With his work, Ted Stamm draws as much from a Minimalist, hard-edge legacy as it does from the randomness and arbitrariness of his own life.  Seeing as Stamm sought to “eliminate any physical boundary in time or space”[1] between his life and his work, we must look at the two as inseparable.  His sleek manipulations of baseball diamonds and high-speed trains offer a glimpse into some of his passions, and his Wooster paintings preserve specific spatial memories from his time in New York.

After the introduction of European painting via the Armory show, several American artists sought to represent the city of New York in a new modernist vernacular. Georgia O’Keeffe’s portrayal City Night, 1926 demonstrates the dynamism of a highly modernized city with angular lines and stark contrasts—similar properties evoke speed and urbanism in Stamm’s work.  Likewise, speed and mechanization played a prominent role in the philosophy of the Futurists; Giacomo Balla’s Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913, conveys the seemingly imperceptible velocity of a being in flight.

Throughout his work, Stamm routinely adhered to the language of Minimalism, even as other painters increasingly turned to new forms of figuration and Expressionism.  He began using shaped canvases in the mid 1970s with his Wooster series; this experimentation with the physical structure of painting certainly echoes that of Frank Stella, among others.  Stamm’s legacy of starkly angular canvases can also be traced in the work of Li Trincere—who knew him personally—Robert Mangold, Ruth Root, and Steven Parrino.

Stamm’s austere color palette of black and white—or raw canvas, at times—also remains a hallmark of his work.  The raw canvas in works such as his Dodgers series contrasts sharply with the deep black Stamm used; this contrast was also invoked continually by John McLaughlin, among other hard-edge painters.  Turning to the color black due to its association with “badness or unconformity and rebellion,”[2] Stamm also used the color on account of its ability to cancel out any appearance of subjective brushstrokes, thereby reinforcing the materiality and objecthood of the canvas that it marks.  The high density of the color black Stamm used, which at times was mixed with graphite to accentuate its textural properties, gave his paintings a sense of gravity, echoing the iron works of Richard Serra.  Stamm’s installation of the works close to the gallery floor only reinforced this connection.

Working in the 1970s in New York, Stamm was certainly aware of Conceptual and Fluxus art practices.  His Tag Pieces demonstrate a connection to Conceptual artists like On Kawara, but they ultimately reflect his desire fuse his life and his art.  For each Tag Piece, Stamm would glue a textile tag—presumably found in his studio—to a page in a notebook and have an acquaintance mark it as they see fit.  After this, Stamm would repeat the process himself in a second notebook, this time marking information such as the date and persons involved.  The ritual This recording of daily events is but one strategy in his efforts to link his work with happenings in his own life, something Stamm achieved throughout his entire body of work.

[1] Tiffany Bell, “Painting for the Future,” in Ted Stamm Painting Advance 1990, exh. cat. (Brookville, NY: Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, 1986), 5.

[2] Ibid., 7.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Byron Kim, Untitled (for J.B.), 2010
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 72 inches

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Byron Kim’s recent work—a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the sky at night in the city. The exhibition opens on Friday, November 4th and runs through Saturday, December 22nd. Byron Kim: Dark, a 56-page hard-cover catalog including 15 color plates of the new work along with essays by David Hinton and Mark Dow will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. This is the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist whose career spans over two decades and includes important solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

Like the artists whom he admires; Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin, Byron Kim works in an area one might call the abstract sublime; his work sits at the threshold between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. In his richly hued, minimalist works, Kim seeks to push the edges of what we understand as abstract painting by using the medium to develop an idea that typically gets worked out over the course of an ongoing series. His paintings often appear to be pure abstractions, but upon investigation and contemplation, they reveal a charged space that connects to the artist’s personal experiences and whose underlying ideas raise questions about issues from politics to environmentalism to cultural identity. Interviewed in his sunny Brooklyn studio, Kim quips, “I’m a painter until 2:00 in the afternoon when the daylight in my studio is so blinding that I become a conceptual artist.”

In this new series of work, Kim paints night in the city, evoking the quality of light and hazy cloud formations in the transition from dusk to dark and beyond. He depicts the state of constant suspension that city dwellers experience; the omnipresent lights block their view into the cosmos and deny a resolution to the day that true darkness delivers. The paintings in this ongoing series, measuring 90 x 72 inches, often have hard-edged, painted borders on two or three sides that act as reminders of the architectural elements like windows, cornices and facades of buildings that frame our views of the city sky. Kim paints his crepuscular skies from memory, creating open spaces that act as trigger points for the viewer’s inner dialogue, giving the imagination room to resonate and remember.

Byron Kim, born in 1961, is a Senior Critic at Yale University. Works from his Sunday Paintings series are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the exhibition “Unfolding Tales: Selections from the Contemporary Collection.” Upcoming in 2012, his work will be included “Time-Lapse” at SITE Santa Fe an exhibition curated by Irene Hoffman. Kim’s signature work Synecdoche started in 1991 and exhibited in the Whitney Biennial in 1993, is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Washington, DC. This ongoing series consists of a grid of hundreds of small panels that each match to color of a person’s skin. It is both a portrait of people in the artist’s life and an exploration of race and community. Kim’s mid-career survey, “Threshold” traveled widely from the Berkeley Art Museum, CA to the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul and on to five other locations in the United States (2006/7). Kim was included in the landmark exhibition “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today,” at the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Tate Liverpool, UK (2008/9). Kim participated in many other international exhibitions including the 7th and 3rd Gwangju Biennale, Korea in 2000 and 2008. In addition to the National Gallery of Art’s collection, Kim’s work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Norton Family Collection, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum, CT; Walker Art Center, MN; and Whitney Museum, NY among others.

Installation view.

September 15 – October 15, 2011

A rare opportunity to view an unexamined period of Reinhardt’s career with the first public presentation of a recently rediscovered early body of work, featuring fifty geometric paintings and works on paper, ranging from bold collage to vibrant gouache. Influenced by Cubism filtered through the lens of American artists such as Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler, the works reveal the reductionist process that led Reinhardt to his iconic monochromes.

Ted Stamm at his studio
101 Wooster Street, January 1980
Photo courtesy of Abby Robinson

September 24 – October 29, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Ted Stamm: Paintings, an overview of paintings, works on paper, street interventions, and other materials by the late NYC-based abstract painter. Prior to his unexpected death from heart failure in 1984, Stamm created a substantial, mature body of work that was at once responsive to the past, indicative of his time, and prescient of the future.

Ted Stamm was born in Brooklyn in 1944. At age eleven, his family moved to Freeport, Long Island, where he spent the remainder of his youth. He enrolled in Hofstra University in the mid-1960s, where he began by studying graphic design. He quickly moved into painting studying with artists Perle Fine and John Hopkins. He also studied printmaking with artist Richard Pugliese, who later introduced him to the Soho art world. Stamm moved to Soho permanently upon graduating from Hofstra University in 1968.

Between 1968-1972, Stamm produced lyrical abstract paintings consisting of poured red, blue, and pink paint on canvas. In the summer of 1972, he began to cover up these earlier works with grids-like patterns of black marks; he referred to these as his “cancel paintings”. Inspired by the late work of Ad Reinhardt, Stamm consistently used the color black in his paintings from this moment forward. He associated black with rebellion, rigor, and reduction.

In 1973, Stamm began making conceptually-driven work based on chance systems – rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel – that would determine the format and number of painting layers for a specific work. In 1974, he started working with shaped stretchers and introduced the element of line into his paintings. A year later, Stamm produced his “Wooster” series inspired by a form he had seen on Wooster Street where he lived. At this time, he also began making on his “Dodger” paintings named after the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. The curved forms and right angles used in these paintings were likely derived from the shape of a baseball field diamond. Examples of both Stamm’s “Wooster” and “Dodger” paintings will be included in the exhibition.

Increasingly engrossed by the concept of speed, the aerodynamic design of cars, trains, and airplanes, and the Modernist charge to reinvent painting for future generations, Stamm began developing his “C-Dodger” paintings in the last 1970s. The “C” in the title referred to the supersonic airplane The Concorde, which Stamm would often travel to see arrive and depart at Kennedy Airport in NYC. Similarly, his “Zephyr” paintings begun in 1979 were informed by the futuristic, stainless steel train that set a speed record for travel between Denver and Chicago in 1934. His later paintings “ZCTs” and “CDDs” from early 1980s hybridized various elements from his earlier “Wooster” and “Dodger” works and were hung low on the wall just inches off the ground. One of Stamm’s “Zephyr” paintings, ZYR-4 (1979, oil on canvas, 33 x 114 inches), will be on view in the exhibition.

During his career, Stamm was also engaged in making highly experimental works produced in collaboration with other artists and individuals. His “Tag” pieces enlisted the participation of visitors to his studio who were asked to make a mark of their choosing onto a found garment tag that was glued down onto a page in a sketchbook. Stamm would respond to this mark in a second sketchbook of the same design. Both pages were then stamped with the date and other collateral information to create a record of their exchange.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Stamm also made proto-graffiti street interventions, which he termed “Designators”. Using a small stencil of his “Dodger” shape, he painted the shape in black on buildings and other locations in NYC that had personal significance to him. When he returned to a specific site and saw that his original mark had been altered, he would paint the shape again in silver. On his third visit, he would stencil a black “T” on the silver shape. On his fourth and final visit, he would add a second “T”, this time in silver. Images of Stamm’s street interventions will be included in his show, as well as documentation by photographer Abby Robinson of his participation in the Pool Project organized by artist Russell Maltz at the C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY, in the late 1970s.

In one of his few written statements about his work, Stamm asserts “my work deals with an idealism which announces and supports the advancement of the art language, specifically painting”. More than 25 years after his death, it is clear that Stamm’s persona and character, his optimism about painting’s enduring possibilities and future advancement, and his expanded practice both in and out of the studio were of great significance to his artist contemporaries. His work also anticipated the conceptual strategies and material inquiries of subsequent generations of artists who came of age in NYC during the past three decades.

Ted Stamm (b. 1944 Brooklyn, NY; d. 1984 New York, NY) exhibited his work internationally during his lifetime, including in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues, such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Clocktower, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Condeso/Lawler Gallery (all New York City), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH), Museum of Art (Fort Lauderdale, FL), Oklahoma Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, OK), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, CA), Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL), Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), Atkins Museum of Fine Art (Kansas City, MO), Akademie Der Kunste (Berlin, Germany), and Louisiana Museum (Humlebaek, Denmark).

In 1977, Stamm was included by curator Manfred Schneckenburger in Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany. His work was exhibited alongside artists, such as Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra, among others. In addition, Stamm exhibited his work at the legendary Downtown artist-founded venues 112 Greene Street (1975), Artists Space (1975, 1980), and Franklin Furnace (1977, 1980).

Stamm received awards in Painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowments for the Arts (1981-1982). His work has been reviewed in publications, such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun, among others.

Stamm’s work is included in the public collections of Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA); Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), and Western Australia Art Gallery (Perth, Australia).

CATALOG
Ted Stamm: Painting Advance 1990, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, NY, 1986 (PDF)

PRESS
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Pac Pobric, On-Verge, November 27, 2011
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Brett Baker, Painters’ Table, October 8, 2011
Ted Stamm @ MINUS SPACE, by Mark Dagley, Abaton Book Company, October 6, 2011
Best Exhibition Award, DUMBO Arts Festival, September 23-25, 2011
The Reductive Expands: MINUS SPACE will move from 175 feet in Gowanus to a Dumbo loft, by Stephen Maine, Artcritical, September 12, 2011
Gowanus Gallery MINUS SPACE Moving to Dumbo, by Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, September 1, 2011

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE would like to thank Russell Maltz, Per Haubro Jensen, Abby Robinson, Linda Levit, Serra Pradhan, and Marianne Boesky Gallery for their expert assistance with this exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm and by appointment

Kris Scheifele, Window Contortion, 2010
Acrylic paint and acetate
41 x 18 x 3 inches

February 18 – March 20, 2011

My most recent project is a series entitled The Contortions. Each piece is made entirely of layer upon layer of acrylic paint. The paint is applied methodically to a wooden panel support until it reaches a thickness of up to a half-inch. Then, it is pulled up from the support and cut with a box cutter. After being attached directly to the wall with nails, gravity pulls on the paint attenuating connections and continuing to change each piece. Not only is a temporal record created by the build-up of layers, but also by the paint sagging, stretching, and bending over time. In this way, The Contortions resonate with Eva Hesse’s latex and rubber pieces, which relate to the body, have evolved, and are now in a state of deterioration. Through its own elasticity and impermanence, my project can point to the cycles in life as well as cycles in art.

The Contortions, however, are more than memento-mori. I also think of them as comic and sexy performers. When I initially began working on The Contortions, I was thinking about the kind of spastic showing-off kids do—twisting their bodies in strange ways attempting to perform elaborate dances or gymnastic maneuvers. I related this to strategic, artistic maneuvering and, as a result, my very first Contortion ended up in knots like a circus contortionist. Perhaps because The Contortions share a proportional relationship to the body and are flexible, many people relate the work to clothing, particularly theatrical costumes. Because some of the cut pieces of paint look like straps, many make a sexual connection, which has included stripper or show-girl outfits, corsets, S & M gear, and equestrian paraphernalia—bridles, reigns, and stirrups. It is not surprising that all of these interpretations relate to the body and its control or lack thereof.

David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia (2000), an illuminating account of the significance of color in culture and society, has also informed The Contortions. Batchelor argues that in Western culture an abundance of color is deemed superfluous, decorative, or non-intellectual much like the Other—“the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological”—who is associated with it. Simply put, an abundance of color gets associated with the Other, whereas ‘serious’ color, such as black, white, and grey, gets associated with the ‘smart arts’ like Minimalism and Conceptual art. I am struck that within Minimalism and Conceptualism both color and painting faded into the background just as non-white and non-male participants began to enter the professional artistic arena. Consequently, the abundance of color in many of the Contortions is meant to signify the dismissed and the marginalized. I wanted to pack my paintings with multi-layered multiplicity and diversity as an affirmation of the feminine and in empathy for otherness.

Because the lens through which I often read work includes an analysis of formal elements in order to make correlations to art historical precedents, I tried to make this access point available in my own work. For instance, I was inspired to make Super Girlie Contortion, an over the top embrace of the extremely feminine, while reading Jerry Saltz’s review of Pipilotti Rist’s recent installation. Saltz wrote that Rist had made MoMA—“a bastion of masculinity”—ovulate. Prior to the essentialist feminism of the seventies, pretty princess pinks could not have been taken seriously, whereas today, such a deliberately ‘feminine’ tactic, despite its detractors, can be used as a tool. Super Girlie Contortion is an exceptional piece since it is the only Contortion that deliberately tries to look like particular objects—a vagina and a purse—both of which underscore a feminine strategy (with a giant pink highlighter!).

Rainbow Contortion not only epitomizes an abundance of color but, for me, also points to the ubiquity of the rainbow in the recent work of artists such as Jules de Balincourt. Color in Primary Contortion references Piet Mondrian’s utopic signification. In this piece, the cuts also mimic the horizontals and verticals Mondrian strictly adhered to in his signature work. In The Last Contortion, I simply slashed the rectangle of paint diagonally in a gesture of negation. This all black Contortion came to mind while reading Painting as Model (1993) by Yve-Alain Bois. Bois writes about the strategy of returning to a zero degree in abstract painting, which could mean starting over or ending things once and for all. The latter is epitomized by Ad Reinhardt’s attempt to make the last paintings—to ‘win’ by having the final word. The Last Contortion refers not only to this but also to other instances of all black painting from Kazimir Malevich to Robert Rauschenberg.

Work by László Ottó

February 18 – March 26, 2011

dr. julius | ap is pleased to present “Bilder des Anfangs” [Images of the Beginning] by Hungarian artist László Ottó, an exihibition which features recent paintings made from various shades of black pigment.

The artist writes:

“As a European my work is western, but at the same time I am consciously relating to East thought. Existential questions of life and death are the subject of my work. I construct geometric objects with a symmetry that focus on meditative contemplation. This particular exhibition only shows black images that serve as vehicles for viewers to open their mind to the fundamental questions of being. This spiritual claim takes the viewer out of everyday life and asks him to face the inevitability of impermanence.”

László Otto was born in 1966 in Pécs, Hungary, the birthplace of both Victor Vasarely and Marcel Breuer. Originally trained in architecture, he began painting in 1989 as a Constructivist. A few years later, he worked with the geometric painter Ferenc Lantos. In search of spiritual knowledge, he began to study Hindi philosophy [the Advaita Vedanta] and Japanese Zen Buddhism, studies which have taken him on a number of extended trips to the East. He writes extensively and refers to the writings of Ad Reinhardt as having had a great influence on his artistic attitude.

He has had numerous exhibitions in Japan and Europe and currently lives and works in Vékény, Hungary, not far from his birthplace.

After contributing to the exhibition mehrfach_ multiple, “Bilder des Anfangs” [Images of the Beginning] at dr. julius | ap is his first solo show in Berlin.

Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915
Oil on canvas
26 x 17 inches

March 2 – April 30, 2011

I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic Art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
–Kazimir Malevich

It’s obvious now that the forms and colors in the paintings that Malevich began painting in 1915 are the first instances of form and color.
—Donald Judd

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “Malevich and the American Legacy” at 980 Madison Avenue, New York.

The exhibition has been conceived in close collaboration with the heirs of Kazimir Malevich and features six rare and pivotal paintings, including Painterly Realism of a Football Player–Color Masses in the 4th Dimension (1915) that was recently acquired from the heirs of Malevich by the Art Institute of Chicago. They are brought together with works by modern and contemporary American artists including Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Alexander Calder, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, James Turrell, and Cy Twombly. Major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Storm King Art Center have lent works; others have been borrowed from the personal collections of Twombly, Kelly, and Ruscha.

In the ferment of the early twentieth century Russian art scene, Malevich, one of the pioneers of non-objective art, developed Suprematism as an art of pure form. He envisioned his Suprematist paintings as geometry stripped of any attachment to the mimetic representation of real objects; the elemental alphabet of a pictorial language outside the visual world. Suprematism thus conveyed what Malevich believed was the supreme reality of existence: pure feeling. His works were first shown in the West in 1927, when he traveled to Germany with over seventy works of art, which were included in the “Große Berliner Kunstausstellung” (Great Berlin Art Exhibition). Subsequently, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. included several paintings in the groundbreaking exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in New York, whose founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim – an early and passionate collector of the Russian avant-garde – was inspired by the same aesthetic ideals and spiritual quest that exemplified Malevich’s art.

These pivotal events in American cultural history, together with subsequent publications and exhibitions progressively increased Malevich’s exposure in the United States. The first U.S. retrospective of Malevich’s work in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum provoked a flood of interest and further intensified his impact on postwar American artists. Since that time there have been few opportunities to see Malevich’s works in the United States outside of museums and to examine the ongoing effects of his enduring influence. By providing an opportunity for both, “Malevich and the American Legacy” seeks to contribute to the expanding scholarship on the influence of the Russian visionary.

It is not only formal analogy that connects Malevich and American artists but also deeper aesthetic, conceptual, and spiritual correspondences. In dialogue with his work and ideas, they searched for elemental and universal forms consistent with simplified aesthetic aims. Barnett Newman’s By Twos (1949), Ellsworth Kelly’s White Square and Black Square of 1953, a black 1955 Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt, and No. 3 (Plum and Black) by Mark Rothko all respond to Malevich’s ultimate proposition in Black Square (1915) while David Smith’s Cubi (1964), Richard Serra’s Malmo Roll (1964) and Donald Judd’s untitled stack (1982) expound in three dimensions on his more complex, planar Suprematist compositions. Subtly modulated paintings by Brice Marden and Robert Ryman build compositions from the most elemental of forms into unique and multifaceted embodiments of material and process. Ironic ripostes are provided by John Baldessari’s Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich) (1976) in which a white square reminiscent of Malevich’s White On White is used to mask the crucial part of a noirish movie-still, creating a lacuna that shifts the emphasis from the act itself to the responses surrounding it; and by Ed Ruscha’s bleach paintings, which transform verbal threats into cesura. From the current generation of artists in their ascendancy, Charles Ray, Mark Grotjahn, and Banks Violette’s charged abstractions testify to Suprematism’s dramatic reach into the present and allow for its future impact.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and scholarly catalogue with essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Magdalena Dabrowski, and Aleksandra Shatskikh.

Ever since I was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the mid-1990s, I’ve been thinking about another art school on the other side of the East River: Hunter College. Since at least the 1950s, Hunter has been and continues to be one of the leading champions of color and abstraction, not to mention painting, among art schools in the United States. Hunter remains a beacon in today’s post-everything art world.

Over the years, an incredible array of influential and celebrated abstract artists taught at Hunter — many of my closest artist friends and colleagues also studied there. This VIEWLIST exhibition is a thoroughly subjective homage to those faculty members and the program they built. Without question a core concern shared among all of these artists is color, with strategies ranging from the exhaustively systematic to the intuitively poetic.

Artists:
Michael Brennan, Gabriele Evertz, Ron Gorchov, Ralph Humphrey, Lyman Kipp, Vincent Longo, Emily Mason, Robert Motherwell, Doug Ohlson, Ray Parker, Ad Reinhardt, Tony Smith, Robert Swain, Mac Wells, and Sanford Wurmfeld.

Note: I also wanted include Julius Goldstein in this project, but was unable to locate any images of his work online.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Left: “Why Artists Are Going Abstract: The Case of Stuart Davis”, by Winthrop Sargeant
Life Magazine, February 17, 1947, p. 78-83, © Life Magazine

Right: Loren Munk, The Roots of the New York School, 2010
Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

December 11, 2010 – January 29, 2011

MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce the exhibition Becoming Modern in America. The twofold exhibition will feature more than 20 vintage issues of Life magazine spanning the years 1936-1972, as well as two recent paintings by Brooklyn, New York-based painter Loren Munk.

Life Magazine
Life was purchased and redesigned as a weekly news publication by Henry Luce in 1936. It was the first photojournalism magazine published in the United States and its editors placed photographs on par with written text. For more than 30 years, Life was one of the most wide-reaching and influential popular media outlets in the US with its circulation reaching 8.5 million copies weekly by 1970.

Between 1936-1972, Life published more than 20 feature articles about the emergence of Modern Art in the US, including the development and public reception of geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. It is still debated today whether the magazine’s coverage of the visual arts during this time was a benefit or a detriment to the artist community in New York City.

Groundbreaking articles include its August 8, 1949 issue, in which Life published the controversially-titled article “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”. This was followed a year later on January 15, 1951 by Life’s second landmark article “The Metropolitan and Modern Art: Amid Brickbats and Bouquets the Museum Holds Its First US Painting Competition”, which featured the iconic photograph of The Irascibles by Nina Leen.

Life also profiled dozens of other artists in its pages during this period, including Piet Mondrian, George Braque, Stuart Davis, Jean Xceron, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella, as well as the critics Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, among others. The magazine highlighted key moments in the development of Modern Art, such as the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1937, A.E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art in 1938, the Museum of Modern Art’s roundtable on Modern Art featuring 15 major art critics in 1958, The Downtown Gallery founded by Edith Halpert, and The Jewish Museum’s Primary Structures exhibition in 1967.

Loren Munk
For the past decade, Loren Munk has created intricate, impastoed information paintings mapping the history of New York City’s artists, writers, venues, and movements. Becoming Modern in America will feature two recent paintings by the artist. The first painting, The Roots of the New York School, highlights the artists Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham, and diagrams the history, influences, and venues that led to the development of the New York School. Loren’s second painting, Critical America, similarly visualizes the field of art criticism as two primary streams of thought — formalistic and poetic -– and maps the influence of the key critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

Loren Munk (b. 1951, Salt Lake City, Utah) has exhibited his work in museums, galleries, and non-profit venues nationally and internationally for the past 30 years, including in New York, Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland, and Brazil. His work is included in countless public and private collections worldwide, such as the Museum of the City of New York, Metropolitan Transit Authority, Chase Manhattan Bank, Sony Music, Forbes Magazine (all NYC), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Hood Museum of Art (New Hampshire).

