. He moved back to Argentina in 1922 where he worked as a sculptor in his father’s studio for several years. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young local Argentinian artists. Returning to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. His first solo show was held at Galleria Il Milione in Milan in 1931. In 1935 he traveled to Paris and joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy and Sevres, France. In 1939, he joined Corrente, a Milan-based group of expressionist artists, while intensifying his collaborations with architects. In 1940, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he founded the Academia de Altamira with some of his students in 1946, from which the Manifiesto Blanco group emerged. He returned to Milan in 1947 and, together with a group of writers and philosophers, signed the Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo. His first major international retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1977. Subsequent museum exhibitions include Musée national d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987 (traveled to La Fundación ‘la Caixa’ Barcelona; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1988); Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1996 (traveled to Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna, 1997); Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan (1999); “Lucio Fontana. Entre Materia y Espacio,” La Fundación ‘la Caixa’ and Museo National Cantro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1998); Hayward Gallery, London (1999); and “Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006–07).

Work by Ellsworth Kelly

May 16 – June 13, 2012

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ellsworth Kelly.

This will be Kelly’s first show of paintings in Paris in 20 years, since his 1992 exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume which surveyed the early works he made while living in Paris from 1948-54.

The exhibition will include an installation of four 2-panel paintings, made this year, each consisting of a colored curve in relief against a white panel. Installed on the four walls of the gallery they read as a singular, iconic statement in a progressive spectrum of red, yellow, blue and green.

Kelly has often said he takes inspiration from observing the world around him, distilling to abstraction visual fragments like the shape of a leaf, an architectural vault, the bend of a page or the curve of a body. Throughout his long career Kelly has consistently revisited the curve in his most iconic paintings, drawings and sculptures. Predecessors for the curved reliefs on view here can be found dating back to early collages, reliefs and paintings made during the six years he spent living and working in Paris after World War II.

Curves appeared early in Kelly’s art. A wide arc tops the vertical shape in Kilometer Marker, 1949, and a pair of curves, not identical but complementary, reach down to the lower corners of Relief with Blue, 1950. As Kelly has explained many times, the forms of Relief with Blue originated in a sketch he made of a production of Hamlet at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris, which he saw during the late forties. The relief element, with its curved inner edges, alludes to the shape of a half open curtain.1

Ellsworth Kelly has a long and rich relationship with the city of Paris. It is while living and working here that Kelly transitioned from figurative painting to his first efforts in total abstraction, and first experimented with chance, basing works on the river Seine and Parisian architecture. It is also in Paris that he made his first “Spectrum” and “Relief” paintings that forever changed longstanding relationships between painting and the wall, painting and sculpture and between color and form.

The work that Kelly usually cites as his «first» work is in fact based on the windows at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris:

Instead of making a picture that was an interpretation of a thing seen, or a picture of invented content, I found an object and «presented» it as itself alone. My first object was «Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris», done un 1949. After constructed «Window» with two canvases and a wood frame I realized that from then on painting as I had known it was finished for me. The new works were to be objects, unsigned, anonymous.2

At 88, Ellsworth Kelly is among the most distinguished of living artists, who has been the subject of countless museum exhibitions around the world. Most recently the Haus der Kunst, Munich organized a survey of Kelly’s black and white paintings which is currently on view at the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany. Also in 2012 The Graphische Sammlung of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich organized a survey of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Plant Drawings” which is traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in June. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston recently organized a survey exhibition of Kelly’s sculptures in wood. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York organized a retrospective of Kelly’s work in 1996, which traveled to The Tate, London and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Ellsworth Kelly will be on view at 79, rue du Temple in Paris until July 13, from Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 7pm.

Press preview before the opening on Tuesday, May 15 at 5 pm.

1 Carter Ratcliff, Ellsworth Kelly’s Curves in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, Ed. by Diane Waldman, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996, p.57.
2 Ellsworth Kelly, source of his artist quotes on life, art life, theory and painting: «Notes from 1969», in Ellsworth Kelly : Works on Paper, ed. Diane Upright, Harry N.Inc., Publishers, New York, 1987, p. 9-10.

Saturday April 28, 2012
Doors open at 7:00 pm
Performance from 8:00 to 8:20 pm

Cade Tompkins Projects is pleased to present a site-specific, commissioned sound and light performance work by Lynne Harlow.

Old Stone Bank
86 South Main Street
Providence, RI

Gilbert Hsiao, Dub Plate (detail), 2012
Acrylic on circular panel
48 inches diameter

April 27 – June 16, 2012
Opening: Friday, April 27, 6-8pm

MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce the exhibition Gilbert Hsiao: Jump & Flow. This is the New York-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York after living in Berlin, Germany for the past four years. Hsiao’s exhibition will consist of an installation of recent shaped patterned paintings.

Gilbert Hsiao is one of the foremost pattern painters of his generation. Profoundly influenced by music – ranging from Minimal to Funk to World music genres – and an avid record collector, Hsiao has produced complex, non-narrative paintings, drawings, and works on paper since the early 1980s that foreground pure visual sensation. Concerning his greater practice he states, “I want to bring into being visual experiences for which we do not yet have words, but can experience nonetheless”.

Although premeditated in appearance, Hsiao works intuitively and builds the patterns and configurations in his paintings through the repeated process of taping and painting layer upon layer of line and color from the panel support forward. His color palette is refined and unambiguous, often utilizing three key colors: black, white, and silver. He then commonly combines these with one or more fluorescent colors, such as yellow, green, orange, red, blue, or purple.

Six years ago, Hsiao reached a seminal breakthrough in his work and began using shaped panels for his paintings. In the beginning, this included circles, triangles, and diamonds, but rapidly evolved into more complex shapes, such as pentagons, hexagons, octagons, parallelograms, quadrilaterals, trapezoids, kites, and pie shapes. The new shapes, when combined with the dynamic patterns depicted on them, appear deceptively simple, yet bestow a sense of preverbal contemplation on the viewer.

Gilbert Hsiao (b. 1956, PA; raised Terre Haute, IN) has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United States. He has mounted solo exhibitions at MINUS SPACE, Dr. Julius | AP (Berlin, Germany), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX), and White Columns (New York, NY), among others. Recent museum exhibitions include the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA), Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (Bonn, Germany), and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY).

In April 2012, Hsiao received the prestigious Space Award from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and will begin his residency in Dumbo, Brooklyn in September. He was also awarded a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2008. Hsiao is member of American Abstract Artists and he studied Art History at Columbia University (New York, NY) before receiving a BFA from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY).