Installation view

June 22 – July 31, 2010

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery presents Shape Language, a group exhibition organized by Natalie Campbell.The works on view rethink the basics of color and form while treading the line between what is inside and outside a formal vocabulary. The starting point for the exhibition is Blinky Palermo’s Graue Scheibe from 1970, in which form attains a precarious autonomy: an irregular lozenge of shaped noncolor, floating (almost) freely on the gallery wall.

Shapemaking is an incessant, purposeful activity; it allows forms to speak and generate their own next iteration or question, as is apparent in Amy Sillman’s humanized, electric canvas and Imi Knoebel’s Messerschnitte collage series. A sense of experimentation carries through the silhouettes and shadows in Amy Granat’s photographs of destroyed, manipulated film. Jason Tomme’s hybrid of painting and monotype uses spray paint and a pressed sheet of paper to make process, physicality, and serendipity visible, while the marks in Zak Prekop’s delicate painting emerge from a process both immediate and contemplative. A hulking, monolithic sculpture by Esther Kläs creates an almost human personality out of surface and volume. Everyday materials generate their own unique idioms: in Patrick Brennan’s paintings, the matter-of-fact layering of paint, popsicle sticks, silk, and other craft media embeds daily life within an anxious yet confident visual field.

The curves and planes of Keiko Narahashi’s half-formed clay pots create surprising, unstable relationships that shift fluidly between two and three dimensions. A similar optical play emerges between the rigid lines and the traces of spray paint in Ned Vena’s painting. Simultaneously physical and disembodied, the shaped and stacked canvases of Joe Bradley and Wendy White make use of the tension between surface and edge, fullness and emptiness. Adam McEwen defamiliarizes shape and opens it to new meanings, appropriating and altering a form from Ellsworth Kelly’s Curve series with representations of banal text messages. Playing off of the contrasts and harmonies among these works, the exhibition coheres around the near-freedom of a visual language grounded in the physical world.

(left) Cecilia Vissers, Blacksod Bay, 2010
Steel, 2 x 95 x 93 x 0.8 cm (photo Peter Cox)
(right) Jose Heerkens, Written Colours II, 2010
Oil paint on linen, 150 x 200 cm (photo Willem Kuijpers)

May 20 – July 25, 2010

As in previous years, the Waterland Museum is organising an exhibition on current forms of concrete art. This time we present works by two female artists, both of whom have a strong affinity with the landscape. Both express this inspiration in a highly different manner so the juxtaposition of their works in the Waterland Museum promises to be more than exciting.
Formal art

Formal art is art that is created in accordance with formal rules. This means that the artist starts from, for instance, a set of fixed dimensions and proportions of elements and creates a sculpture from these. The work will then display a certain order, repetition or build-up of elements. Formal art is sometimes referred to as systematic or geometric-abstract art. It is also known under the name of concrete art; in concrete works of art it is all about the (sets of) rules that have been set in advance and which determine the artwork as it is being realised.

In 1930, Theo van Doesburg published his manifesto on concrete art. One of the principles he formulated in this manifesto was that abstract art is different from concrete art, because the latter is in no way derived from nature or reality – nature or reality are not ‘abstracted’ during the creative process as, for instance, Piet Mondrian transformed an apple tree in a series of paintings to an ever more abstract image of what he considered to be the essence of the apple tree.

Concrete art, Van Doesburg stated, is created entirely in a mental, conceptual process. Shapes and structures are the starting point, and the artist crafts an image by means of transformational processes. So it is more about the compass and the measuring tape than it is about the meaning of the initial image and the final picture. The artist concentrates on the elements of the image and their transformation. The results of such processes have their own autonomous meaning, they refer only to themselves.

In the works of both Jose Heerkens and Cecilia Vissers we can see an inspiration that finds its origin in the landscape and its abstraction; however, in subsequent steps, it leads to a working method that is concrete and its results are autonomous.

Jose Heerkens
“I mostly work on several series simultaneously, which develop alongside each other. Sometimes a series may continue for several years.”

Like many artists who work on the basis of concrete principles, José Heerkens creates most of her works in series. Each series is based on a specific set of rules and principles, and experience has shown that a set of rules may result in an unlimited number of works; a different interpretation of a single rule (choice of colour, grid size, number sequences) results in a different and unique work.

In the survey of her work on her website, Heerkens takes the Arid Zone series from 1992 as the starting point of her more recent work. It is immediately clear that a fascination for the landscape is the basis for this work – the earthy colours, geological layers, a high or a purposely low horizon, and strikingly: the presence of series of parallel lines that sometimes suggest a building, sometimes an archaeological rudiment.

Heerkens processes the inspiration from the landscape in a modernistic manner: crucial is not the image of the landscape but creating a parallel landscape in paint on the canvass. Paint and painting suggests a landscape, recalls this – although never seen in reality – from the memory of the viewer. So not the imitation, but the experience of a landscape in another medium.

In these images certain aspects of the suggested scenery are magnified at the expense of others: the colour of the earth, the geological structure, the line of the horizon, and especially the formal rhythm with which depth, width and height are suggested. A typical example of this is Run Across (1993): the picture elements – horizon lines, colour and the focal point of perspective – have been painted on top of one another almost autonomously. What’s more, the horizon line is curved so we see a part of the globe as it were from cosmic space.

A series of paintings Heerkens created in 1998-2002 was given the title of No Horizon. These works eliminate, in a step by step succession, any visual hold and as a result the abstraction is taken even further and the landscape inspiration is not as clear anymore (but is never lost out of sight).

In the works of the Stripewise Space series (since 2001) Heerkens appears to limit the expression of space in her paintings to the space of a line – on the other hand, there are still sufficient options left: a line may indicate a direction, it may divide the space of the painting into sections, and the width of the line may vary innumerably. The works in this series are not only consciously constructed of lines, but also systematically: the surface of the painting has been divided into squares or rectangles; the (ir)regular lines of paint add content and countenance to these segments. Several rhythms begin to cut across one another.

The concept of the Stripewise Space cycle then evolves into several series in which Heerkens is working ever more consistently and concretely. All possible forms of lines are investigated, in combination with the painting surface and the characteristics of colour schemes.

“Lines give shape and they lead space to rhythmic structures. They also carry the colours across the canvass.”

One series of works from 1998-2002 was called No Horizon; however, the book published in 2006 containing an overview of Heerkens’ work, was actually called Horizon. With this contradiction, the artist seems to indicate that she has never abandoned her starting point, but has in fact thoroughly and conceptually transformed it. Her pictorial search for reduction and essence basically produced a new panorama, inside of which a new horizon emerges.

In the Luminous Square series (started in 2007) Heerkens shows which transformations are possible based on visual and conceptual tensions between line, colour and painting surface; sometimes the grid, as a strictly structured area, is the main theme, sometimes planes and grids suggesting depth, then again it may be a play of lines on the canvass that itself in parts has been left unpainted; sometimes the colouring of patterns and shapes is so close to the colour of the canvass that the difference between colour and non-colour, between painted and non-painted, disappears.

On the one hand these works have been set up more strictly (the painterly element has disappeared completely), on the other hand they have a strikingly and surprisingly light and playful quality. The transformation that all the elements of the image have undergone, results in works of art that are both more complex and brighter.

Heerkens continues to strengthen her concepts step by step in her most recent work; principles from previous series she confronts anew with her by now rich experience as a painter, and works emerge that shimmer in one’s eyes. In this sense her work has some affinity with paintings of Frank Stella, which also spring from classic pictorial themes such as the distribution of light and dark, and the shape/ground relation. The works of Agnes Martin, in which the painted and drawn line – sometimes almost a written line – plays an important part, are also closely related to the works of José Heerkens.

The titles of Heerkens most recent series indicate once again that both she and her work have a place in a tradition in which the spatial reality of colour, structure, rhythm and light, interpreted as autonomous landscapes, continues to be a source of permanent inspiration: Reality of Light and Written Colours.

Cecilia Vissers
The thing that immediately strikes one in the works of Cecilia Vissers is the visually important role of the object’s contours. The strong borderlines of her wall sculptures, their demarcation to the wall, seems to burn itself into the viewer’s eye.

Every now and then a painting’s frame plays an active role in how we perceive the painting – it produces a framework, offers a visual hold and, for instance, articulates the pictures’ depth perspective. Then the frame functions as a window that co-determines one’s view, in the way the diaphragm helps to articulate certain qualities of the photographic image. The contours of Vissers’ work are so powerful that they add identity and dynamics to the entire inner surface.

Every object in the world has shape, colour(s), volume, weight and texture. Vissers’ wall sculptures also have these qualities but in a more autonomous manner. First of all, each quality has been distilled in the purest possible way; secondly, these qualities have been intertwined and matched in such a way that they harmonise within the contour like the notes in a musical chord.

We are used to interpret an object, whatever it is, with our eyes, and to use it, assess its qualities and consider which ones we may utilise for a certain purpose. Does this particular block fit that particular position in the wall I am building? Does this vase look good in that location? We are used to recognise the potential of (natural, cultural) objects, or to read and isolate their history. We attribute a function and a place to objects.

Cecilia Vissers’ wall sculptures are fully autonomous objects, introverted, useless, beautiful, present and unusable. They appear to be created never to betray the process of their origin. Purely in terms of visual tensions it is not clear whether the object has been shaped because there were incisions (from the outside), or whether the material has shaped itself (from the inside). (Some multipart works show incisions as events, e.g. Gaoth (2010) and Very Likely (2010).)

In image theory, a distinction is made between figure and (back)ground: a shape always manifests itself against a – larger – surface or background; the visual dynamics of their boundaries and the visual relation of their – suggested – volumes can be aesthetically charged to a high degree. With many modern artists, and certainly with the first abstract artists, the figure/ground concept has become an important visual means for developing a personal visual language, for instance in Matisse’s paintings on dance and the large collages from the last years of his life. Arp’s reliefs and assemblages, Ellsworth Kelly’s drawings and paintings, and – in the Netherlands – the works of Ad Dekkers and Ben Akkerman also come to mind.

Cecilia Vissers has something important in common with Arp’s and Kelly’s work: however abstract their work is, it always reflect the inspiration of organic, natural shapes and structures such as flowers, leaf and tree shapes, plant growth, and geological formations. Vissers is fascinated by the possibility that her works and nature’s works offer parallel experiences. This is often reflected in the titles of her works: Orange Tide, Follow the River, Wald, Blacksod Bay, Wolkje [Little Cloud] (whereby each title can represent a series of works).

In her residencies in Ireland and Scotland Vissers made the experience of walking across boundaries between mighty spaces: the boundary between cliff, sea, and sky, the sense of “this is the furthest you can go”. But she has also found inspiration in industrial landscapes (Corus Steel Works IJmuiden in the Netherlands and the Ruhr Industrial Area in Germany) and in city profiles.

Cecilia Vissers’ works are systematic, which means that geometric shapes and proportions are important starting points; but contrary to other variants of concrete art (e.g. the paintings of José Heerkens) they do not present themselves as documents of a – more or less readable – creation process. As a result, her work belongs to the Dutch tradition of concrete art that is defined by artists such as Van Doesburg, Dekkers, Schoonhoven and Akkerman; a tradition of works that may be inaccessable at first sight but in which the combination of intensity, intimacy and silence has yielded exceptionally clear results.

–Cees de Boer

Installation view

May 6 – August 15, 2010

We are proud to present the first major museum exhibition of the young Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson (b. 1976). For several years Einarsson’s art has been subject to a major international attention, and with his characteristic works Einarsson has developed into one of today’s most notable, young artists from the Nordic countries.

The dual theme of authority and rebellion is a point of departure for Einarsson’s visually hermetic, mostly black and white paintings, carefully constructed sculptures, photographs, videos, flags and flyers. Einarsson engages with alternative and abject cultures in order to unsentimentally address the workings of contemporary society from within its anomalous manifestations.

In the exhibition, “Power Has a Fragrance,” Einarsson takes existing visual material as a starting point, to create works that relates to both the abstract language of Minimalism and the narrative structures of Pop Art. Reflective of his international career, he expands his complex network of references beyond western culture and the present.

There are many parallel realities in the universe of Gardar Eide Einarsson. At least two contradictory, albeit productive, forces immediately appear to be at stake. One represents the virtuosity of blur and fuzziness, which clouds his works in fog and introduces shifting focal points within which dark and gloomy enigmas emerge. Here the artist stages a novelistic sfumato and an overriding atmosphere of uncertainty and dark melancholia. Words and images stir up a wealth of connotations to notions like “suspended”, “memory flashes”, “vertigos”, “fugitive encounters”, and “unchartered territories”. The other involves a very different narrative. The environment here is that of the clear-sighted and the investigator; it is detailed, pointed and obsessive. Seeking precise points of reference and arbitrary details, it matches texts from instruction manuals and police handbooks with badges worn by solders in Iraq, signs from bars and restaurants, pictures of prisoners’ coded tattoos, and a photo of a well-known drug dealer. Together, they resist the impression of anonymity and elusiveness otherwise insinuated. The result is an eerie environment, which is simultaneously ambiguous and hyper-realistic. On one hand, we witness the blur of an abstraction, a quiet tempest of a Robert Motherwell painting or a geometrical rhythm of an Ellsworth Kelly composition; on the other, we experience a sense of precision akin to an immigration manual.

Paul Henry Ramirez, BLACKOUT (installation view), 2010
Mural, paintings, relief, furniture & lighting
A Centennial Commission, Newark Museum, NJ
Photograph by Raymond Adams

Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Reception 6-7pm, Program 7-8pm

Free, pre-registration required.
Call 973.596.6550 or e-mail: rsvp@newarkmuseum.org

Newark Museum
Billy Johnson Auditorium
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.newarkmuseum.org
directions

Matthew Deleget will moderate a discussion with an international group of contemporary artists including Lenora de Barros, Paul Henry Ramirez and Don Voisine. The artists will talk about the legacy of constructivist abstract art as it relates to their work and explore why abstraction continues to be a vital mode of expression.

This panel discussion is presented in honor of Elizabeth Brady Richards.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract artist, curator and writer. He is the director of MINUS SPACE, a gallery and web site project devoted to reductive art in Brooklyn, New York.

Lenora de Barros is a poet and visual artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, whose work includes video, poetic performance, photography and sound installation. Having exhibited throughout Brazil and abroad, she is interested in exploring the abstract visual, aural and material signs of language.

Paul Henry Ramirez is a US artist noted for his signature style of fleshy and pop-inspired abstraction. BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation in which he has transformed the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court with abstract, biomorphic forms and playful, bold color.

Don Voisine is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn, New York. President of the New York-based American Abstract Artists group that was founded in 1936, he works with a visual vocabulary of pared-down geometric form to explore the possibilities of visual space within abstraction.

RELATED EXHIBITIONS
On view through 05.23.2010

Constructive Spirit
Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s – 50s
Constructive Spirit investigates the formative geometric abstract art movements of Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. This exhibition is the first to explore the conceptual connections and exchanges that existed between abstract artists from South and North America. Featured are more than 90 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films drawn from the collection of the Newark Museum, along with loans from public and private collections and galleries across both continents. Artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Alejandro Otero, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

BLACKOUT
A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation that allows viewers to experience painting as an environment that one can enter. Using the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court as his canvas, Ramirez employs his signature curvaceous biomorphic forms amidst a profusion of pop-inspired colors in dialogue with the Court’s distinctive Beaux-Arts architecture. BLACKOUT is the fourth and final commissioned project initiated to celebrate the Museum’s Centennial year.

For more information, please visit www.newarkmuseum.org.

February 17 – May 23, 2010

The first exhibition to bring together South American and US geometric abstraction, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s features more than 90 works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Constructive Spirit examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films. Featured artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

Constructive Spirit includes many never-before-seen works from the Newark Museum’s preeminent collection of US art, as well as major loans from acclaimed private and public collections and galleries across both continents.

Complementing the exhibition are related programs and events. On Saturday, April 10 from 10 am to 5 pm the Newark Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will present an international symposium that will offer new perspectives on South American and US abstract artists including John Ferren, Juan Melé, Charles Biederman, Gego, Josef Albers and Lygia Pape. Other related programs include a lecture series, gallery talks and family events. For information, click here.

Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s is accompanied by a major publication of the same name that will be available February 2010 at the Newark Museum Shop. Fully illustrated and co-published by Pomegranate Press, it features seven essays that place North and South American abstraction in dialogue. Authors include Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O’Hare and Cecilia de Torres. The 196-page publication will be available in hardcover for $39.95. Call 973-596-6696 to pre-order your copy today.

Jan van der Ploeg, Wall Painting No.273 Grip, 2009
Acrylic on wall, 560 x 1400 cm

November 7 – December 19, 2009

JAN VAN DER PLOEG
“And yet Giotto succeeded. He could make the local and particular stand for universal ideas.”
– Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920)

“The purpose of good design is to ornament existence, not to substitute it.”
– George Nelson, Good Design: What is it for? Problems of Design (1957)

“Q: Ought [art and design] tend toward the ephemeral or toward permanence?
A: Those needs and designs that have a more universal quality will tend toward permanence.”
– Charles Eames, “What is Design?” (1972)

American artist Joe Scanlan wrote a critical essay in 2001 titled, Please, Eat the Daisies. In it he examines the faulty premise of ‘design art,’ a term that came into favor in the mid 1990s’ as a way to categorize the work of artists such as Jorge Pardo, Atelier van Lieshout, Tobias Rehberger, Andrea Zittel among many others. He describes it by stating that, “design art could be defined loosely as any artwork that attempts to play with the place, function, and style of art by commingling it with architecture, furniture and graphic design.” Importantly he goes on to say that, “what seems critical to design art in all of its forms is that some sort of slippage occur between where art is, how it looks, and what it does.” The premise of this essay however is not Scanlan’s astute ability to detail the characteristics of this new genre but his insights into exposing its failures. His fundamental argument is that its practitioners evoke double standards by employing notions of design and function as a foil for artmaking. “We harbour a philosophical disappointment in the professional double standard practiced by design artists themselves, whose need for art to appear useful—without the risk of being so—strikes us as timid and sad.”

I appreciate Scanlan’s articulate assertion that design art regularly fails because its claim to design, and all of its many social and serviceable facets, is only a ruse for making art. This is where Jan van der Ploeg comes in. His wall paintings conjured from the visual properties prevalent in graphic design aspire to be first and foremost art. Van der Ploeg is a skilled designer and exquisite draftsman who navigates between innovation and familiarity, mischievousness and pragmatism. As a problem solver Van der Ploeg assesses a given site, public or private, and with a refined abstract vocabulary he dramatizes architecture and place. Organizing information and assigning it active meaning is a role shared by both the artist and the designer. Yet distinct from the graphic arts, van der Ploeg conveys, like Giotto before him, a desire to communicate abstractions and ideals that lay beyond function kindling the extra-ordinary and the unexpected.

With color, repetition and scale, van der Ploeg eschews static functional design dialogue, opting instead for lively visual attention. One needs to approach his wall paintings with the same curiosity that one would approach a Sol LeWitt wall drawing or an Ellsworth Kelly shaped painting. Despite their graphic and generous scale, close and intense observation is required to understand the visual patterns and motifs comprising their composition. As Philip Fisher writes in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Rare Experience, “To profit from wonder man cannot be either inattentive or passive, since in these cases he would not notice differences, nor can he feel himself to be living in a world that is fragmented, anarchic, and unpredictable.” Van der Ploeg works here, in the margin that separates the familiar from the wondrous, between abstract and the concrete

This is perhaps most evident in the ambiguous and idiosyncratic public spaces van der Ploeg occupies: the stairwell, the corridor, the oblique street-side wall of a house. These are spaces of transition, ephemeral spaces, overlaid with a design that, through a self-contained symmetry, or a repetition suspended by the space itself, attests to its own permanence, its own structurality. As Friederike Nymphius writes, van der Ploeg’s wall paintings, “draw in” the incidental marks of utility, the purely “architectural factors like doors and windows, chimneys and frames,” negating their particularity and making them complicit in the monochrome abstraction.

This is something quite different from, perhaps opposed to, what Scanlan identifies as the specious “double standard” of a merely apparent usefulness. Rather, van der Ploeg invokes the “slippage” between “where art is, how it looks, and what it does” in an effort to effectively de-functionalize the public space where the art is, to efface its transience with a mark of the permanent. In other words, the drama van der Ploeg creates through his appropriation of public space is not the drama of design, or, as George Nelson would put it, the ornamentation of existence, but its utter reconfiguration.

In the context of the gallery, the space of intentional viewing, van der Ploeg’s paintings evince a dissimilar effect. With the same dedication to form, the same repetitious vocabulary, the work unmasks the limitations of the viewing-space. Here the wall paintings solely evoke their concreteness. Their reality is conveyed in the line, color and surface of the works. Where, in public sites, the abstraction assimilates social and political particularities, in the gallery the wall paintings formally negotiate the prosthetics of the space itself: the parquet flooring, the light fixtures, etc. Brilliant, dizzying, harmonizing, van der Ploeg’s paintings on expanses of gallery walls protract van Doesburg’s claim that “a plane is a plane, a line is a line, nothing less, nothing more.” However, his paintings expand the best of contemporary non-objective work in their shear boldness and fearless scope, the entirety of the painting’s dynamics are always greater than the architecture that supports them.

The impact of van der Ploeg’s paintings is located at the intersection of sensation and thought, between the work’s graphic visual impact and its conceptual underpinnings. His paintings are welcomingly antagonistic to narrative. Signifying instead a powerful commitment to the commingling of the familiar, new and strange potentials of color and form. When viewing van der Ploeg’s work “We find our way not to a moment of solving the painting, but to knowing it…being acquainted with it, seeing part of the intelligibility of it as Aristotle, Theodoric, Descartes, or Newton saw part of the intelligibility of the rainbow,” (Fisher, p. 179)

–Michelle Grabner

Installation view

June 27 – September 26, 2009

Freestyle or The art of surfing the abstract wave

Tilman’s latest monochromes, whether one-off or in series, have an askew look to them; they would appear to have broken with geometric abstraction, with the purism of primary colours and with self-reference. While there is a hint of the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, in fact the syncopated silhouettes and acid tones of these Freeforms spontaneously evoke the dynamic lines and pure colours of the distorted American cartoon images of the mid-fifties.

In other recent works Tilman appears to have distanced himself from the tradition of constructivism and minimalism with which he is often associated. In 13.08 (Pink Champagne) (2008), although the rectangular structure is maintained, the bottom right-hand module of this light pink quadriptych sinks inwards towards the wall, creating a discontinuity reminiscent of the virtual circuit of a video game. The superposed elements of 14.08 (Urban Structure I) (2008) are reminiscent of a composition from the early days of neo-plasticism but the chromatic impurity of the white dispels any doubt. The irony peaks in Splice (2008): two hybrid monochromes precariously propped up one against the other have no wall support and no front view as such, as they are painted both front and back, one of them looking rather like a sandwich filled with slices of paint. Worth noting ‘en passant’ is the title, which is derived from the film editing term ‘to splice’. And what about the series Stacks that uses the same principle as Donald Judd in his works with the same title but inflicts on them sugary tones and a pleasurable sense of accumulation verging on disorder?

So yes, Tilman glides coolly over the shadow cast by modernism, drawing free forms, supposedly abstract but always reinvented. If he avoids the traps of formalism, it is because part of his work process, albeit fundamentally influenced by the non-objective avant-garde starting with De Stjil then Bauhaus, is anchored in real life. The artist stresses that his work is intuitive and that there is no mathematics involved; also that he uses images registered during city walks. The strong visual impact of ‘a huge pink shape consisting of isolation panels mounted on the outside brick wall of a building under construction’ (1) was a motive force in the execution of this relaxed abstraction, which unashamedly runs through a whole range of pastel colours, including some sublime pinks…

This freestyle surfing of the non-objective also enables Tilman to introduce the experience of space into his painting by using structures that oscillate between sculpture and architecture, as in The House of Colors. Stemming from a reflection on floor objects, this unidentified modular object may be three-dimensional and have the feel of a hypothetical utopian construction but it is none the less a work of painting. Its size rules it out as a maquette but nor does it have the physical dimensions or indeed the functional purpose of architecture. Composed of multicoloured rectangular sections interlocked like a giant set of lego the work acts as a sort of observatory with multiple peepholes. The public is invited to experiment and look through this multi-angle viewfinder, not unlike the optical devices invented by painters down through the centuries, from the camera lucida to the camera obscura.

Tilman’s work is primarily about exploring the effect of light on forms and colours — visually, physically and psychologically. We should not forget that, quite apart from the fact that the artist comes from Munich and was influenced by the subtle half-tones of baroque painting, he started out in photography. In one of his catalogues entitled Look Awry (Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 12 May – 25 June 2006), Tilman urged the public to look at his constructions ‘awry’. Playing on the word’s double meaning this could also be understood as an injunction to look at the work ‘askew’. The ‘defects’ or lopsidedness in Tilman’s painting, with its slight dissonance of forms and colours tinged with humour but ultimately extremely elegant, clearly confer a human dimension on the work, transforming what is an art to look at into a space of experience.

–Catherine Macchi de Vilhena

(1) Tilman, Interview Tilman and Chris Ashley, May – June 2006.

 

Tony Delap, Modern Times III, 1966
Wood, fiberglas and lacquer, 32 x 84 x 38 inches 

March 7 – April 4, 2009

Pushing the edges, often literally, of his primary disciplines, artist Tony DeLap has dedicated close to half a century to exploring the seam between sculpture and painting, merging the boarders of architecture, design and art, reducing to the most basic expression of form, shape, scale and color, while remaining devoted to the search for beauty in the creation of a simple object.

West Coast minimalist, Tony DeLap has been an inspiration and mentor to some of California’s most revered artists. Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and John McCracken all blossomed under his tutelage.  Along with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Tony DeLap has set the path for generations of reductive artists, embracing the principles of limited color, geometry, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor.

Work by Tony DeLap is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Tate Gallery in London, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington as well as many other prestigious institutions world wide.  Along with numerous solo exhibitions, DeLap was included in several of the defining exhibitions of the mid century including; “Primary Structures” (The Jewish Museum, New York) “American Sculpture of the Sixties” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and “The Responsive Eye” (The Museum of Modern Art in New York)

Royale Projects presents “TONY DELAP: modern times” (the title taken from a sculpture created in 1966 that anchors the exhibition), a brief survey of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the sixties through the current decade that expose how Tony DeLap continues to redefine “modern” by tweaking and mutating formalist ideals.  

 

Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Blue Relief, 2008
Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 80 x 80 inches 

 

Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1957
Ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches 

February 5 – April 11, 2009

Matthew Marks announces two exhibitions by Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal.

Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal
The exhibition features eight two-panel paintings from 2007 and 2008, on view in the 22nd Street gallery. Each consists of a black or white rectangle with a contrasting black, white, or colored rectangle placed diagonally on top and extending beyond the boundary of the canvas below.

In the catalog published to accompany the exhibition, Johanna Burton writes: “What Kelly is producing does not end at the edge…a shadow is thrown, but rather than demarcating the shape and space of the work more clearly, it works to utterly confuse what is being looked at: these are paintings that, in places, don’t end or, perhaps, refuse to show how they begin. Rather than a perceptual fluke or an experiment in phenomenology, however, this is, I think, a part of the painting.”

Four additional paintings will be shown in the 24th Street gallery. A two-panel black and white relief, completed early in 2007, is the oldest work in the exhibition and anticipates the diagonal paintings. The only curved canvas the artist has made in the last few years, which shows Kelly’s more lyrical side, is a dark blue and white painting, and is also on view here. Completing the exhibition are two multi-colored paintings in three and four-panels related to ideas with which Kelly first started working in the 1950s.

Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings 1954 – 1962
This exhibition consists of 23 drawings in a variety of media, including ink, graphite, oil paint and collage. Modest in scale, with no dimension larger than fourteen inches, many of the works in the exhibition are working drawings relating to larger paintings. They were made in the first years after Kelly returned to New York from Paris in 1954, where he lived for six years after WWII, studying on the G.I. Bill. The artist’s touch is much in evidence, and the drawings have an immediacy unusual in Kelly’s work. All of the drawings are exhibited here for the first time.

Beginning in Paris, and continuing in New York, Kelly developed a unique vocabulary of abstraction based on the observation of nature and the world around him. The drawings in this exhibition give the viewer an opportunity to see Ellsworth Kelly as a young artist exploring the full range of abstraction within his chosen vocabulary.

A fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by the art historian Richard Shiff, will be available.

 

January 10 – February 15, 2009

MOT International founder Chris Hammond interviews artist Thomas Kalthoff.

“One cold April afternoon in Cologne I spent a few hours at the studio of an artist I had recently been introduced to. We drank coffee and ate large slabs of gateau whilst discussing painting, Palermo and the Cologne scene in the 1980’s and 90’s. All the while I was flicking through a large pile of photographs of the artist’s work from the last few years, all of which were quite remarkable. What was more remarkable was that Thomas Kalthoff, despite being friends with Krebber since the late 1970’s and having mixed with many of the German heavyweights from the Cologne period, was little known outside his close circle of friends. Even more remarkable was that he had quite happily kept his work to himself for all these years. This exhibition of new works by Thomas Kalthoff at MOT INTERNATIONAL will be the artist’s first in the UK. Below is an abbreviation of our conversations around his work, but viewing this work is the only way to discover Thomas Kalthoff.

 

Chris Hammond: When did you start to paint the cube\box and what is its’ significance in your work?

 

Thomas Kalthoff: I started to paint monotone grey boxes on small canvases around 1992-3 for the Friesenwall 120 exhibition. At around 1995 I painted lots of organic formless canvases using only three colours. This developed into grids, rectangles and squares. I rediscovered and started painting boxes again in about 2002.

The significance: I remember that I was very early (1979) inspired by packing cases of washing machines and refrigerators. This not necessary as art but its’ imposing presence in the room. I did not immediately follow this up since I was not interested in commenting on design or packaging at all, but its ambiguity. When I re-discovered the boxes in the 90’s I wanted to explore this vacant quality I had earlier discovered.

 

CH: What made you move to rendering the boxes as sculpture? Also how do these works relate to the paintings?

 

TK: I started to make the 3D boxes around 2004. While I had been painting these boxes I had often brought my groceries back from the supermarket in cardboard boxes and they seemed to accumulate in my house. One day it occurred to me to build, out of wood, a 3D version of what I’d been painting. The result fascinated me and I built more to explore this dimension. This in retrospect seems to be a completely natural development. The boxes and paintings are of equal value.

 

CH: Could you tell me a little about the method of display, the use of home made tables and plinths?

 

TK: I felt it was very important that every box needed space all around it, It is not just a question of presenting the boxes more officially. The boxes in the paintings for example have to have the space around it. They need their own space. Similarly the 3D boxes could sit on the floor or on a white plinth, but that didn’t seem to be enough. Each box needed its’ own unique stand or table to be displayed on. I felt this accented the character of the boxes.

 

CH: tell me about colour in the work, do you consider yourself a colourist? Where do the colours come from?

 

TK: I don’t consider myself to be a colourist. I am not interested in the beauty of the colours themselves. My choice of colour is extremely related to a tension between harmony and discord, accord and disharmony in the relations of the colours to each other. This tension is to find a balance in the colours in each image or box where the colours resonate with each other. I use colours to get a result that creates both conflict and resolution.

There is no model that I use to choose and select the colours. I have a palette of fifty colours and I mix them sometimes with each other but mostly I use them straight from the tube or mix them with white.

 

CH: How do you place your work in relation to Palermo or anyone else?

 

TK: I find it very difficult to compare myself to someone who is so well known. I find a great affinity with artists where their work is monochrome and/or the form simple. For example Palermo, Morandi, Tuymans, On Kawara, Zobernig, E. Kelly, De Keyser, West, Gober.

 

Thomas Kalthoff was born in Essen in 1954. He started studying mathematics in Berlin 1975 – 1976 before changing to art school and in 1979 went to art school Karlsruhe for 1 semester, meeting Michael Krebber. Back in Berlin Kalthoff saw, for the first time, a catalogue by Palermo and everything changed. He found it impossible to paint and spent much of the 1980’s traveling or working in various jobs. In 1988/89 He moved to Cologne, where his friends Krebber and Strothjohann introduced him to the scene there and he was able to start painting again. In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition with about 20 grey box- paintings(fuse- boxes ) and 3 Wittgenstein- house paintings. In 1997 he was in a group show at Galerie Daniel Buchholz with small house paintings and in the same year started to make the grid paintings. In 2002 he had a couple of two-person exhibitions at kjubh Kunstverein. (with Strothjohann) and from this time on was painting mainly the box motif. Kalthoff has remained elusive over the years, showing rarely apart from a few group shows such as at Galerie M 29 in Cologne in 2004. Choosing not to self promote and to concentrate solely upon his work makes Kalthoff unique and this is a great opportunity to discover an artist who has, until now, remained hidden.”

Here we are far from the living-room and close to science-fiction Jean Baudrillard,
“The Ecstasy of Communication”

Your aluminum finish slightly diminished is the best I ever have seen Jefferson Airplane,
“Plastic Fantastic Lover”

In 1987, the year Mark Dagley’s paintings currently on view at Minus Space were first exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, abstract painting was exploring its newfound relationship to the digital age. The hard-edge lines and shapes that had been a mainstay of avant-garde trends in abstraction from painters as different as Kazimir Malevich and Gerald Murphy in the teens and 1920s to Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella in the 1950s and 60s, were being used by painters in the 1980s to symbolize the allusive space inside a computer.

In 1987 the latest innovations in computer technology were delivered to us as squat, clunky objects. From the first home IBM models to the hulking video game stations found in every bar in the East Village, the information encoded in the machine was inseparable from its physical structure. Twenty years later, in our relentless attempts to assume authority and ownership over the unfathomable, computers are increasingly designed for minimal effect–sleek, aluminum, and pearly, they are veritable “non-sites” of information. This transformation from an object-based system of communication to an increasingly virtual method of transmission is mirrored in abstract painting’s move from an embodiment of frontal space, manifested through color, form and canvas shape, towards the illusion of infinite space, rendered with digital-like precision.

Dagley’s paintings, like these now ancient-seeming machines, bring us back to a time when information and form were unabashedly conjoined in one package. The awareness of abstraction in painting as a historical continuum was married to a Downtown street aesthetic, bringing new color, form and texture into studio practice. The surface of each painting is an all-over glossy, impenetrable substance–a mirrored screen that camouflages a handcrafted construction, from visible canvas edges, to the elegant wood structure.

The four paintings selected for this Crib and Standard, suggest an otherworldly artist’s basement laboratory, an abstraction from the graveyard. When confesses that after the successful completion the painting “seemed to take on a prompting him to construct a series from variations design. However, like Frankenstein, contained too much latent power for After debuting the works in a celebrated Shafrazi, Dagley moved on to politer canvases and began experimenting pieces.

The Shafrazi paintings are mutable, on a myriad of meanings and forms, sublimely lacquered diner tabletops to Tetris space. The play of contrasts, from wooden support, suggests an inanimate Sitting comfortably in their own aura the paintings are like mutant rejects showroom, with an aesthetic tang that pulls surface repels at the same time.

Clone is the diabolical court jester of the group, coming the closest to suggesting an infinite space beyond the visible field of the viewer. The painting’s precisely delineated diamond pattern of mauve, pale yellow, maroon red, greygreen and navy is cut-off indeterminately at its edges. A rectangle of space cut out of its middle creates a thickly improbable frame in fairground colors for any slip of wall space behind Clone. The cut-away frame is a device that Dagley returns to in many of his pieces, ranging from simple rectangle borders to the step-ladder, geometric edge of Clone and Crib. Hero, not on view at MINUS SPACE, but exhibited at Shafrazi, took on a figurative life of its own as a jack-o-lantern-like face with square eyes, nose and mouth. Ghost, a severe jet-black, and Crib, in tropical starburst hues, are animated enough to appear as long-lost Pacman figures. Like the first blocky faces and bodies in computer games, a human form is referenced through minimal visual cues.

The trial and error experimentation involved in the conception and execution of the Shafrazi series is at once playful and workmen-like. Dagley realizes the final structure and color pattern through acrylic sketches, a kind of painter’s blueprint model for the finished architecture. The second step is to build a half-size cardboard maquette of the form. It is only after these preliminary works have been made that Dagley begins work on the final structure. An even surface of polymer resin is applied to the hard-edged acrylic paint job, adding a thickness and sheen that becomes brilliantly apparent after a thorough going over with a propane torch to remove air bubbles.

Dagley first discovered polymer’s sensitivity to oxygen distributed by the torch by unsuccessfully attempting to even the surface by blowing on it. The visible result of applying a synthetic plastic to the paint is that over time the colors have slightly warmed in hue, adding a patina of gravitas to an otherwise fun-loving palette.

Steven Parrino, Dagley’s studio mate in the late 1980s, was conducting his own experiments in the deconstruction of traditional painting supports, giving the tired mantra of “the death of painting,” an amplified existential bent. Immaculately constructed minimalist canvases in black, silver, white, and red were cut in half or loosely re-stretched on their frame, granting a baroque symmetry to the painter’s fatal motorcycle accident.

Parrino’s art, inspired by the limits of theory, was able to encompass the heartbeat of life itself. Similarly Dagley’s Shafrazi paintings belong to the unruly class of geometric abstraction that indulges in an outsider diet of industry, punk rock, perceptual games, and a shot of 1960s cool. The formal tropes of abstract painting are clearly understood with reverence–why else would they be so jocularly pushed to their extremes?

In a recent conversation with painter Don Voisine, Dagley revealed that his original conception of the series was fed by a need to create objects that were ‘not in the least bit cynical.’ The paintings have now been brought to a new audience at MINUS SPACE after twenty years stuck in pause, and it is our privilege to be able to experience again this reverential and formal abstraction masked as insouciance. One thing is certain, for Mark Dagley’s paintings there will never be a final game over.

 

Nora Griffin is a Brooklyn painter and writer for The Brooklyn Rail.

 

 

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March 2 — May 12, 2008

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol’s “I want to be a machine;” the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella’s “Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that.” Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

 

Installation view

December 1, 2007 — January 31, 2008

L&M Arts presents The Complexity of the Simple, an exhibition of more than twenty important works by twenty artists of international renown. The show demonstrates the broad range open to a systematic abstraction viewed over nearly five decades. Artists represented include such mid-century masters as Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, and also critical figures of more recent date such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Liza Lou, Anselm Reyle and Tom Friedman.

 

 

Lines, Grids, Stains, Words 

thru October 22, 2007

Lines, Grids, Stains, Words presents drawings from the 1960s to the present that conflate the simple and seemingly impersonal formal and compositional vocabularies of Minimal art with references to the physical and the bodily. Concerned with issues of scale and perception rather than content, Minimal art often utilizes industrial fabrication techniques and materials, and its hallmark compositional strategies include straight lines and geometric forms organized in rows, grids, and sequences. But Minimal art’s relation to the body, while ever present in the medium of sculpture, is often difficult to discern in studies, sketches, and other related works on paper. This exhibition traces the ways in which remnants of the physical can be found in Minimalist works on paper, beginning in the early 1960s, when the formal conventions were defined and tested, and follows the applications of these vocabularies in reference to the body through the present day.

 

James Lee Byars: The Art of Writing 

thru October 29, 2007

This exhibition includes a selection of letters written by artist James Lee Byars, who for over fifteen years engaged in an engrossing correspondence with MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller. Written using manifold and diverse media, these letters reveal the artist’s interest in materiality, and many of the documents also have a performative nature that evokes the element of time. Drawn from The Museum of Modern Art Archives, these writings function as an intimate sketchbook; they clearly delineate the artist’s ideas while making room for experimentation with materials—often the same materials Byars used in his “mature,” fully executed works.

 

Focus: Ellsworth Kelly 

thru January 7, 2008

This single-gallery installation is devoted to thirteen paintings and drawings by Ellsworth Kelly. Three of the paintings are on view for the first time and are recent acquisitions: Relief with Blue (1950), a gift from Donald L. Bryant, Jr., a Museum Trustee; Dominican (1952), a gift from the artist; and Two Whites (1959), a gift from James and Kathy Goodman. In addition to these pivotal works from the 1950s, the gallery features a major work from the 1980s, Three Panels: Orange, Dark Gray, Green (1986). Composed of three shaped canvases, it spans thirty-four feet of the gallery wall. Over the past five decades, Kelly has redefined abstraction by examining the shapes and colors found in natural and man-made forms, producing a visually and philosophically sophisticated body of work. 

 

50 Years of Helvetica 

thru March 31, 2008

2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffmann’s design Helvetica, the most ubiquitous of all typefaces. Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern. In honor of the first typeface acquired for MoMA’s collection, the installation presents posters, signage, and other graphic material demonstrating the variety of uses and enduring beauty of this design classic. As a special feature in the exhibition, an excerpt of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica reveals the typeface as we experience it in an everyday context.

In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions.  Why abstract art?  What is abstract art good for?  These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar.  It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work.  They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we work to move abstraction forward.  And for artists making abstract work now, Pictures of Nothing is necessary reading.

The 2006 publication of these lectures, given as the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures in 2003, offers the many of us who could not attend the talks access to his clear, concise, deeply informed and often funny examination of the art of the last fifty years.  The discussion of abstraction begins, after a very brief summary of the early 20th Century, with the 1950s – the Cold War and Abstract Expressionism.  While it progresses to 2003 in a fairly linear chronology, Varnedoe also moves sideways, describing the significance of multiple and seemingly contradictory things happening at once. 

James Turrell, A Frontal Passage, 1994
Light, 12′ 10″ x 22′ 6″ x 34′

Pop Art and Minimalism emerging from the same moment.  Frank Stella making paintings that are equal parts Pollock and Johns.  Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman make quiet, subtle works that appear similar but are worlds apart.  Although Varnedoe is forced, in the interest of time, to omit many artists and works that could have been included, he’s not working in art historical generalities.  He’s looking at specific ideas, moments and relationships.  With regard to this he says, “Epochs do not have essences, history does not work by all-governing unities, and works of art in their quirkiness tend to resist generalities.” 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Enamel on canvas, 7′ 6 3/4″ x 11′ 3/4″

As he leads us through de Kooning, Johns, Judd, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hesse, De Maria, Turrell, Halley, Richter, Marden and Serra (and many others), Varnedoe keeps an emphasis on experience and our responses to the very particular details of a piece.  Small differences, he says, make all the difference.  Whether it’s how we experience the work directly or how the work relates to our experiences in the world, he ties the art to our personal encounters.  Through this he builds his argument that abstraction isn’t grounded in something universal.  Rather it’s based on responses that are our own.  Subjective.  Individual. 

It’s this, a culture that coheres because it values independence, that abstraction offers us.  In Varnedoe’s words, “This is why abstract art, and modern art in general, being based on subjective experience and open-ended interpretation, is not universal or the culmination of anything in history but the contingent phenomena of a modern, secular, liberal society.” 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968
Brass, 22″ x 48 1/4″ x 36″

Varnedoe concludes with a reference to the faith that abstract art requires.  As he describes it, “Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith.  A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing…”  His faith, his unwavering belief in abstract art is present in every word of these lectures and it’s what makes his insights and arguments so extraordinary.

A modern, secular, liberal society.  That’s something to have faith in.

 

Lynne Harlow is a New York City-based artist.  She will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

Kirk Varnedoe. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III, preface by Adam Gopnik. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006.

 

 

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

 

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

 

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

 

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

 

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

 

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

 

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

 

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

 

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

 

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

 

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

 

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

 

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

 

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

 

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

 

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

 

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

 

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

 

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

 

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

 

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation

introduction
Steve Karlik’s paintings are formally refined yet generous in spirit, grounded in materials yet spatial and open. His work is that of a serious painter, at first seeming almost severe, yet with time revealing itself as sensual, emotional, and beautiful. A thoughtful viewer will find that his reductive forms can resonate with one’s memory, references, and experiences; the associations one makes with his work are varied and surprising. The paintings involve our eyes, minds, and bodies. His work is scaled to our physical presence, but brings about in us a dual response — it is both intimate and monumental. If the personal is political, then the politics of Steve’s work are a belief in the importance of the individual and a responsibility to the collective; in the viewer’s heightened experience is found the significance of our connection to each other — the possibility of a simultaneously singular and shared meaning.

— Chris Ashley, September 2005 

 

The following conversation between Steve Karlik and Chris Ashley was conducted via email from April to July 2005, and included a studio visit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, on May 20, 2005. For further information about Chris Ashley, please visit www.chrisashley.net.

 

Chris Ashley: Steve, why don’t we start with some basics: where are you from, and how did you become a painter?

 

Steve Karlik: I was born in 1960 and grew up surrounded by nature in rural Oregon, outside Portland to be exact.  One day in my mid 20’s, I started painting because it gave me the latitude to reflect on the texture of the land as I experienced it.  I’d been looking at James Lavadour’s paintings of eastern Oregon, and my first paintings were these gray-to-sepia blurs, washy landscape references with a few recognizable features.  My only concern was pushing landscape painting further into abstraction until I was introduced head-on to Mark Rothko’s work.  The washy fields I was painting then began to lose their landscape reference to something more non-objective.  I attended Portland State University in 1990 and studied painting under Mel Katz, a Post-Minimalist sculptor from New York who introduced me to thinking about art in a pragmatic manner.  When I got to Portland State, I was surprised because my studio was in the same building where Rothko learned math as a child.  In 1995, I was accepted into the graduate program at Pratt Institute and moved to New York.

At Pratt I studied under Ted Kurahara and Linda Francis, and developed friendships with the Brazilian painter Daniel Feingold, and future Minus Space artists Mathew Deleget and Rossana Martínez.  In 1996, I saw two important exhibitions that made a lot of sense: the Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim; and the wall-mounted oil stick planes by Richard Serra at Mathew Marks.  Kelly and Serra began to express for me critical art that pushed the relationships of form and space, and used those relationships to engage the viewer directly.  Immediately after Pratt I found a studio in DUMBO (the Brooklyn neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and I now live and paint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

 

CA: You entered graduate school in your thirties, an age later than seems typical these days.  What were you doing before then?  What difference do you think your age may have made in your approach to graduate school, the work you did there, and the path you took afterwards?

 

SK: Before graduate school I was a book binder.  I did that for about ten years.  It was kind of a cool profession with lots of hands-on work.  My age was a factor then in the kind of art I produced.  I’d been in a trade for ten years where the production process was meticulous and extremely demanding.  A strong sense of craftsmanship was essential, and you had to turn out a well-crafted product in large volume at high speed.  I was twenty-seven at the time, and just entering art school as an undergraduate — I remember taking a lot of what I practiced at work into the studio.  I had a studio for a while where I worked in the loft space above the production floor.  I would work at night using the equipment below to produce art.  I made a series of reductive forms that for the first time really followed an exact process determined by the materials.  I would eventually use mylar and multiple layers of an industrial tape that was thick and soft, semi-transparent and amber-colored.  As the layers built up, I would take the work-in-progress to the hydraulic cutter, apply clamped pressure (about 600 lbs per square inch) and clean it up with the hydraulic knife.  I wish I still had some examples; the surfaces were packed and had the appearance of layered bands of raw beeswax.  It was really then that I started developing a personal aesthetic.

 

CA: Bookbinding as a craft is, of course, very hands-on and visual.  I think it’s fascinating that you were doing this other kind of visual work before painting, and that bookbinding lent its materials to the beginning of your making visual art.  It sounds like you came to making art mostly on your own.  How did making a painting with tape turn into painting with paint?

 

SK: The overall experience in the shop seductively smelled of drying ink, lacquer, and paper; it felt like a place where art was being made.  I worked on a printing press setting up dies and locking in forms for the purpose of scoring book and magazine covers so they wouldn’t crack when folded.  These were basically locked-in steel structures that held scoring blades sandwiched between wood and lead strips of different widths and point degrees.  The sheet would run over this die while moving around a large drum.

We had to sometimes shim the die to make it score deeper, and pack the drum with paper backing to protect it.  Some of the runs were long and the drum would take a beating.  When the run was over, the press was cleaned with lacquer thinner.  There would be a deposit of dust, ink, oil, lead and tape on the backing sheets, a transferred film or stain that was a silky gray green.  It wasn’t long before I started seeing abstractly into the by-products of production.

I started using the backing sheets like an underpainting, applying a tape we used in production over these stains to give them depth and a thick, almost opaque, amber color.  Soon thereafter, the tape became the primary focus.  I could lay down tape, layer upon layer, apply pressure and repeat the process, building up a thick, waxy, amber field.  I was creating art that looked like painting without actually painting.  More importantly, I was intrigued by how much variation could be found within one unified surface.  When I was formally enrolled in art school, this was the imagery I attempted to recreate with paint — it was dark, indifferent and physical, and it looked severe and spontaneous.  Finally, the canvas seemed so much more vital to presenting it as art.

 

CA: It’s interesting how the imagery and surfaces in your paintings seem to have these definite sources.  With this earlier work you’ve just described, there is a process of laying things down and working at a surface, and while your current work is quite different, there is also a great attention to surface and process.  It’s always interesting to hear about what an artist has in mind, even distantly, when thinking about his or her work.  You mentioned the landscape, and I’m wondering if there are references to other media or fields of study that are important to your work.  For some this might be literature, film, architecture, music, scientific facts or data, and these might be influences that are visual, philosophic, sociological, and so on.

 

SK: I like to think that my paintings are somewhat informed by Modernist architecture. The 2004 panels on view on Minus Space with the elliptical forms actually came about after looking at Louis Kahn.  I see these elliptical forms as drawings — plan views for idealized structures. 

Modernist architects have done some amazing things, and when it’s really good, the thinking comes through visually. There’s logic with architects like Alvaro Siza or Kahn that is tied directly to their relationship with materials — simplicity derived from using steel or wood, for instance, on steel’s and wood’s terms. The really good architects, historically, have had a close relationship with the materials and have had the ability to assert their own identity into the process, so that while the uniqueness of the materials helped shape the project, the project visually shows the architect’s ideals.  Siza’s use of brick brought us unique forms that were realized by using brick slightly out of context.  In looking at some of these structures, it all makes complete sense rather quickly.

 

CA: Can you describe some of the ideas you’re trying to realize in the work, and how you think you’re successful at making that happen? Perhaps you can talk about a specific work that you feel integrates the conceptual and visual aspects of your work.

 

SK: Finding ways of letting the materials carry an idea is something I’m always trying to track down and will probably always be moving towards; you could refer to it as transcendence of the everyday through visual experience.  I like to think that reductive work has a poetic undercurrent that supports reductive painting’s more literal and theoretical understanding.

The piece Settlement Series, Corsair (24 x 48 inches) has connotations that are pretty obvious — Corsair refers to the aircraft.  This work is an idealization, and considers the pre-high modern images of some aircraft in current high-Modernist light.  I think it’s important to understand that this painting isn’t a duplication of actual wing markings, but the essence of them through color and structure.  The markings on the original aircraft were bands of white-black-white-black-white amidst the blue of the wing.

The materials used in the painting are hand-polished wood and specific hues of extremely flat gray-blue acrylic and tempera paint, which is brushed, rolled, and sanded with care and precision.  I was careful to duplicate the original blue of the Corsair’s body on the painting with mixtures of Cerulean Blue, Medium Gray Light, and Lamp Black; one band tended towards black and the other band is the actual blue of the Corsair.  The piece is elongated, horizontal, and object-like to suggest a general sense of the ideal wing, yet it is the emblematic quality of the painted bands that is important for the painting to carry a reference to the actual Corsair.  With the painted surface hard and matte, like paint on metal, there is a transition from non-concrete idea to meaning.

In the work Corsair, a visible reference to a specific, almost mythical aircraft is established in the context of contemporary art as motif, and the painting becomes a field where a current interest in blue finds a childhood fascination with a specific visual memory and plants it solely in an art context.  The reference to a Corsair becomes less important than how the work reinterprets Corsair as the emphasis for making painting that engages in a dialogue with painting.

 

CA: Painters, particularly abstract painters, often work to make paintings that are both an image and an object, and work at integrating those two aspects.  Each aspect requires its own considerations, and making the painting a whole entity requires additional considerations.  Are you working towards a painting that the viewer can see holistically?  And in doing this are you trying to let the viewer follow your decision making process, as well as be aware of whatever intentions or impulses you may be operating with?  Is there an ideal that you hope to lead the viewer towards?

 

SK: I have a history of making work that is mute and intends to transcend expressive activity — what artist Daniel Feingold refers to as a “sound free ambiance devoid of personal expression.”  Holistic is a good term.  Recognizing the painting pre-consciously, or feeling it in the gut, is one of the goals.  Like most painting, the information is all there to be retrieved or uncovered, yet what is brought to the activity of viewing that positions the viewer centrally within the experience of the work is most important.  I think if I were to move the viewer towards an understanding of the really precarious state that the idea of balance suggests, I would be adding value to art and painting in general.

 

CA: This notion of the viewer’s experience of your paintings as leading to an “understanding of the precarious state that the idea of balance suggests” really appeals to me.  It’s something that one would think would be present in all art, but mostly in the background.  It sounds like you want that to be one of the primary experiences of your work.  Can you say a little more about that idea?

 

SK: I have always tried to establish an overall sense of balance, or rather equilibrium, so that it becomes the signature of oppositions that resonate in a kind of dance.  Equilibrium reflects a universality or wholeness that is a dynamic state.  You might say that I explore in painting what may exist in essence through geometric forms which are purely abstract and build (visually) into highly structured compositions.  What is important is that space is not static, but a visually dynamic push-and-pull.

 

CA: It appears from studio photos that you work on paintings laid flat on the table, and my studio visit seemed to confirm that, too.  Do you always work flat, or do you also work on paintings hanging on the wall?

 

SK: Rarely do I work on the wall. The surface I am after is blatantly flat with little imperfection.  The paint I use is a water-thin mixture of acrylic and tempera with acrylic binders similar to extremely thin house paint, which dries with the same characteristics.  The paint is put on in many coats and has a tendency to run, sometimes showing light-traces where the paint might dry more unevenly in areas that accumulate more paint.  Having the work face up allows me to look at it as raking light falls down and across it.  This is important with the darker colors, where what is required is a dense sheet or film. When light falls across the surface evenly, I know it’s close to being finished.

 

CA: What is the “fox fur” reference that you are using in many of the recent titles?  My guess is that it has something to do with color.  It seems that all the paintings with “fox fur” in the title have a gray.  There is, of course, the silvery gray of fox, and these grays look rather lustrous.  How are you using that term?

 

SK: The term “fox fur” ultimately describes a range of grays that I started using in early 2004. When I did the series Fox Fur and Teal, I was rediscovering that all forms of gray are really complex hints of muted color, and I was looking for a title for the series that described the overall variations of gray within the range being used.

In the first series, however, entitled Fox Fur, I was pulling paint over the surface with a large knife, leaving accumulated skins of translucent paint.  These skins or films always covered a dark blue or black ground and the surface became cloud-like in appearance.  The term “fox fur” became descriptive of a process.  It certainly referred to a subtle range of color, but also alluded to the nebulous quality of the final surface, i.e., the Fox Fur Nebula.  The interest in the silvery grays stuck and I started using this focus as the basis for developing new work that considered color in a more specific manner. The “fox fur” reference finally became a reference to, or rather a description of, a quality of color, a non-descript silvery gray that ranges from yellow to magenta and includes any color absorbed by it.

 

CA: It can be pretty bold to say, as you do in your MINUS SPACE statement, “The work is not about anything, but the thought of remnants is important…,” because you’re asking the viewer to give up on expecting to be handed a readily received, digestible package of meaning.  Instead the viewer enters into a pre-verbal, visual, time-based experience, which requires an investment in the process of looking, during which the painted object “unfolds.”  In this dynamic I think the artist gives something to the viewer, but also requires that the viewer give to the work too.  The viewer’s giving is their engagement in the process of active, sensitive looking.  Without that the image/object’s unfolding doesn’t happen.  Do you see this — the engagement, the unfolding through looking, the time it takes to do all of this — as part of the subject matter and meaning of your work?

 

SK: I don’t like letting the viewer off the hook easily.  I like to think I demand of the viewer as much as they demand of the so-called artwork.  I don’t think the viewer is transparent to painting, especially with reductive abstraction.  There is no subject-object relationship, unless of course you immediately hand them all the answers right up front, so asking the viewer to go to the pre-verbal and give up on a readily digestible package of meaning seems appropriate for where I want my painting to go.

I say my work is not about anything because it sits in that literalist realm where it unfolds continuously with time.  Some painting is visually ever-renewing; each time you come back to it there is some variable that wasn’t noticed or that becomes apparent over time.  Painting that is more literal is wholly manifest at any moment and never changes; it keeps unfolding continuously with time rather than over it.  The work confronts the viewer and meaning depends partially on what the viewer brings to it and what the work offers.  As a structure outside of consciousness that consciousness refers to, abstraction becomes a field that provides an extension into an idealized sphere of meaning.  I think this has to happen pre-verbally before meaning is given.

 

CA: It seems to me that this structure would first engage the viewer in your experience, as a model, a thing outside themselves, and then as an experience of their own.  Do you agree with that?

 

SK: I do. There are qualities in some art forms that are more, to some degree, objectifiable.  Art can be representational and meaning can be developed more immediately.  With non-objective or more literal art, the model is more perceptual and doesn’t carry as well-developed or agreed-upon sets of meaning that a painting such as the The Last Supper or even a stop sign carries.  With non-objective art we almost have to weigh the whole object and perceptually gauge its presence.  We have to come to terms with it individually as a thing.

 

CA: The imagery and ideas you use have definite sources.  Earlier you referred to the importance of Kelly and Serra in your comprehension of “critical art that pushed the relationships of form and space and used those relationships to engage the viewer directly.”  I think this statement could apply to your work, too.  I wonder if you could unpack this a bit, in particular, what this might mean for your art.

 

SK: Every once in a while, a painter or a sculptor needs to come along and really try to dismantle the art form.  Kelly uses the formal, visual elements that define painting’s flatness to make objects.  Serra takes our understanding of an object and turns it back on us, redefining it by challenging human perception.  In both artists I saw work that was highly conceptual because the idea became visible in the object during the viewing of it.  I see art with heavy formal elements becoming a more open-ended system when the space of the viewer is enlisted.

To answer the question, in painting I look for visual elements that are speculative, that challenge the art form and remain unique in voice.  The space of painting is a fairly tricky space to navigate; it’s flat, but also contains connotations and narrations that are other than flat.  Painting’s space is illusionistic.  These concerns have to be orchestrated in a way that is visually unique, makes sense conceptually, and moves the art form ahead intellectually.

 

CA: We have talked elsewhere about the idea of a central metaphor to an artist’s work.  I brought up examples discussed in an interview in a catalogue for painter George Lawson; Lawson mentions painter Patsy Krebs’ idea of a central metaphor regarding one’s work and discusses his own central metaphor.  For example, Krebs had referred to a reproduction of a Siennese Annunciation in her studio and identified the concept of transmission and inspiration as central metaphors for her work.  In Lawson’s case, as I understand it, a reproduction of one of the sarcophagus frescoes from the Diver’s Tomb in Paestum is an image that he identifies with and connects his work to in terms of the importance of diving deeply, of taking a leap and plunging into the middle of an action, place, or emotion.  Can you identify a central metaphor that is operating in your work?  You’ve already mentioned the importance of Modernist architecture and also the idea of flight related to the Corsair airplane.

 

SK: Flight is beauty in tension — all that force, speed and grace.  The reference to the Corsair worked well for that particular painting; it allowed me to locate idea in a realm separate from expression so I could remove myself somewhat and stand outside or adjacent to the work and visually focus on the painting.

I tend to be pretty methodical in my approach to looking at work-in-progress, and when I’m in the studio, I mostly contemplate the work’s visual logic.  All the visual elements (surface, form, and color) have to balance, yet have a slightly-off quality, a weight.  I’ll refer to it as a strange sense of familiarity.  The Japanese refer to it in their traditional pottery as a balance of perfect imperfection, which comes from nature.  The idea signifies for me a balance or beauty that has tension. 

When I paint I tape off and paint rather quickly.  The works are a lot less planned than they look.  The slightly-off quality I refer to is a subtlety, and recognizing it on the panel before it’s taped-off is like seeing something as a flash that goes off when, for a brief moment, the mind is left with an imprint of structure.  I really have to trust my decisions, because often times the kind of tension I’m after is poised on failure — failure of not being taken far enough, or taken too far. 

 

CA: I think I see a number of ideas in operation in your work: the separation of idea and expression; the precarious nature of balance; and the moment of recognition, or understanding, as a flash.  You work to achieve this by creating or finding tensions in a work that catches the viewer by surprise, sparking a moment of recognition or memory.

 

SK: I’m often surprised myself.  Looking for minor visual elements, such as emerging color relationships or the relationships of form that need to be explored and made concrete, sits at the heart of what I do.  What really inspires me is nature and its systems, the motion of which always tends towards maximum efficiency.  It is nature’s systems that first got me interested in thinking about balance and how tenuous and resilient natural systems are, always poised between decay and regeneration.  There is a lot of movement there that when experienced on a human scale looks static, but it’s constantly aligning and realigning itself so that it stays poised and efficient. 

 

CA: There are a couple more ideas, I think.  One is in the idea you mentioned related to pottery— is your painting a kind of following your materials and their properties and behaviors, of accepting what they can do, just as a ceramicist might have to do with clay and glazes?  And secondly, you said you are looking for subtle tensions and beauty related to “perfect imperfection”— are you trying to create those tensions, or are you trying to find those tensions?  Where does that tension reside? Is it mostly in the surface of the painting, in the drawing and form, or are there other aspects to the entire painted image and object that are contributing to these tensions?

 

SK: I definitely prefer to let the materials be themselves and follow them.  The materials set the rules.  Imperfections in the materials often set the tone for what happens visually with the entire painting.  I first started using wood as a support for functional reasons — I tend to press hard, and it doesn’t warp as canvas can.  Wood became an aesthetic choice because it’s a finished surface that reacts dramatically with nearly any surface next to it.  The tonality of wood changes with different colors and can float or recede much as a color does depending on what color or texture is adjacent to it.  I also prefer panels with a good deal of surface tension, where the grain shows stress or character.

An entire image or object in balance with its imperfections is worked to that level of completion and is usually a quality that is subtle and realized only when it’s finished.  There is a level of spontaneity related to the painting process in finding it.  Usually there is something (a form, a surface, or a color) that might weigh just a bit more than another area relative to it, or might impact the painting as a whole without being so obvious that it dominates the entire painting.  This is how I ultimately see tension having the greatest strength.  I like to work these areas of tension into relationships so they are controlled as an entire painting that functions as a system.

 

CA: Any recent developments in your work?  What’s ahead?

 

SK: Sometimes we overlook things that after the fact seem painfully obvious.  During our studio visit, you pointed out that my wood surfaces functioned like drawing by comparing them with the earlier pulled wax surfaces.  I owe you for that one — it’s become a kind of echo with implications on how I might consider the surface as more active.  “Flip” is a new piece on MINUS SPACE that reflects this.  I am also starting a series of vertical wall mounted sculpture that involve reflective color and reflective light; they follow nicely off the paintings, but seem strangely lighter.

 

CA: I’m curious to know what place you think art, and in particular your art, has in the world?  I’m asking that kind of eternal question about the meaning of art and what it’s good for.

 

SK: Someone once made a joke in one of my studio critiques at Pratt that started up a good conversation.  They were considering the way of the dinosaur and trying to determine what kind I was.  My instructor (bless her) told them, “the kind that wants to bring people to their knees” — that would be the Abstract Expressionist inside me.  All joking aside, the kind of Modernism that was emerging after Abstract Expressionism, only gets to flourish sporadically.  High Modernism keeps appearing and reappearing and is continually taking on new meaning and escalating Modernism as an art form that is critical of itself.  That is the key to keeping Modernist art from intellectually going the way of the dinosaur.  Because Modernism reserves some of the critical dialogue for the artists, I hope that my work helps push that dialogue along.

To answer the last part of the question honestly, I get kind of itchy if I go too long without moving paint around — again, the inner Abstract Expressionist talking.  Painting allows me to navigate the world in a way that brings visual structure to its nuances, reshape it, tag it, preserve it, and color it.  While I feel I’m continually arriving at something, I’m also searching for something and painting allows me to work that out visually.  I also get a great deal of pleasure from living with painting.

Hartmut Böhm, Quadratrelief 32, 1968
Plexiglas, 127 x 127 x 5.5 cm
Peter C. Ruppert Collection
Museum im Kultur-speicher, Würzburg, Germany

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004 in conjunction with Hartmut Böhm’s spotlight exhibition.

Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview – your first published in English – with a brief discussion of the art climate in Germany directly following World War II. You were born in Kassel, Germany, in 1938, and came of age during the war and post-war period. The war clearly caused a massive disruption with prior concrete art movements developed by the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, and Constructivism in Russia. Where and how did concrete art and artists regroup and reemerge during the late 1940s and 1950s in Germany?

Hartmut Böhm: The first years after the war were struck with shortages, the strains of daily life, and the reconstruction of destroyed structures.

Documenta I in Kassel in 1955 was certainly the reentry into the international art dialogue; it took place in the makeshift Fridericianum, which was badly damaged in the war. The Art Academy (Kunstakademie) in Kassel was newly re-founded in 1948 with a partial adoption of the teaching methods of the Bauhaus, which were expressed in the new term “work academy.“

The High School for Form (Hochschule für Gestaltung), founded in Ulm in 1953, oriented itself even more clearly after the Bauhaus. It had the requirement of comprehensive, intellectual discussion with the outside world; the initiators were Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl, in memory of their siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazis. Max Bill became their first principal and planned the school building.

Anton Stankowski returned back to Stuttgart from Switzerland and resumed his work in art and graphic design, which he began in Stuttgart in the 1930s. Max Hermann Mahlmann returned from the war and found his constructive pictorial language in Hamburg in the 1950s. Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who lived during the war in Holland, went to the High School for Form (Hochschule für Gestaltung) in Ulm. Josef Albers stayed in the United States, but came to Ulm as a guest lecturer between 1953 and 1955. Otto Ritschl worked in Wiesbaden.

The younger generation first formed at the end of the 1950s in Rheinland. Düsseldorf and Cologne became important places for art. I am thinking about Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker, and the broader circle of European “Zero” artists. The actual concrete artists, however, lived, worked, and taught at various places and remained widely isolated, until little by little newly-founded galleries came into being – for instance, Galerie “Der Spiegel“ in Cologne; Galerie Teufel in Koblenz (later Cologne); Galerie Hoffmann in Frankfurt (later Friedberg); and others.

MD: Two of the artists you cite as major influences in your artistic development are Max Bill (Swiss, 1908-1994) and Richard Paul Lohse (Swiss, 1902-1988). In the United States, there is very little information about these seminal artists in the form of exhibitions, monographs, essays, dialogue, etc. Please discuss the legacy of these two artists on concrete art in Germany and, more specifically, their impact on the development of your work and thinking.

HB: The “Zurich Concretes“ had the privilege of continuing to develop the constructivist tradition of the pioneering generation in neutral Switzerland. Max Bill grew up as a student of the Bauhaus. He impressed and influenced me with his far-reaching theoretical and curatorial work, as well as his wonderful graphic, painterly, and sculptural work. Still today, I know how directly his “Skulptur 22“ overwhelmed me at the 1959 Documenta.

His writing, “The Mathematical Way of Thinking in Art” (Die mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst) from 1949 gave concrete art a theoretical foundation. During the war (1944), he showed the first exhibition on the theme in the Kunsthalle Basel under the title “Concrete Art.“ In 1960 he put together a second concrete art exhibition that also included North and South American positions (Alexander Liberman, Ad Reinhard, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Mary Vieira, Luiz Saciloto, Hermelindo Fiaminghi and others).

Richard Paul Lohse influenced me with the rigid consequences of his modular and serial orders, which he developed beginning in the early 1940s. I have visited him multiple times in Zurich since the 1960s and he has become something of a “fatherly friend.“ He has been interested and engaged in the work of younger artists his entire life; he has intensely followed my work and analyzed it with rigorous exactitude. I am especially thankful to him for insight into the conclusive consequences that hold a work together structurally.

It is difficult to comprehend, why so little attention has been given to these two influential artists in the United States. Max Bill had a large exhibition at least in 1974 at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which was shown afterwards at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Art. To my knowledge, Lohse was introduced by Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street in 1988 and with a few paintings in a solo exhibition in Marfa.