In addition to his artistic work, Loren has been a highly visible art critic for more than a dozen years. Working under the pseudonym James Kalm, a persona he created in the 1990s, he produces the weekly video blog The Kalm Report on YouTube, which he describes as a “blurring of criticism, historic documentation, journalism, and performance art”. He is also a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, writing the column Brooklyn Dispatch.

Life Articles
* Europeans Sweep Carnegie Show, December 20, 1937, p. 24

* Albert Gallatin’s Great-Grandson Sponsors a Museum of Abstract Art, May 2, 1938, p. 42

* Speaking of Pictures, This Is Art by Piet Mondrian, July 2, 1945, p. 6

* Why Artists Are Going Abstract: The Case of Stuart Davis, February 17, 1947, p. 78-83

* Radar: A Nonobjective Painter Tries to Marry Science and Art on Canvas, Jean Xceron, February 2, 1948, p. 69

* A Life Round Table on Modern Art, Fifteen Distinguished Critics and Connoisseurs Undertake to Clarify the Strange Art of Today, October 11, 1948, p. 56

* Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke, December 20, 1948, p. 22

* High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow: There Are Three Basic Categories of a New U.S. Social Structure, and the High-Brows Have the Whip Hand, April 11, 1949, p. 99

* George Braque: Great French Innovator Has Evolved a Serene Modern Art of His Own, May 2, 1949, p. 80

* Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?, August 8, 1949, p. 42

* 100 Years of American Taste: A Gallery of Popular Paintings Reveals an Unwavering Love of Realism, August 29, 1949, p. 56

* The Great Armory Show of 1913: The Most Important Art Event of the Century Threw the People of the U.S. into an Uproar, January 2, 1950, p. 58

* The Metropolitan and Modern Art: Amid Brickbats and Bouquets the Museum Holds Its First U.S. Painting Competition, January 15, 1951, p. 34

* New Crop of Painting Proteges: Dealer with an Eye for Talent Tries to Pick Tomorrow’s Stars, March 17, 1952, p. 87

* New Art at Close View: Details from the Carnegie Show Dramatize Painters’ Approaches, November 21, 1955, p. 96

* Great Recluse: Brancusi and Art Come from Hiding, December 5, 1955, p. 131

* A Boom in U.S. Art Abroad: Japan and Europe Go for Americans, May 19, 1958, p. 76

* Star Brother Act in Art: Two Italian Artists, Afro and Mirko, Make Hit Teaching in U.S. Colleges, June 9, 1958, p. 66

* Baffling U.S. Art: What It Is About, Life Presents a Two-Part Series on the Abstract Expressionists, World’s Dominant Artists Today, Part I, November 9, 1959, p. 68

* The Varied Art of Four Pioneers: Analogies with Nature Help Explain Abstract-Expressionist Work, Part II, November 16, 1959, p. 74

* Master of the Minimal: Ad Reinhardt, Honor Comes Late to a Solitary Moralist in Art, February 3, 1967, p. 45

* Shape of Art for Some Time to Come, July 28, 1967, p. 38

* A New Cut in Art: Oddly Shaped Canvases by Frank Stella Challenges Viewers, January 19, 1968, p. 44

* Fling, Dribble and Dip: Young Sculptors Pour Their Art All Over the Floor, February 27, 1970, p. 62

PRESS
Loren Munk at MINUS SPACE, by Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, January 22, 2011

Becoming Modern in America: Life Magazine 1936–1972 & New Paintings by Loren Monk, by Sarah Schmerler, Time Out New York, January 14, 2011

Gallery Chronicle, by James Panero, The New Criterion, January 2011

A Loren Munk Report, by Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint blog, December 12, 2010

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

June 17-26, 2010

Twelve Rules for a New Academy (gender & sexuality) is the title of Christopher Dean’s forthcoming exhibition at Factory 49, Sydney. The title directly references Ad Reinhardt’’s 1953 manifesto ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’, a statement that maps out the rights and wrongs of art. Rather than presenting the art going public with a list of objective commandments Dean’s exhibition speaks from a more intimate and subjective position.

Dean’s interpretation of Twelve Rules for a New Academy consists of twelve small pencil drawings on paper using quotes beginning with the word ‘I’. As the exhibitions subtitle suggests all of the quotes contained within the drawings make reference to the theme of gender and sexuality. The design of each drawing uses a font derived from children’s ABC building blocks. Bursting out from the centre of the gridded text in each work is a pink trapezoidal shape, paying homage to Reinhardt’s monochromes and the emblems of Russian Constructivism that inspired them.

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.

Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1961-62
Artificial fiber, 24 3/16 × 18 1/8 inches
Photo Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

March 2009

The Last Breath of Piero Manzoni, by Robert C. Morgan

Chris Martin: Works on Paper at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, by John Yau

Imi Knoebel at Mary Boone Gallery, by John Yau

Philip Guston: 1954-1958 at L&M Arts, by John Yau

The Art World on Facebook: A Primer, by Sharon L. Butler

February 2009

From Abstract Expressionism to Minimal Art: The Legacy of Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith, by Robert C. Morgan

Al Held at Paul Kasmin Gallery, by Roni Feinstein

R H Quaytman: Chapter 12: iamb at Miguel Abreu Gallery, by Joan Waltemath

March 14 – May 3, 2009

The Green Gallery East presents new silverpoint drawings by Michelle Grabner with a mobile by Brad Killam. Michelle Grabner’s paintings and silverpoints index the essentialism of time. Created with lines, marks, ticks, points, and dots Grabner’s compositions are simply organized, accumulated, and sequenced, thus leaving virtually no space for the imagination or invention. There is nothing signified or expressed – nothing to be interpreted – only a methodical indication or trace of time’s passage. Directing attention away from associations and referents toward formal concerns. Grabner’s works underscore the poetics of constraints and sameness:

“With absolute conviction I believe and practice Ad Reinhardt’s thesis put forth in Extreme Routine. ‘One paints when there is nothing else to do,’ he writes. For Painting to be Painting — elemental visual vocabulary and meter unique to the language — everything else has to be ‘taken care of.’ It is a responsibility and privilege to work within its conditions. Painting is not Painting when it props up the self or attempts to tell stories. That activity is called picturemaking. Painting is larger than pictures but not larger than its limitations which are severe and singular and sweet.” 
– Michelle Grabner

ROUTINE EXTREMISM
Ad Reinhardt

One paints when there is nothing else to do. After everything else is done, has been “taken care of,” one can take up the brush

After all the human, social physical needs, pressures have been accounted for, only then can one be free to work.

There is nothing worse than a fine artist who has something to do, a “job” or Commission,” thinks he has a “job” to do. Sculpture is always a “questionable” fine art, this is why

After the mail has been read and answered, bills paid, the place, studio cleaned and swept, children packed off to school or camp, wives released for shopping, after one has eaten, gone to the john, has taken the morning, noon or afternoon nap, free from any anxiety, all pains, pleasures, all distractions, obstacles, hindrances

Expressionism and surrealism is always fake, art as something else is always fake

Pension, income, when finally one has absolutely no reason not to work, it is exact

ideal time to begin

finished

One lives after one is through painting what one is painting

After one

One lives after there is no more painting to be done

One has been painting out

After the paintings have been painted out.

Allied Works Architecture
Maryhill Overlook, 1999
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster 

“Brad Cloepfil is the principal of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Allied Works is a nationally recognized architecture firm that has recently completed projects like the extension to the Seattle Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and is currently finishing the Museum of Art & Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. PORT recently sat down with him to ask about the impact artists have had on his work.

PORT: How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

Brad Cloepfil: When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn’t even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. I wasn’t seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. I saw Richard Serra’s Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called “architecture” that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas…?”

PORT is dedicated to catalyzing critical discussion and disseminating information about art as lensed through Portland, Oregon.

Photo by Kay Bell Reynal

Several works by legendary American abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), never shown in a U.S. museum before, will debut this winter at The Rose Art Museum. An extraordinary body of work created by Hans Hofmann for the architect Josep Sert’s 1950 city plan called the Chimbote Project is the genesis for this exhibition.  The nine painting studies Hofmann produced for a series of murals in this Peruvian city form a concise and inspired example of the depth of Hofmann’s strengths as an abstract painter and modernist visionary. Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 is curated by Michael Rush, the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose, and New York-based guest curator Catherine Morris.

According to Rush, in the Chimbote paintings vibrant colors mix with a variety of forms (circular, angular and cruciform) and are so full of energy that the canvasses “virtually vibrate with a palpable physicality.” The year 1950 was an important one for Hofmann.  Not only does this period mark Hofmann’s full maturity as a painter, as he produced more than 50 paintings in 1950, but it also delineates one of his most productive periods as a writer.  In the post war years, the artist wrote a significant amount, revealing the formal and conceptual intricacies of his intellectual concerns and his creative processes.  Writings identified by the first line of the “typescripts,” as they are called include revelatory pieces such as “When I start to paint…,” dated April 1, 1950 and “In this moment…,” dated Nov. 25, 1950.

Hofmann also delivered an important talk at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum that year.  Entitled Post-Abstract Painting, 1950 France and America, Hofmann’s lecture was presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that Rush says was characterized as the “most radical artist organized show of contemporary art in America since the 1913 Armory Show.” Artists in the exhibition included Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Theodoros Stamos, among others.  A reciprocal show, Réalités Nouvelles, took place simultaneously in Paris at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

According to the curators, Hofmann, while clearly recognized as an important painter, has often been heralded more for his influence as a teacher than as an artist.  It is the intention of Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 to situate Hofmann where he belongs: firmly at the center of the historically significant generation of abstract American artists.  While recognizing his broad influence as a teacher, Rush said, “it is our wish to place the work itself center stage, allowing it to be valued, indeed savored, as the product of an under recognized genius.”

The exhibition will consist of the full suite of Chimbote paintings in the context of two dozen other important works from 1950, including “Push Pull,” “Spiral Nebulous,” “Magenta and Blue,” “Image in Green,” “Image in Blue,” “Image in Red,” and several works on paper. Lenders include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum and numerous private collectors.

