George Ortman, Sun Dance, 1997
Acrylic on bainbridge board
36 x 36 inches

January 14 – February 25, 2012

An exhibition surveying 62 years of the artist’s work.

George Ortman’s painted constructions of the 1950s and early 1960s are pioneering works. Their reductive geometry and modular color were widely seen as being at the forefront of young artists move away from abstract expressionism. Writing about the Whitney’s Young America 1960, Hilton Kramer noted that “There is only one artist [in the exhibition] who is equal to a museum showing: that is Mr. George Ortman.” Indeed, Ortman’s work was a particular inspiration to Donald Judd who saw it at the Stable Gallery and repeatedly cited its importance as an antecedent: “[In 1959] George Ortman was doing his best reliefs and had been working along that line for some time. Their worth has never been adequately acknowledged.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

In many ways Ortman’s early work forms a missing link between post-war abstraction and the geometric art of the 1960s. As such it fits neatly beside the occult assemblage of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in a progression away from abstract expressionism towards something concrete and revelatory. Judd remarks in his seminal essay on the development of the new art of the 1960s, Specific Objects that “The work of Johns and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman’s reliefs for example, are preliminaries.” (Arts Yearbook 8, 1965) Interestingly, Ortman shares with Johns and Rauschenberg a type of quotidian surrealism, as well as ties to Dada. Ortman’s link to post-war Surrealism originates in his studies at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York in 1949. The Dada connection comes via Duchamp, and is evident in the parallels between Ortman’s formal geomancy and chess. As Judd observes: “[Ortman’s constructions] seem to be games or models for some activity and suggest chance, from much through little, controlled and uncontrolled, operating on things both related and unrelated. They are one of the few instances of completely unnaturalistic art. They are concerned with a new area of experience, one which is relevant philosophically as well as emotionally.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

The current exhibition starts with Ortman’s first construction, Beginnings (1949), done while in Paris on the GI Bill. Beginnings clearly shows the artist’s assimilation of surrealist influence, taking Cornell’s boxes in a new, abstract/constructivist, direction. Journey of a Young Man (1957 is a sententious work marking Ortman’s transition from surrealism to purely geometric constructions. Like all of Ortman’s art it belies a furtive narrative figuration undergoing an analytical progression towards pure abstraction. Tales of Love (1959), the largest work in Ortman’s breakthrough 1960 exhibition at Stable Gallery, is the apogee of the relentless, reductivist constructions that Judd found so inspirational. Blue Diamond (1960) is Ortman’s most widely reproduced work and was a centerpiece of Toward a New Abstraction, the important 1963 exhibition at the Jewish Museum that defined then emerging post-painterly tendencies. (Here Ortman took equal place alongside Ellswoth Kelly, Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.) In the 1970s, as a faculty member at Cranbrook Academy near Detroit, Ortman’s work acquired a riveting elegance. Constructions such as Woodward (1974) and Eye (1977) have the unified formal presence of the best post-war abstraction to come out of New York.

In the late 1980s and 1990s Ortman turned his eye toward Detroit, seeing in the city’s tragic decay themes that were familiar to him from his work at the Tempo Playhouse, the theater he cofounded in 1953 that was the first in America to present plays by Ionesco and Genet. Pilgrim and Jefferson Avenue are two major constructions from this period. Stark in their use of silver, white and graphite, they have a lucid mechanical ferocity bearing interesting comparison to the work of Lee Bontecou. Most recently, fascinated by the geometric possibilities presented by the intersection of four inclined planes, Ortman has been working on an ongoing series of free standing pyramidal forms.

Throughout his career, Ortman has made Imitations based upon classical and modern masterpieces. Included here are drawings for Heartbeat, Ortman’s first (1962) Imitation based on Matisse’s Piano Lesson, and a group of drawings from his study of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (1965). These drawings emphasize the figurative and symbolic foundation of Ortman’s art, demonstrating the mechanics of his abstraction and showcasing his extraordinary talent as a draughtsman–an interesting aside for a geometric abstractionist shared by others of his generation such as Ellsworth Kelly.

George Ortman was born in 1926 in Oakland, California. In the early 1950s Ortman showed at the cooperative Tanager Gallery on Tenth Street, then in 1957 and 1960, at the Stable Gallery. Throughout the 1960s Ortman showed at the Howard Wise Gallery. The artist had a one-person exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1965. In 1970 Ortman left to teach at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and stopped exhibiting in New York. The current show is George Ortman’s third exhibition since returning to New York in the 1990s. In 2001 this gallery presented a cycle of paintings from the 1980s based on Georges Seurat’s Models, and in 2006 an exhibition of 4 constructions and new cast sculptures.

Installation view

January 19 – February 25, 2012

“Souterrain” will consist of new objects built in response to the gallery space, a wall painting, and recent photographs from 5 different series.

Lotte Lyon’s sculptures employ a pragmatism in the materials used, in the methods of assembly, and in the delivery of associative ideas. The two sculptures made for “Souterrain” respond to un-heroic architectural elements of the gallery space: the stairway leading from Beethovenplatz is matched with a stepped object propped against a large empty wall, and a small utility cabinet seems to have yielded a stack of boxes that could be drawers pulled out of an impossible space hidden by that cabinet. A wall painting transports the visitor from one space to the next, and a room filled with photographs makes it clear that Lotte Lyon’s staging is meant to give an impression of theatricality and performance, as much as they are referencing various Minimalist traditions.

In the catalogue produced for Lotte Lyon’s exhibition in 2010 at the Landesgalerie Linz, Midori Matsui describes the work as having a strategy of gestural, metonymical analogy, which connects the artist to an American Minimalist tradition by way of the performative elements of Robert Morris, the perceptual elements of Donald Judd and the associative elements of Robert Smithson. The element missing in this description, as Matsui points out, is the lightness in Lotte Lyon’s work, which has an important humorous element, and is carried out through the use of prefabricated two-dimensional materials, rather than solid mass. This work would just as readily find a lineage within a European tradition as well, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, and Lily van der Stokker, as examples.

Lotte Lyon has exhibited in a number of Austrian institutions, including Landesgalerie Linz, Kunstpavilion Innsbruck, Camera Austria in Graz, Secession Vienna, the Jesuitenfoyer in Vienna, das weisse haus in Vienna, Galerie Stadtpark in Krems as well as a number of alternative spaces in Vienna including LOVE_, Area 53, and Kunstbuero. Internationally, the PS1 in New York, the MMC LUKA in Pula, Croatia, and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo. She shows extensively with Galerie Aoyama|Meguro in Tokyo.

Menno Derk Doornbos & Piet Hein Eek present and exhibition of the work of Donald Judd and Jan van der Ploeg.  The installation will feature five works by Judd set on floor and wall murals by Jan van der Ploeg.

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

John Beech, Reutlingen Factory Yard #2 (detail), 2010
Metallic tape on black and white photograph

June 18 – October 16, 2011

The mundane, the invisible, the discarded—all become grist for the often elegant and humorous sculptures of John Beech. Conflating sculpture, painting, and photography, the British-born Beech has established an international following for his post-minimalist works. The exhibition will feature three recent sculptures and large-scale photographs that have been altered with industrial tape and enamel. The works operate inside a universal language of abstraction, which suggests the reductive rigor of Donald Judd mated to the wit of Marcel Duchamp in its use of common industrial construction materials and found objects. Beech’s handcrafted works present reappropriated industrial objects transformed into absurdist mutations that dislocate the viewer’s expectations through his visual recycling of images and materials.

New York-based Beech has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award, a Chinati Foundation Residency, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions organized by Bruce Guenther, curator of modern and contemporary art.

Installation view

May 6 – June 25, 2011

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Donald Judd drawn from the artist’s seminal 1989 exhibition held at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany. Brought together from international public and private collections, this will be the first time these particular works have been exhibited together in a group of this size since Judd’s 1989 installation.

The exhibition, which will span both of the gallery’s spaces at 525 and 533 West 19th Street, will reflect the artist’s intended clarity and rigor in its installation. These works comprise one of Judd’s few explorations of color on a large scale using anodized aluminum and thus provide a focused investigation of the key concerns within Judd’s practice.

This will be the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work since having announced its exclusive representation of Judd Foundation.

One of the most significant American artists of the post-war period, Donald Judd’s oeuvre has come to define what has been referred to as Minimalist art—a label the artist strongly objected to. The unaffected, straightforward quality of Judd’s work demonstrates his strong interest in color, form, material, and space. With the intention of creating work that could assume a direct material and physical ‘presence’ without recourse to grand philosophical statements, Judd eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation.

Judd began his practice as a painter in the late 1940s; however, he soon introduced three-dimensional elements into the surface of his work. His first sculptural objects took the form of shallow reliefs, and by 1963 he had begun to create freestanding works that were presented directly on the floor and the wall. Throughout his practice, Judd used materials such as plywood, steel, concrete, Plexiglas, and aluminum and employed commercial fabricators in order to get the surfaces and angles he desired. He created declaratively simple, fundamental sculptural forms, many of which took the shape of simple ‘boxes’ or ‘stacks,’ which he would often arrange according to repeated or sequential progressions.

Consisting of twelve identically scaled anodized aluminum works, the historic exhibition at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden was significant in that it marked the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format. Although he had previously examined the qualities of an open box form, the works created for Baden-Baden display a distinct systematic approach in determining the interior space of each box, which Judd divided vertically in different spatial configurations, sometimes introducing color through the use of anodized elements or sheets of Plexiglas in blue, black, or amber. The combinations of materials, dividers, and colors—which differ from box to box—thus determine the singular nature of each work within a finite number of variable possibilities; each of the boxes being an individual work that represents one possibility out of the given parameters.

These works demonstrate the artist’s visionary approach to using industrial material as well as his considered attitude toward proportion and installation. They were designed not for the actual space at Baden-Baden, but in relation to each other and within the given framework of their

design. Installed together, these artworks present a particularly unified experience of composition and space. For Judd, the placement of a color, panel, or, ultimately, a work, was always part of a larger context. The presentation of the boxes as a group allows for their unique spatial arrangements and colors to be apprehended by the viewer as a whole, while also emphasizing their relationship to the surrounding architectural environment. As such, the exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to experience a large-scale presentation of a single body of work by the artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, to be published in collaboration with Steidl, Göttingen. The publication will include new scholarship on Judd by noted art historian Richard Shiff, in addition to archival material and re-printed interviews with the artist.

The work of Donald Judd (b. 1928 Excelsior Springs, Missouri; d. 1994 New York) has been exhibited internationally since the 1960s and is included in numerous museum collections. A survey exhibition of the artist’s work was organized by the Tate Modern, London, in 2004 and traveled to the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Kunstmuseum Basel. Other important exhibitions of the artist’s work include Donald Judd: Early Work 1955-1968, which traveled from the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany to the Menil Collection, Houston in 2002-2003 and Donald Judd: Colorist, held at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice in 2000-2001. Permanent installations of the artist’s work can be found at Judd Foundation spaces in New York City and Marfa, Texas, along with the neighboring Chinati Foundation; his work is also on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, New York.

May 6 – May 31, 2011

The Salamatina Gallery in Americana Manhasset is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the U.S., Closing the Gap, by acclaimed Dutch artist Jan Maarten Voskuil. The artist will show a selection of new works never seen before. In conjunction with Jan Maarten’s exhibition the Salamatina Gallery will present a collaborative symposium on Sunday, May 8, 2:30 – 4:30 pm including Matthew Deleget, Founder/Director, MINUS SPACE and Erik Saxon, artist. The panelists will discuss their work and ideas, as well as their relationship to new international directions in reductive abstract painting, in particular the monochrome.

Voskuil’s “paintings” are about everything that a painting usually is not: sculpture, design, architecture, and installation. His uniquely constructed configurations of stretchers and linen expand, quite literally, the grounds of what can count as a painting, while the curved surfaces of his works confound any stable distinction between three-dimensions and two. Voskuil’s art draws upon both the perceptual Minimalism of figures such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, and the literal Minimalism of figures such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. But rather than rejecting painting as these predecessors did, Voskuil remains committed to this medium and its continuing potential, even if it is, in his own words, “nothing more than just wood, linen, paint, and a little craftsmanship.”

Jan Maarten Voskuil received his Master of Arts from University of Groningen and pursued post-graduate study at the Ateliers Arnhem, Art Academy Arnhem, The Netherlands. Voskuil has exhibited and widely in Europe, the United States, and Australia, and his work is held in the collections of the Frans Halsmuseum Haarlem, and the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, as well as numerous others.

Catalogue/Book Details: Jan Maarten Voskuil, Getting to a point, with a text by Rob Perree, translated into English and German. Hardcover, 120 pages, 100 full-color images; initial print run of 1200. ISBN 978-90-811487-3-3

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the Netherlands Cultural Services.

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.

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.

Installation view.

January 29th, 2011 4-7PM

The Salamatina Gallery is pleased to launch the new book, Getting to a Point, by acclaimed Dutch artist Jan Maarten Voskuil. In conjunction with the launch, and in anticipation of Voskuil’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., to take place in April at the Salamatina Gallery, the artist will show a selection of new works as well as a new multiple especially produced for the occasion.

Voskuil’s “paintings” are about everything that a painting usually is not: sculpture, design, architecture, and installation. His uniquely constructed configurations of stretchers and linen expand, quite literally, the grounds of what can count as a painting, while the curved surfaces of his works confound any stable distinction between three-dimensions and two. Voskuil’s art draws upon both the perceptual Minimalism of figures such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, and the literal Minimalism of figures such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. But rather than rejecting painting as these predecessors did, Voskuil remains committed to this medium and its continuing potential, even if it is, in his own words, “nothing more than just wood, linen, paint, and a little craftsmanship.”

Jan Maarten Voskuil received his Master of Arts from University of Groningen and pursued post-graduate study at the Ateliers Arnhem, Art Academy Arnhem, The Netherlands. Voskuil has exhibited and widely in Europe, the United States, and Australia, and his work is held in the collections of the Frans Halsmuseum Haarlem, and the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, as well as numerous others.

Book Details: Jan Maarten Voskuil, Getting to a point, with a text by Rob Perree, translated into English and German. Hardcover, 120 pages, 100 full-color images; initial print run of 1200. ISBN 978-90-811487-3-3

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”.

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Berlin gallerist Rolf Ricke has been unleashing influential American artists like Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Donald Judd, Lee Lozano, Steven Parrino, Richard Serra, Jessica Stockholder, Barry Le Va, David Reed, and Li Trincere on Europe since the 1960s. A 1965 trip to New York opened his eyes to the creative ferment happening there, and inspired him to import the artists themselves, to create new work for his Berlin-based gallery, rather than simply borrowing existing pieces. It was a savvy move. Through the decades, he formed relationships with these artists and acquired a stellar collection of works. The Rolf Ricke Collection, which is being exhibited at three major European museums in 2008, represents four decades of work by predominantly American artists. This accompanying publication is a trove, showcasing Ricke’s 150-piece collection and putting it in context with an illustrated timeline of 40 of the richest years of art history.

September 4 – November 7, 2010

Next to Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel, Lewis Baltz is one of the most prominent representatives of the New Topographics movement, which was seminal to the development of conceptual photography. Baltz, as well as Donald Judd, were among the artists whose works were shown in the 1970s at the New York gallery of Leo Castelli. The current exhibition at Galerie Thomas Zander now brings together these two artists for the first time, creating an exciting interaction between oeuvres characterized by a minimalist use of forms and imagery.

Baltz’s photo series document the side effects of industrial civilization on the landscape, focusing on places that lie outside the bounds of canonical reception: urban wastelands, abandoned industrial sites, warehouses. His photographs uncover the correspondences between spatial forms that occur in the everyday world and advanced forms found in art. Baltz’s strategies imply a reflexive knowledge of the history of photography in that they deploy the photographer as a teacher of seeing who makes things visible through reductive gestures. He already turned in the mid-1960s towards a reduced, minimalist-style aesthetic, orienting himself on artists in the fields of painting, sculpture and Land Art. The autonomous presence of the work of art was declared the guiding principle. “The work exerts its own existence, form and power. It becomes an object in its own right,” as Donald Judd describes it.

Together with a number of wall objects, sculptures and early drawings by Donald Judd, the exhibition will show early Baltz photographs from The Prototype Works and from the 25-piece The Tract Houses that were first exhibited in 1971 at Leo Castelli. The two series are among his earliest projects, which broke with mainstream photographic traditions to reveal pronounced modernist references. Baltz manages in his work to extend the notion of the documentary; he “emphasizes the paradoxical position of photography within the art history of its time” (Sheryl Conkelton).

Baltz’s minimalist and reduced image compositions explore the photographic style as a process, and refer not only to the art of photographers like Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank but also to painters and sculptors of his day such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns or Sol LeWitt. Convergences are to be found in his formal and aesthetic compositional patterns as well as in the content he fixes on, which Baltz subjects to a highly critical analysis, without however losing sight of essentials. The focus is on universal aspects instead of particularities, as expressed above all in his “Prototype Works”.

Born in Newport, California, in 1945, Lewis Baltz studied photography at the Art Institute in San Francisco from 1966–69 and went on to hold various teaching positions and professorships in the 1970s. He still teaches today, at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice, where he lives and works, while also maintaining a home in Paris. At the young age of 26 he had his first solo exhibition of photographs, at Leo Castelli in New York. In 1975 Lewis Baltz then took part in the “New Topographics” exhibition at George Eastman House. Since then, his works have been featured in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, and they are included in various important collections worldwide. This year, Baltz’s works will be on view at at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as at the LACMA, Los Angeles. September will see the opening of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC will also mount a solo show from April to July 2011. All German publications on Lewis Baltz were published by Steidl Verlag

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 James Hyde, Stuart Davis Group
Pierogi / The Boiler, Brooklyn, NY, 2010

James Hyde with Phong Bui

David Reed In Conversation with Phong Bui, by Phong Bui

Donald Judd and 101 Spring Street at Nicholas Robinson Gallery, by Phong Bui

Julian Dashper
‘Untitled (I’m Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue #10), 2010 (detail)
Acrylic paint on wall
Each dot 8mm in diameter placed 60cm apart

Opens July 9, 2010

Work by Julian Dashper, Victoria Munro, Kyle Jenkins and replica furtniture of Donald Judd

Location:
Attic Contemporary Art Space
264 Margaret Street, Toowoomba, Qld, 4350

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…”

3 Concurrent Exhibitions
Front Room: Gerald Jackson
Lunchroom: Working Drawings, curated by Peter Soriano
Office: Sculptures from the 70s, curated Rey Akdogan

Katy Siegel and I had hoped to include Gerald Jackson’s work in an exhibition for which I was the advisor and Katy the curator, “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975”. But we could not find a way to get in touch with Gerald. Then, when I was visiting the exhibition at the National Academy Museum, Gerald was there. Shortly after, he sent me a DVD of a recent performance that just astounded me. In the third Studio Show Gerald will present this DVD with the painting included in the performance, and earlier work on skids from the ‘80s.

“I think that my experience growing up in America was a really black and white experience. The only color I think I really saw, that I thought was color, was on TV, commercials, or a different view of America – that America was in color and my world was in black and white.” -– Gerald Jackson

In the lunchroom there will be an exhibition, curated by Peter Soriano, of drawings by Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano and Richard Serra. The exhibition asks questions about the nature of “working drawings”.

Rey Akdogan has curated a related exhibition in the office, mostly of sculptures from the ’70s, including works by Nancy Arlen, Lillian Ball, Bill Bollinger, Lee Lozano, Judy Pfaff, and Alan Shields.

The Studio Show will also be open to the public on Sunday, June 13th, and Saturday, June 19th, from 1 to 6 PM, and at other times by appointment. Please contact the studio if you have any questions.

We hope you can come to the opening and please feel free to forward this invitation to your friends! We will serve beer and wine.

-– David Reed, Gerald Jackson, Peter Soriano, Rey Akdogan, Hans Kuzmich, Mark Golamco, and Andrew Schwartz

reedstudio
506 Greenwich Street, Storefront (between Canal & Spring)
New York, NY 10013
212.431.3051

Donald Judd’s personal library of 13,004 books located in La Mansana de Chinati, his home and studio in Marfa, Texas is now accessible online. The library database is the result of an ambitious process, which took more than 3,500 hours of work and led to the cataloguing and photography of the collection from October 2008 through January 2010.

A library offers a portrait of its collector, in this case Donald Judd. The idiosyncrasies of the collection — its subject matter and arrangement—offer insight into the private realm of the reader, the range of Judd’s interests over time and the combination of philosophies, sciences and cultural influences he referenced. Spanning over 40 years of active collecting, the library shows a breadth of knowledge that is remarkably diverse and eclectic.

Visitors to the website will be able to view not only the floor plan, bookcases, shelves, and books, but also each title’s reference, including its Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH), and information about where to find it at a location near the users’ home. This achievement provides new access to the artist’s personal holdings and a powerful tool for researchers and the general public to deepen their understanding of his contributions to the art of the 20th Century.

The online portal presents the books precisely as they are in the library. Utilizing a program and browser designed specifically for this project, visitors to the site will begin the virtual tour by viewing a floor plan of the artist’s two-room Marfa library, with the ability to browse its 96 bookcases, which include books on subjects as varied as 20th Century Art, Norse Sagas, and Physics. Moreover, visitors can also view the spines of each book exactly as they sit on the shelves and can select any book to view its particulars, including basic information such as the title, author, and issue date, as well as details like the binding, physical description, and Dewey Classification.

Although the Judd Library is not a lending institution, the website does allow visitors to locate any book on the shelf at a lending library near their current geographic location.

And finally, visitors will have the ability to explore the books included in the Judd library using a more standard search function including criteria such as the title, author, publisher, subject headings, language, and the ISBN.

The organization of the library reflects Judd’s sensitivity to geography and understanding of the development of the arts, languages, and sciences across different ages and cultures. As evidenced by the sheer breadth of the collection, Judd valued books both for their ability to share knowledge and as beautiful objects to be treated with respect. The library covers 576 shelves containing 13,004 books, of which 10,718 are unique pieces and 2,286 are duplicates. The topics are wide-ranging, with 1,060 pertaining to exhibitions, 3,129 art books (including 100 catalogues), and 1,455 focusing on architecture. At least 40 languages are represented throughout the collection.

The library is located in La Mansana de Chinati, also known as “The Block”, Judd’s former studio and residence in Marfa, and the site of some of his first large-scale architectural projects and installations. It measures one full city block and incorporates a historic World War I military workshop. The artist first used The Block in 1973 when he rented one of the two former army buildings and began installing the property with his art. One year later, he bought the entire property, which also includes a rectangular two-story home, formerly the offices of the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps. The Block is enclosed with adobe walls, which reference local construction techniques, as does the interior courtyard, which is landscaped with cactus gardens and Judd furniture. Also on the property, and in addition to the library, are a unique site-specific U-shaped work, a Judd-designed swimming pool and private garden as well as two large, permanently installed spaces that house the artist’s studio.