January 6 – February 18, 2012

Ward Jackson was born and grew up in Petersburg, Virginia. He studied painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute of the College of William and Mary, now Virginia Commonwealth University, earning his Master’s Degree there in 1952. While still in school Jackson began the correspondence with Guggenheim curator Hilla Rebay that would eventually lead to his long tenure with that institution. In a series of letters he sent drawings to her for comment and received critique and encouragement. Following graduation Jackson spent a summer studying under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Mass., settling in New York in the autumn of that year. Jackson’s student work had already attracted the attention of painter and critic George L.K. Morris who invited him to contribute to an American Abstract Artist annual exhibition in 1949. Morris, a founding member of the AAA, took Jackson under his wing and the two developed a close collegial relationship which lasted until Morris’ death in 1975. Jackson later was invited to join the group and was for many years its recording secretary.

Ward Jackson had his first solo exhibition in NYC at the Fleischman Gallery in 1956. In the early 60′s, inspired by the work of senior painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Jackson moved away from the gestural style that had marked his work of the ’50′s, developing his signature style of austere, hard edged geometric compositions on square and diamond shaped canvases. In 1964 he showed a group of black and white diamonds in an important exhibition at the Kay Mar Gallery that included such figures as Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Don Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella, and which marked a pivotal moment in the early development of minimalism. For the rest of his life Jackson expanded upon this personal and rigorous approach to abstraction, developing his ideas in the hundreds of 4 x 6 inch “drawing books” that he always carried with him.

Ward Jackson continued to exhibit widely in NYC and throughout the United States as well as in exhibitions in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan. Some of the high lights of his career were solo exhibitions in the late 1960′s and 1970′s at the Graham Gallery, NYC, French and Company Gallery, NYC, and the short lived but seminal John Daniels Gallery, (founded by Dan Graham and David Herbert), NYC, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg. As winner of two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowships; Ward Jackson had two solo exhibitions at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts during the 1970′s. In the 1980′s into the 90′s, Ward Jackson developed an active career in Europe with numerous solo exhibitions in Germany, in Berlin at Galerie Adlung & Kaiser, at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. He continued to have a foothold in the New York art world throughout the 1980′s and 90′s, with regular exhibitions at the John Woodward and Marilyn Pearl galleries in Soho.

Posthumously his work has been championed, by Lisa Dennison who included his painting in the 2004 Guggenheim Museum exhibition; Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present. In 2007 Ward Jackson had a comprehensive memorial retrospective at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn NY, which included a catalog with an essay by Stephen Westfall and a panel discussion with Westfall, Jed Perl, Phong Bui, and Matthew Deleget. The show received several good reviews and was immortalized in a you-tube virtual tour with his artist nephew; Julian Jackson by the James Kalm Report. An informative interview about Ward Jackson’s work and life is available at the Minus Space blog: Ward Jackson – Heat at the Edges, A Conversation with Julian Jackson, by Matthew Deleget In 2008 Gary Snyder included Ward Jackson’s paintings in “New American Abstraction 1960 – 1975″ at his gallery in NYC. Gary Synder and David Richard Contemporary in Santa Fe, included Ward Jackson in “1960s Revisited” in the 2010 exhibition and catalog in Santa Fe where Jackson’s work was singled out in a favorable review. David Richard Contemporary is now representing Ward Jackson’s work.

His paintings and drawings can be found in numerous public collections including; The National Museum of American Art Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., The Brooklyn Museum of Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, CA, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University MA, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Va., Edward Albee Collection, British Museum, London, and in Germany at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, the Museum Morsbruch, Leverkusen, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

In addition to his long career as a painter, Jackson was the archivist and the director of the viewing program at the Guggenheim Museum for nearly 40 years. Two visible legacies from this long involvement is the remarkable group of photographs that Jackson curated from the archives on permanent display in the cafe of that Museum illustrating the history of the Museum and its’ associated artists, and an art work in the Guggenheim collection by Dan Flavin dedicated to Ward Jackson and commemorating their time working at that museum together. In 1969 Jackson joined forces with publisher Roger Peskin and staff photographer Paul Katz to found an experimental folio publication, ART NOW New York. This interesting venture paired loose 8 1/2 x 11 inch prints of art works recently exhibited in the galleries with brief statements solicited from the artists. Over a four year run ART NOW New York published the work of well over a hundred of the most significant figures of that period, from Jasper Johns and Brice Marden, to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Smithson. ART NOW gradually developed into the ubiquitous and well known ART NOW Gallery Guide for which he served as advisory editor until 1998.

Widely known for his encyclopedic knowledge of art and artists, Ward Jackson was an active, opinionated, and informed participant in the New York art world that he so loved. He passed away in February of 2004.

- Julian Jackson / Rene Lynch

Stephen Dean, Untitled (Crossword), 1996
Watercolor on newsprint
3 1/2 x 4 inches

August 17 – October 16, 2011

On view in the Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums, from August 17 to October 16, 2011, Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists features 72 works created between 1960 and 2011, that include text or reference textual elements. Many of the works reflect developments in modern and contemporary art and critical theory, and relate to concurrent politics, history, and philosophy. Among the more than 40 artists included in the exhibition are Alice Aycock, Trisha Brown, Dan Flavin, Jane Hammond, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Karen Schiff, Cy Twombly, John Waters, and Lawrence Weiner.

The earliest works in the exhibition represent the movement perhaps most closely aligned with text art — Conceptualism, which arose in the 1960s out of frustration with the development of modernism, especially with the dependence on an art object that was often explicated with extensive text (from the artist, a curator, or a critic). Instead, some of the artists included in Art=Text=Art such as Lawrence Weiner (American, born 1942), Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), and Mel Bochner (American, born 1940) sought to create art that provided direct engagement with ideas, demystified the aura of the art object and creative act, and criticized the politics and economics of the traditional art world.

Some of the featured artists examine linguistics and explore the structure of text and its effectiveness or ineffectiveness as a tool of communication. Ed Ruscha (American, born 1937) makes works that exploit the visual and verbal form of words in conjunction or in contrast with their meaning, and William Anastasi (American, born 1933) examines issues of form and definition in his “shorthand” drawings. Karen Schiff (American, born 1967) considers the structure of text and its placement in books, newspapers, and illustrated manuscripts, and how that structure provides a context that can mimic or amplify the content of the text itself.

Work by artists who use text as a formal element similar to color, shape, and composition are also featured in the exhibition. American artist Jasper Johns (born 1930) subjects the shapes of numbers and letters to his unique painterly style that subtly questions the ease with which meaning is assigned to symbols. Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) included excerpts of poems that are so scrawled as to become illegible yet the words cohere with the overall composition seamlessly.

The artwork featured in the exhibition is from the collection of Sally and Wynn Kramarsky, New York. Wynn Kramarsky is a collector of modern and contemporary drawings, who has had portions of his collection exhibited at various museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Art=Text=Art was organized by the University of Richmond Museums and curated by N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University Museums, with Rachel Nackman, Curator of the Kramarsky Collection, New York. The exhibition and programs were made possible in part by the University of Richmond’s Cultural Affairs Committee, and funds from the Louis S. Booth Arts Fund.

The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue featuring images of all of the works in the exhibition, an essay by N. Elizabeth Schlatter, and entries contributed by University of Richmond alumni and students among other artists, writers, curators, and critics. It is free and accessible at www.artequalstext.com.

Installation view.

Opens March 3, 2011

Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection explores how a museum collection constructs and embodies histories to be reconsidered over time, offering various views into the museum’s own history and its collections right up to the present day, through monographic installations of individual works or bodies of work by key artists and designers, thematic surveys, archival research projects, special projects and recent acquisitions. The exhibition showcases the breadth of the museum’s collections, which include over 90,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, works on paper, artist’s books, applied arts and industrial and graphic design. As selections from the collections are presented on a rotating basis, returning visitors will have the opportunity to see different works over the coming months.

The climate-controlled Hall of Honor features iconic works from the collection, offering various perspectives on abstract painting, with works from the 20th-century painting is exemplified in the work of Piet Mondrian, while works by Kazimir Malevich are purely abstract. Color and autonomous form distinguish works by Jo Baer, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Barnett Newman. The centerpiece of this presentation is The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952–53), the renowned paper cutout by Henri Matisse, which is flanked by the intense gold and deep blue of paintings by Yves Klein.

A stunning installation of works using fluorescent light by Dan Flavin occupies the hall of the upper floor. Originally commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum, these works were first presented in this same location in 1986. Titled untitled (to Piet Mondrian through his preferred colors, red, yellow and blue) and untitled (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), these works were conceived by Flavin to be in dialogue with Mondrian, the history of modern art and the museum’s distinctive architecture.

A number of gallery spaces are devoted to individual artists and designers. Works by Carl Andre, Lothar Baumgarten, Barbara Bloom, Ger van Elk, Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Bruce Nauman, Allen Ruppersberg, Willem Sandberg, Wieki Somers, Fiona Tan, Charley Toorop and Marijke van Warmerdam, among others, will be on view.

The Stedelijk Museum’s collection is also distinguished by its extensive holdings of applied arts and design, from which a special selection is presented. A collection of tableware will be on show, with services, flatware and accessories. Following two recently acquired aluminum chairs by Wieki Somers, the museum has dedicated one special room to the design of metal furniture, both modern classics and contemporary pieces by, among others, Ron Arad, Xavier Lust and Gerrit Rietveld. Four consecutive galleries host a presentation of work by important young designers, including striking pieces of jewelry by Karl Fritsch and Manon van Kouswijk and experimental industrial design by Joris Laarman.

In the field of graphic design, one room is dedicated to exceptional manuscripts by former museum director Willem Sandberg—made during World War II (when, as a member of the resistance, he was in hiding) that clearly anticipates later signatures of his design work. Another gallery features a selection of extraordinary Cuban posters from the 1970s that evoke the Castro revolution.

Installation view.

February 10 – March 19, 2011

Lehmann Maupin announces The Parallax View, an exhibition of significant works exploring observation as conflict, curated by Manuel E. Gonzalez. On view 10 February – 19 March, 2011, the Chelsea exhibition features works by Teresita Fernández, Dan Flavin, Gego, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson, all acclaimed artists who confront traditional notions of space, light and the nature of observation.

Grounded in the idea of a parallax, defined as “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer,” this exhibition brings together stylistically disparate artists linked by the tension and romance between rigorous geometry and expressive chaos. The Parallax View explores the idea of observation as conflict: conflict between mind and object; analysis and fleeting insight; continuity and fragmentation; object and artifact; inner and outer. The minimalist works by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin provide narratives about light and landscape. Agnes Martin and Mary Heilmann suggest both the vastness and intimacy of nature, yet another source of conflict, but free of nostalgia or sentimentality. Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris and Teresita Fernández define perception, the physical and temporal relationships that a viewer encounters in relation to an artwork, setting the stage for interpreting a parallax as a prism that reflects the many facets of observation as conflict. Eva Hesse and Gego take a playfully minimalist approach to liberate sculpture from its traditional restraints, and straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is a complex spatial proposition on the relationship between seeing and experience, an abridged history within the shifting paradigms that ushered art towards the present century.

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.

Carl Andre, Grecrux, 1985

January 19 – March 05, 2011

Sadie Coles HQ is delighted to present an exhibition of stone sculptures by Carl Andre, comprising a sequence of works in Icelandic basalt and two major works in travertine.

Throughout his fifty year career, Andre has created sculptures by placing standard units of stone, metal or wood in simple geometric arrangements. In early works such as Equivalents (1966; eight different configurations of 120 bricks) and Cuts (1967; a negative variant in which eight voids were made by removing combinations of blocks from a grid), Andre articulated the concepts of horizontality, repetition and implied extension that have remained central to his methodology.

Andre’s ALTBASE series of floor sculptures, made in Reykjavik in 1996, consists of differently sized groups of basalt squares (12, 15, 21, 24), variously stepped and layered in order to occupy the same three-by-three grid. GRECRUX (Rome, 1985), one of Andre’s earliest works in travertine, uses fifty-three blocks to form a square-shaped Greek cross or crux quadrata. Its intersecting lines accord with the artist’s famous statement in 1970 that “my ideal of sculpture is a road. That is a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point … I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view.” SUM ROMA (Marseille, 1997) arranges the same material in a thirty-unit solid triangle whose stepped form recurs throughout Andre’s oeuvre.

Eschewing metaphorical connotations, the sculptures draw attention to their essential materiality and to the stone’s intrinsic aesthetic qualities. The travertine works recall the material’s use in iconic Modernist buildings and in Roman art and architecture – an association underscored by the title of SUM ROMA. Andre was indeed originally inspired to use travertine by a trip past the quarries on the road to Tivoli. In common with the majority of Andre’s work, these pieces also foreground the dynamic between work, viewer and architectural context. The artist has tellingly described the progression of his own work, and twentieth century sculpture in general, as a shift in emphasis from ”sculpture as form” to “sculpture as structure” and finally “sculpture as place”.

Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, Andre emerged in the 1960s as one of the key exponents of Minimalism. In the late 1950s he shared a studio with Frank Stella, whose minimal black paintings of that period provided a formative influence, and in the 1960s he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in linear forms and materials excised from pre-existing masses and contexts. A similarly significant episode was his realisation during a canoeing trip that sculpture could be “as flat as water”.

October 30 – December 21, 2010

David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of works from the 1960s and 70s by American artist Michael Heizer (b. 1944) at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space.

As a pioneer of the 1960s Land Art movement, Heizer has created a prolific and ambitious practice encompassing painting, sculpture, and large-scale earthworks. His paintings and sculptures, which he has produced intermittently throughout his career—manifest many of the ideas explored in his monumental works—which use land as a material form. Bringing together rarely seen paintings and sculptures from the 1960s and 70s, this exhibition reveals Heizer’s early engagement with the contrasting qualities of negative and positive forms.

Heizer moved from California to New York City in 1966, where he began his career as a painter. He was attracted to the concepts and aesthetics of what is now referred to as Minimalism, and his practice, during this period was in close dialogue with that of the artists he befriended, such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Walter de Maria, and Tony Smith. By the late 1960s, Heizer had left the constraints of New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he could create large-scale works that did not conform to the institutional and commercial boundaries of museums and galleries. It is in these empty deserts that he created some of his most impressive and laborious earthworks, among them Double Negative (1969-70). Inspired by Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan architectural ruins—which his father, an archeologist, exposed him to at a young age—Heizer’s earthworks often employ depressions and trenches in the ground as a means of addressing displacement and space. A prominent feature in the artist’s oeuvre has been his preoccupation with the opposing relationship between presence and absence (or form and void), an idea that originated with Heizer’s earliest paintings, and which is clearly pronounced in many of his renowned earthworks.

With an emphasis on reevaluating the relationship between positive and negative forms, as well as the confrontation between mass and space, Heizer’s output focuses on the tension that occurs when these juxtaposing elements are presented together; his paintings and sculptures reflect this complexity. The periods in which Heizer has concentrated more on studio production mark an intensely important stage in his artistic formulations, as he has used painting and sculpture as a way of working through his interest with mass and emptiness in various proportions. As Ellen Joosten suggests, Heizer’s studio works “are by no means ‘relaxations’ between the great earthworks, but rather [represent] periods of tremendously intense involvement in the formation of [the] questions that are engaging him.”

In his paintings, Heizer mostly uses hues that are associated with the colors of the desert (dark ochre, olive green, mauve, and slate grey), which he rolls over the canvas in large, rapid gestures, sometimes covering the entire surface and in other cases creating a transparent layer of color. This technique creates a positive and negative surface in which the transparent mass simultaneously frames and demarcates the empty canvas, thereby drawing attention to the presence and absence of space in relationship to mass and color. This method, which is clearly illustrated in Slate Tripych, 1979, mimics the traces left on the earth’s surface by the effects of erosion and weather. As Joosten further explains, “In his painting, erosion manifests itself as a phenomenon not so much in the material as in the form: through the interplay of closeness and emptiness (or transparency). The closed form (or material) is attacked from out of the white, while on the other hand form (the material) disturbs the silence of the (‘empty’) canvas.”

Paintings such as Untitled No. 5, 1967-72, Untitled No. 1 (Slate), 1974, and Untitled No. 7 (Red), 1974, reject the conventional square or rectangular canvas through the artist’s removal and replacement of segments of their surface area. In these works, Heizer demonstrates his concern with framing elements according to geometrically-calculated subtractions and reconfigurations, a process which he also employs in his earthworks.

The awareness of space and form articulated in Heizer’s paintings and earthworks is further pronounced in his sculptures, or “object sculptures” as he refers to them, in which scale, mass, gesture, and process are explored. The Minimalist shapes which he employs reference objects and architectures of ancient cultures; however, an extreme reduction of form underlines the artist’s interest in the spatial function form has within the “emptiness” of space. His preoccupation with the elementary forms of the square, rectangle, and circle, which reappear throughout his practice, come to full fruition in his sculptural works such as Vermont, 1977. Made using grey granite, this work is comprised of circles and their equivalent segments or fractions, arranged together in such a way that the harmonious relationship between the parts and the whole is emphasized.

Heizer currently lives and works in Nevada, where he is in the process of producing possibly the largest earthwork ever created in contemporary art. City, located in the remote desert, is comprised of five phases, each of which consists of a number of elaborate structures which the artist refers to as complexes. This monumental work has been an ongoing project for Heizer, and is currently the central focus of his artistic practice.

September 10 – October 30, 2010

The Paula Cooper Gallery will present an exhibition of four early Dan Flavin works, produced between 1964 and 1975. The exhibition will provide a look into Flavin’s varied configurations of paired contrasting colors, centering on a major “corridor” piece of pink and yellow lights from 1972-1975.

With his first fluorescent light piece, the diagonal of May 25, 1963, which he dedicated to Brancusi, Flavin expressed an interest in activating sculptural space with color and light. By the late 1960s he had developed a wide-ranging set of possibilities for integrating his lights within the three-dimensions of architecture. These possibilities included engaging the floor, ceiling and corners of the exhibition space; taking advantage of architectural features such as doorways and moldings; fencing off segments of the exhibition space with “barriers” of light; and, by the time of his 1969 retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, developing special installations, or “situations,” consisting of specially constructed architectural spaces containing room-filling light.

Flavin’s “barred” corridors, which he started developing in 1972, consist of specially constructed hallways bisected by a barrier of forward-facing and back-facing lights. The corridors allowed the artist to extend his experiments with intermingling and contrasting background and foreground colors in a contained environment. The experience of encountering one of Flavin’s corridors is described as follows by Michael Govan:

“The bars of light block physical passage through a corridor, but not visual access. [...] The space beyond the bars in these corridors is lit by a set of back-facing fixtures mounted directly behind those facing forward. The result is two contrasting colors that influence each other, one quite strongly present from the forward-facing fixtures placed midway down the corridor, and one secondarily visible in the spaces between the forward bars in the remaining inaccessible area of the corridor beyond the bars [...] Of course [...] the color relationship of the barred corridors is reversed when viewed from the opposite side.”

As Tiffany Bell notes, the square or rectangular configuration of the lights also allowed Flavin to refer to the picture plane of painting and the idea of perspective, and thus to inscribe his work within long-established art-historical categories.

The barred corridor on view in the gallery’s main space, untitled (to Barry, Mike, Chuck and Leonard) from 1972-1975, is an eight-by-eight foot installation of paired pink and yellow light fixtures installed back to back. This important and unique work (though Flavin had planned it in an edition of 3, only one of the edition was ever produced) was shown most notably in “Dan Flavin: installations in fluorescent lights 1972-1975,” a one-person exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Museum (later renamed Modern Art Museum Fort Worth) in 1975 and has not been shown publicly since 1999, the date of a Judd/Flavin exhibition at the Menil Collection.

The exhibition will also include three other important works. The earliest, from 1964, is an 8-foot vertical column, untitled (to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Inch). Cool white and daylight white lights are placed between bright yellow and pink lights, creating a gentle wash of white and colored light.

The two remaining works are corner lights from the 1960s, one of which a cruciform of two-foot pink and yellow lights on loan from The Museum of Modern Art and originally a gift to the Museum from the renowned architect Philip Johnson.

Dan Flavin was born in 1933 in Queens, New York and began studying, collecting and making art in the 1950s. He had his first one-person exhibition at the Judson Gallery in New York in 1961, and began working on his series of icons (wall-mounted square works that incorporated light sources) that same year. His first one-person exhibition using only fluorescent light opened at the Green Gallery in 1964. Flavin continued to receive critical acclaim and attention through the 1960s, leading to the traveling retrospective organized by National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1969. In 1973, the Saint Louis Art Museum presented two concurrent exhibitions of his works on paper and fluorescent sculptures. Among Flavin’s significant one-person exhibitions in Europe were shows in Basel in 1975, Baden-Baden in 1989 and Frankfurt in 1993. He has executed many commissions, including the lighting of several tracks at Grand Central Station in New York in 1976.

In 1983, the Dia Center for the Arts opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York, a permanent exhibition of his works, designed by the artist in a converted firehouse. Flavin also created a monumental installation for the reopening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1992. One of the artist’s last site-specific works is the sculpture permanently illuminating two stairwells of the former Dia building in Chelsea (1996). His luminous installation in the Santa Maria in Chiesa Rossa, Milan, opened posthumously in 1997. Flavin died on November 29, 1996.

Installation view

September 24 – October 24, 2010

Installation view

September 10 – October 30, 2010

As the Cedar Tavern played a role in the formation of abstract expressionism, Max’s Kansas City galvanized a younger generation of artists from when it opened in 1965 to when it closed its doors in 1974. This exhibition will feature the amazing diversity of artists from every major reference point in the New York art world of the period: Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual and Performance Art – a creative efflorescence rarely seen in art history.

Max’s Kansas City was a social venue where ideas could be thrown out, tested and formed. But a salient distinction was signaled to the art world at Max’s as important new art was installed; and the art was a “permanent installation,” as Donald Judd phrased it, rather than a changing show. John Chamberlain’s galvanized iron sculpture imposed itself dramatically at the entrance while Dan Flavin’s bold red florescent sculpture defined the corner of the back room and cast a glow over the entire space. Frank Stella’s large abstract painting dominated the side wall, while the frame of Dorothea Rockburne’s folded paper collage gathered nicotine above the bar and Forrest (Frosty) Myers’ laser beam ran from the front window to a mirror on the juke box and then across the entire restaurant to the back room.

The commitment at Max’s to the current generation was communicated and understood by everyone in the bar, and it prompted the idea that this was the locus of serious art talk and thought. At the front of Max’s stood owner Mickey Ruskin. Regulars included John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Larry Rivers, Larry Poons, and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the back room Andy Warhol held court with his entourage of film and factory people including Brigid Berlin, snapping Polaroid pictures and making audio-tapes of conversation. Hard drinking “heavy hitters,” in contrast to the clientele in the back room, gave off an aura of testosterone in the front room. The virtual hegemony of men there prompted the appellation “hetero-holics.” Women artists nevertheless were seen at Max’s, including Dorothea Rockburne, Lynda Benglis, and Alice Aycock.

In this exhibition we attempt to recreate with curatorial accuracy the art that hung in Max’s and that artists traded with Mickey for bar tabs. Increasingly this art is seen to rank with the most extraordinary periods of history in centuries.

Artists:
Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Larry Bell, Lynda Benglis, Brigid Berlin, Ronald Bladen, John Chamberlain, Dan Christensen, Willem De Kooning, Friedel Dzubas, Dan Flavin, Al Held, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Forrest Myers, Adrian Piper, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Dorothea Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Neil Williams, Larry Zox

This project has been organized by Maurice Tuchman for Loretta Howard Gallery. Interviews with many prominent artists by noted video documentary filmmaker Bill Maynes will be on view in the Gallery.

Loretta Howard Gallery’s exhibition runs simultaneously with Steven Kasher Gallery’s exhibition Max’s Kansas City which will feature over 100 vintage and modern photographs and large-scale sculptures and paintings by some of the artists of Max’s Kansas City. The exhibition will be accompanied by the launch of the book, Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll by Steven Kasher with an afterword by Lou Reed (Abrams Image; September 2010).

Craig Kauffman, Untitled, 2009
Acrylic lacquer and glitter on drape-formed acrylic plastic
36 x 40 x 8 inches

September 10 – October 9, 2010

Craig Kauffman rose to prominence in the 1960’s through his association with the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and later in New York at The Pace Gallery. He was an early innovator and pioneer in the use of plastics and the first to employ vacuum form technology to create sculpture. Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Larry Bell and John McCracken, Kauffman’s work was included in Barbara Rose’s groundbreaking 1967 exhibition, A New Aesthetic, a survey of minimal and reductivist art. In the catalogue accompanying that exhibition, Rose referred to Kauffman’s work as achieving “a kind of abstract eroticism that is purely visual.”

The current exhibition includes work from three series. The Bubbles, in two different scales, reintroduce Kauffman’s classic, convex form, first created in 1968. “Throughout this extended if intermittent attention to the acrylic medium, both pigment and support, Kauffman retained idiosyncratic shape and inflated volume…. In spraying thin layers of acrylic lacquer mixed with reflective paint…, he created the illusion that the color was within the plastic surface…. The dimensional properties were balanced by ongoing painterly concerns of color, light and illusion, even while working on a curved and slippery surface. The newest pieces, no less than those that he created in the late sixties, are uniquely effulgent, radiant, as though generating light from within.“

Also on view are works from two other recent series, the Flowers and the Donuts. The Flowers, in contrast to the Bubbles, are concave hexagons. As Los Angeles art critic Christopher Knight observes, “think overgrown morning glories…or flesh brushed with satin and spangles…. The strangely poignant collision of sumptuousness and vulgarity, elegance and tawdriness gives these works a surprising heft.” The Donuts, as the generic title implies, are asymmetric convex ovals with holes, “sprayed in delicious coatings of silvery hues.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1932, Kauffman began his studies in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, later transferrring to the Dept. of Art at UCLA in 1952, where he received a BFA in 1955, and his MFA the following year. His work is included in major museum and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Kauffman lived for nearly twelve years in the Philippines where he continued to work until his death in May 2010.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, accompanies the exhibition, which is presented in association with Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Installation view of Salotto – Villa Panza Museum, Varese, Italy
(l to r) Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 130, 1987-1988
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 60 x 60 inches
Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 121, 1984-1985
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66 x 60 inches
The Panza Collection (Photo: David Sotnik)

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, 1923-2010

“Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism have heard of the great Italian art collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In many ways a modern day Medici, Count Panza passed away at age 87 in Milan on April 24, 2010.

Together with his wife, Giovanna, and with enormous love, courage, forsight and brilliance, the Panzas amassed three distinct collections totaling 2500 works from the mid -1950′s to the present, mostly of American art. They mostly liked to acquire in depth from mature artists who were as yet not well known but would later be recognized as the major artists of their era. These included such figures as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, James Turrell, Roni Horn, Martin Puryear, Lawrence Carroll and many many others. The Panzas were, in fact, the first major collectors of these artists and signaled to others that these artists were important. Their vast acquisitions influenced American and world art history and art markets profoundly, as well as enhancing the collections of several American museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn…”

Dan Flavin, the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963
Daylight fluorescent light

November 5 – December 19, 2009

David Zwirner presents Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions, the
first exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery since having announced its
representation of the Estate of Dan Flavin.

From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that hangs on a diagonal on the wall—a work which marks the artist’s first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Flavin produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations of light and color.

Curated by Tiffany Bell, this exhibition will examine Flavin’s use of progressions and serial structures, ideas that were central to the artist’s practice throughout his career. Flavin has been credited with being “one of the first artists to make use of a basically progressional procedure,” and the systematic arrangement of color and light fixtures was an aspect of his work that not only led to it being characterized as Minimal art but which moreover influenced Conceptual artistic practices.

On view will be the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963, an installation that was of seminal importance to the artist’s body of work, in that it was the first work by Flavin to explore a systematic procedure. Here, Flavin has extended the primary unit of fluorescent light into a serial, additive system that consists of six fluorescent lamps (in three vertical sets, grouped as one, two, and three lamps). As Michael Govan explains, the nominal three “is at the crux of Flavin’s emerging practice. The vertically-oriented single fixture in white, known as one
[according to a drawing by the artist], must have been considered a reduction to the simplest of formulations. Yet Flavin’s final resolution involved three sets of lights, a series rather than a consolidated whole, which realized the possibilities implicit in the first diagonal—that it could be extended endlessly…the nominal three was not a fixed composition, but rather a concept—whose premise had enormous implications for a form of art that could be drawn out from an idea.” The work is dedicated to the Medieval English theologian and philosopher known for expounding the methodological principle (“Ockham’s Razor”) of forming a hypothesis based on the most concise means possible.

Flavin would continue to explore themes of seriality in a number of key works, including his “barriers,” which literally extend the notion of potentially endless repeatability into the exhibition space. The exhibition will include untitled (to
Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection), 1974, a work configured in a modular sequence of square units that dramatically bathes the surrounding space in blue light. Here, the artist has constructed a fence-like structure of
fluorescent lamps that cuts across the length of a room and disrupts the surrounding architecture. Part of a series of four related “barriers” (created in blue, pink, yellow, and green), this work has not been exhibited since it was first on view in 1975 in a solo presentation of Flavin’s work at the Kunsthalle Basel (fünf Installationen in fluoreszierendem Licht von Dan Flavin); the dedication is to Carlo Huber, who was the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and his wife Helga.

Filling one of the galleries at David Zwirner (the 519 West 19th Street space) will be a large-scale work that Flavin originally created for his first solo museum exhibition. In 1967, the artist devised an arithmetically expanding system of
8-foot lamps that were placed vertically along the available gallery walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Titled alternating pink and “gold,” the installation was comprised of alternating units of pink and gold fluorescent light, installed at progressively larger intervals from one another, beginning at the center of each wall: two lamps (one pink, one yellow) were placed at the mid-point of each wall; then single lamps of alternating colors were placed on both sides of the pair, spaced at intervals of 2 feet, 4 feet, 6 feet, etc. – as many times as space allowed.

The recreation at David Zwirner presents one of the earliest examples of installation art: encompassing all available walls of the gallery, alternating pink and “gold” produces an immersive, site-situational environment of light and
color.

Also on view will be the nine works from 1968 that belong to a series titled two primary series and one secondary. Comprised of three sets of three works (one set in red and yellow fluorescent light; the second in red and blue; and
the third in red and green), each set is composed of a cumulative system of vertical lamps. While they each stand alone as individual works, these constructions demonstrate Flavin’s interest in serial and permutational configurations. This series was first shown in its entirety at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich in 1968, and a complete group of all nine works is in the collection of the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

Flavin employed systematic compositions throughout his career, and the exhibition will include a group of late works from 1990 that project a sequential color arrangement into space: untitled (for John Heartfield) 3a-d forms a series of four individual works. While each of these works are arranged in the same construction of vertical and perpendicular lamps, they are distinctly organized in terms of a progression defined by the artist’s employment of color.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery will publish an extensive monograph devoted to the artist’s work in collaboration with Steidl, Göttingen. The publication will contain rare archival documentation and new scholarship on
the artist by contributors that include Tiffany Bell and will be available in spring 2010.