Accompanying the exhibition is a full color catalogue with essays by Rush, Morris, and invited scholar, Irving Sandler.

Ad Reinhardt, Drawing, 1946

December 2008 / January 2009

Reply to Irving Sandler, by Michael Corris

Katia Santibañez: New Work, by Phong Bui

Ad Reinhardt’s Emblematic Drawings In Their Moment, by Joseph Masheck

Tibor Freund: Motion in Paintings, by Craig Olson
 
Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, by Anne Byrd

Ronald Bladen: Sculpture of the 1960s and 70s, by Ben La Rocco

November 2008

Re: Michael Corris In Conversation with Joan Waltemath on Ad Reinhardt, by Irving Sandler

Stephen Antonakos: Here and Beyond, by Phong Bui

Giorgio Morandi, by Greg Lindquist

Ron Gorchov, by Ben La Rocco

Merrill Wagner, by Ben La Rocco
 
Lee Ufan, by Robert C. Morgan

October 2008

Joanna Pousette-Dart with Joan Waltemath

Michael Corris with Joan Waltemath

September 2008

Jerry Saltz with Irving Sandler

Installation view

September 5 — October 25, 2008

The exhibition Edges of Darkness at Hamish Morrison Galerie showcases artists working from various different aesthetic angles using black. From artists whose names are synonymous with black such as Ad Reinhardt, to others, most strikingly the Spanish painter Prudencio Irazabal, whose focus has been the antithesis to black – light and colour. As the title suggests, rather than a severe, minimilist or monochromatic standpoint it is a colourful exhibition of black, encompassing the glassy reflective and charred black depths of the tar sculpture from the Viennese artist-group Mahony, to the myriad tonings to be found in the canvases of Jörg Scheibe or Ronald de Bloeme.

Walter Rosenblum. Thomas Hess papers, 
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

July 11 — September 14, 2008

Ad Reinhardt’s Black Painting, 1960–66 (1960–66) was donated to the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 by AXA Art Insurance Corporation as a study painting after it was deemed irreparably damaged. Over the course of seven years, conservators, scientists, curators, and artists collaborated to examine the issues surrounding the conservation of this painting, including the inherent vulnerability of monochromatic and minimalist paintings to the aesthetics of aging, experimental solutions for conservation, and the associated ethics of these strategies.

Physical examination and scientific analyses of the study painting contributed to a dossier of information about Reinhardt’s working methods and earlier restoration techniques. These findings are essential to the understanding of how one perceives an imageless surface of flat planes of color, how an artist’s hand (or lack thereof) confers meaning, and how one can define the essential criteria for a painting’s authenticity.

Imageless takes the viewer into the world of the conservator as forensic scientist to uncover the mystery hidden beneath the monochromatic black painting. The cutting-edge technologies used in this research project are being tested to expand the current repertoire of conservation techniques. Science, art, and perception co-mingle in this exploration of the motivation of the artist, materials of the painting, and possible treatment and preservation strategies for artworks that rely on unattenuated surfaces to convey meaning. The inherent fragility of these paintings challenges conservators to maintain a flawless surface while adhering to a stringent code of ethics. For comparative viewing and appreciation of the subtleties of surface, Imageless concludes with a selection of Reinhardt’s black paintings. Presented in low light levels in accordance with the artist’s intent, the paintings offer a rare opportunity to appreciate Reinhardt’s extraordinary technique and meet the perceptual challenges so often neglected by the casual museum visitor.

The American artist collaborative, Anonima Group, was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1960 by Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski. Propelled by their rejection of the cult of the individual ego and automatic style of the Abstract Expressionists, the artists worked collaboratively on grid-based, spatially fluctuating drawings and paintings that were precise investigations of the scientific phenomena and psychology of optical perception. The work was accompanied by writings: proposals, projects and manifestos – socialist in nature – which the artists considered essential to the experience and understanding of their work. 

Their drawings, paintings and writings, which had much in common with the positions of artist Ad Reinhardt, and with the Russian Constructivists, were included in the 1965 Responsive Eye exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Along with other artists in the exhibit , Anonima’s work was incorrectly relegated to what came to be the highly commercialized and publicized category of Op Art. A recent reconsideration and recontextualization of Op Art, the expansive 2006 Optic Nerve exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art, places the Anonima as the sole American collaborative group, along with the European Zero Group, Gruppo N, GRAV and others, who were examining new optical information at that time.

March 7, 2008 – ongoing

This installation, drawn from the Museum’s collection of paintings by Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, focuses specifically on the fertile years between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, during which each artist identified the style and format that would engage him for the rest of his career. Reinhardt’s and Rothko’s ideas about form and color challenged and reconsidered European artistic traditions and philosophies, giving rise to a unique American sensibility in art in general, and particularly in painting. Their paintings were characterized not by the grand, expressive gestures and brushwork of their Abstract Expressionist colleagues, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, but rather by subtleties in color, form, and composition.