The third volume in Ridinghouse’s series of anthologies on the central figures of Minimalism, About Robert Ryman offers a crucial look at the artist. The book charts the gradual evolution of the reception of and reaction to Ryman’s art. Texts include critical responses from his very first solo exhibition to present. A comprehensive selection of over 60 essays and exhibition reviews has been collated into one volume, including texts by some of the most influential art historians and critics. This volume includes an introduction discussing Ryman’s reception throughout history by Vittorio Colaizzi, author of the upcoming Phaidon monograph on Robert Ryman. Other titles in the series include About Carl Andre and Dan Flavin: It Is What It Is. Writers include Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, Arthur C. Danto, Donald B. Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard, Barbara Rose and Roberta Smith. Some essays appear here in English for the first time.

Ridinghouse is the publishing imprint shared by London gallerists Thomas Dane and Karsten Schubert producing books, prints and multiples.

ISBN 978 1 905464 09 8

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In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist’s production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman’s largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting’s conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman’s method—an act of “learning by doing”—as well as his conception of painting as “used paint” set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.

Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman’s approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D’Amico and colleagues. Ryman’s introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.)

Hudson’s chapters—”Primer,” “Paint,” “Support,” “Edge,” and “Wall,” named after the most basic elements of the artist’s work—eloquently explore Ryman’s ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman’s work, Hudson argues, tests the medium’s material and conceptual possibilities. It neither signals the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings.

An October Book.

About the Author
Suzanne P. Hudson is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sorry, but this is too funny not to post.

“A year ago, Artnet News published a light-hearted piece on a music video by former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, which set the pop star’s gyrations amid florescent light environments, and clearly owed a debt to the work of the late minimalist Dan Flavin. Well, not everyone thought the reference was so amusing. John Silberman, of the law firm that represents the Flavin estate, writes to say that the similarities actually led to legal action — and that as a consequence Sony BMG and the production company Partizan Entertainment “have agreed not to make any further use of the video.”

And, indeed, it appears that the offending Philip Andelman-directed clip for Rowland’s single Work has been yanked from YouTube and MTV.com (as of this posting, the full video still appears on something called wat.tv, for those who are interested). According to Silberman, the settlement also involves monetary damages for the Flavin estate, though of an undisclosed amount.” — ArtNet Magazine, April 21, 2009

Works by Burgoyne Diller

January 23 – March 6, 2009

Featuring artists Matthias Bitzer, Liz Deschenes, Burgoyne Diller, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, Yuichi Higashionna , Gregor Hildebrandt, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Camilla Low, Sherrie Levine, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Pearson, Florian Pumhosl, R.H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Anselm Reyle, Alexander Rodchenko, Haim Steinbach, Frank Stella & Katja Strunz.

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.

Click to purchase on Amazon.com

This book examines a seminal 1964 Dan Flavin exhibition at New York’s influential (though short-lived) Green Gallery, which broke new ground–and marked a turning-point in the artist’s career–with the first series of works composed of colored fluorescent light tubes. The exhibition included seminal works like “the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum)” (1963) and “a primary picture” (1964). This volume coincides with Zwirner & Wirth’s recreation of the Green Gallery installation–the first in a series of projects that will explore the presentation and influence of historical gallery shows of the twentieth century. Along with new scholarship by Jeffrey Weiss, former Director of the Dia Art Foundation, this volume contains new color plates, a selection of drawings tracing the development of Flavin’s ideas about these works and their original installation, rare archival photographs, reproductions of exhibition reviews and a selection of recently commissioned statements by artists and critics who saw the exhibition.

May 4 — June 14, 2008

Gering & López Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Dan Flavin and Josef Albers. Pairing two highly influential artists of the 20th Century, the exhibition will allow the viewer to rediscover, evaluate and place into a new context these very diverse materializations of color and line. Though Albers and Flavin used vastly different approaches, both challenged the function of perception and went on to make significant contributions to the history of art. Albers, the Modernist, blurred the line between fine and applied art and employed traditional painting methods to conduct pioneering experiments in color theory and composition. Flavin, the Conceptualist, defied convention by using commercially available fluorescent lights and placing authenticity in the viewer’s mind rather than the artist’s hand. Both utilized architecture and the ability of the human eye to animate their color theories.