MD: You were a student of Arnold Bode, artist and founder of Documenta (started in 1955), at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel, Germany, from 1958-1962. You made your first geometric relief sculptures as a student during this time period. What impact did Bode’s teaching have on your artistic development? What influence did the early Documenta exhibitions have on you?

HB: Arnold Bode was a charismatic man, inspired teacher, and brilliant exhibition designer. He himself painted abstract expressionist, but in his classes, very different positions gathered. I was the only one who worked systematically constructive, but I was in close contact with similar loners, from Fritz Winter’s class Kunibert Fritz and Horst Schwitzki; from the sculpture class Werner Krieglstein and Klaus Müller-Domnick; and, not to be forgotten, from the graphics class with Helmut Schmidt-Rhen, Heinz Nickel who lectured on printmaking at the time.

As my teacher, Bode had therefore no direct influence on the development of my work, but his generosity gave me the room to find my own way. I made my first systematic white reliefs and began to work in series. The theme of “progression“ became decisive.

Documenta II in 1959 was the deciding event of the year; we were literally in Friderizianum and Orangerie daily, where we helped with construction. One couldn’t see the art any closer. I remember how Bode instructed us to carry paintings by Franz Kline or Mark Rothko to specific walls.

After the opening we worked on security and daily tours (by the way, all of Bode’s people were ordered to wear gray pants and white shirts – he hated the uniforms of the usual security personnel).

MD: In 1964, you participated in the landmark exhibition “Nouvelle Tendance” at the Musee de Arts Decoratifs in Paris, which signaled the emergence of Op and Kinetic Art. The exhibition also included artists such as Bridget Riley and Carlos Cruz-Diez, among others. What was your relationship to the “Nouvelle Tendance” movement? Did you welcome the labels “optical” and “kinetic” for your work?

HB: In 1961 I wrote my student thesis “About Constructivism“ (Über den Konstruktvismus), in which I analyzed the historical line from Malevich, Van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy, and Bill through Gerstner via their manifestos and paintings. Karl Gerstner introduced the most avanced form of concrete art for me at that time through his variable picture-systems. I visited him in Basel and showed him a graphic series, which originated from a photographic overlaying of identical positive and negative patterns. He, in turn, showed them to Matko Mestrovic from Zagreb, who was the inspiration and theoretical head of the 1961 “Nove Tendencije“ exhibition there.

I owe my participation in the important “Nouvelle Tendance“ exhibition to the interest and esteem of Karl Gerstner and Matko Mestrovic. Gerhard von Graevenitz was active as a type of artistic commissioner for the German participation in the large Paris exhibition. He visited me and searched out the 12-part graphic series, which I just spoke about.

For me, similar to Lily Greenham, Andres Christen, or Francois Morellet and a systematization of the work process, it was about investigation, comprehension, and perception as active learning. It wasn’t about optical sensations, which it was in the foreground for other artists of the “Nouvelle Tendance“ (even for Cruz Diez or Bridget Riley) and how it was a dominant theme in the Op Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965.

I didn’t see my kinetic objects of the 1960s as dogmatically kinetic, but rather nearly parallel to what I began in 1966 with my group of “Square Relief“ (Quadratreliefs) works. On the basis of systematic, structured fields, they changed visually through alternation of the viewer’s standpoint and direction of the lighting, thereby making a theme of the relativity of perception.

MD: Minimalism emerged as a leading tendency in the United States during this same time. Many traveling exhibitions of Minimalism toured throughout Europe during the late 1960s. What was your perception of American Minimalism? How did it differ from the art being made in Germany at that time?

HB: I can’t remember exactly when and where I saw a Minimal Art exhibition for the first time, but we were well informed in Germany about its theoretical basis and aesthetic arrival through the art periodicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When I think about it, it was inconceivable to me, the force, intensity, and publicity with which this (last?) pure American movement, in my opinion, came about. The various parameters of Minimal Art, such as the grid, addition, seriality, progression, principal comprehension, neutral technical implementation, and use of industrial materials, had existed beforehand. New and excited for me were the radicality, the dimensions, the spatial reference, and the theoretical founding.

In Documenta 4 in 1968, I saw and admired, among the American artists, the spatial-grasping sculptures of Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland’s large oblong formats with horizontal crossbands, the works of Jo Baer, as well as the absolute reductions of Ellsworth Kelly, the huge formats of Al Held, and systems of Sol Lewitt, which have stayed in my memory.

Among the European artists, the still, small formats of Antonio Calderara; the formal, reduced reliefs of Jan Schoonhoven and Ad Dekkers; and the paintings of Günter Fruhtrunk had great meaning.

MD: In 1974, you made your first “Progressions toward Infinity” works, a concept which you continue to expand upon today. How did you arrive at this series?

HB: With the exception of the kinetic objects of the 1960s, I have been occupied exclusively with the theme of progression: understanding progression as regular, at the same time as a running movement from element to element, and respectively as opposing positions of beginning elements. They were therefore formal closed systems in their basic existance (that then became relative through lighting and standpoint).

I looked for a possibility of finding a progression with the same methodical rigor, in which the last step of the progression lies outside the visible and only is existant in the imagination: a progression from the visible to the conceivable. I found the solution in the simple geometric axiom that parallels end in infinity. Expressed reversely, they don’t end in the finite. The visible parameters of the progression correspond therefore very rationally with the only thinkable last step of the progression, the infinite dimension.

MD: Artists have long been interested in the idea of the infinite, the unknowable, the sublime. I am specifically thinking here about Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of individuals looking at the vastness of the sea, or Piet Mondrian’s “Pier and Ocean” series, in which he reduces all elements of nature into plus and minus shapes (+, -). What does the idea of “infinity” mean to you? And how do you reconcile it within the finite, physical materials you use, such as steel?

HB: My titles reference my concept of the infinite, for example “Progression toward Infinity with 30°“ (Progression gegen Unendlich mit 30°) or “Progression toward Infinity with 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°“ (Progression gegen Unendlich mit 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°). They describe the regular advances toward the infinite as a geometric occurence, though also as something that separates the visible from the invisible. I know about the high philosophical, metaphysical concept of the infinite from artists in the Christian Middle Ages, Caspar David Friedrich, Kasimir Malevich, through Barnett Newman or Roman Opalka.

I would like the concept of infinity in my work to be removed from utopia. The fascination for me lies in the simultaneous logical combining of the visible and invisible elements and their derived principal separation from that same logic. Manfred Schneckenburger hit upon the fact, in a sloppy catalogue text formulation, in which he determined that my “Progressions toward Infinity“ are not “metaphysical codes,“ but rather “pictorial strategies.“

MD: In the catalogue of your 1990 retrospective at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany, you consciously chose to organize the more than 130 images of your work according to four reoccurring qualities in your work, rather than chronologically. The qualities are System (serial structures); Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity); Gestalt (partition and outline); and Concept (linear principle and progression toward the infinite). Do you still find these four qualities present in your work? Have any new qualities emerged since 1990?

HB: The four qualities you cite from my Ludwigshafen catalog that structure the catalog into four corresponding sections have remained, in effect, the cornerstones of my work. However, they also indicate the extension of my interests over time: system as a basis for the first phase of work, perception as a core concept of the 1960s and early 1970s, form as the main characterisitc of the chipboard works from the 1980s, and concept as the main idea of the “Progressions toward Infininity“ (Progressionen gegen Unendlich) and the “Comparisons“ (Gegenüberstellungen) of steel profiles from the 1990s until today (there are naturally also fore- and background concepts).

A new quality has arrived. Since around 1990 (although I realized it earlier in a few works, for example, my 1984-85 installation at Schloss Buchberg), I am looking to take apart a given space. That doesn’t mean for me to derive a work from a room’s spatial condition, but rather, to bring a previously worked out project into agreement, so to speak, and check it in another opportunity and in another situation.

An example is my “Floor Work for Odense“ (Bodenarbeit für Odense), which was made for a classical museum (I knew the measurements of the room), after which I exhibited it in an industrial hall in Oberhausen and then in the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, a former administration building. Each time, it yielded “superimpositions“ of the same work (specifically the material structural elements, the I-beams) on top of various floor surfaces (color and material of the floor) and, naturally, in entirely different spatial environments. Or, I proceed to take with me a specific number of same-sized I-beams to an exhibition, in order to decide there, which sculpture I will realize out of an arsenal of previously established possibilities in accordance with the situation.

MD: Over the past 40 years, you have produced work in a broad variety of media, including sculpture, reliefs, installations, paintings, drawings, wall drawings, lithographs, etc. How do you begin a new work? Do you start by experimenting with the materials, or do you begin with an idea and then find the most appropriate materials to express it?

HB: Ideally I always begin with a concept sketch, at most they are linear structural correlations. Is the first sketch made and “approved“ by me? I investigate the qualities of serial forms. For example, can I express that, what I express with 4 lines, also express with 5, 6, 7…or 3, 2, 1 lines? What happens when I alter specific parameters? Etc.

In principle it is the same occurence, whether I work on paper, with chipboard or with steel profiles. The expressive power of the respective materials naturallyinterests me.

At a specific point in time, plexiglas became too elegant for me (it became too dominant in the consumer world) and I searched for a rarer material that was unused aesthetically. I found chipboard, which, in the world of goods, lead a hidden existance as the back wall of closets or covered by veneer. I didn’t stick on any more elements, but rather sawed out the lines with a circular saw. Eventually I discovered the use for industrial, internationally standardized steel profiles, which made it possible for me to get around the given empty space of a wall or floor as a component of the work.

MD: In most of your work, the visible objects – such as steel beams, pieces of Plexiglas, colored pencil lines – are as important as the empty spaces you leave between them. When I look at your work, I often find myself connecting lines, shapes, and forms in my mind. Discuss for a minute your use of emptiness in your work.

HB: I called my 1990 exhibition at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt “the room around the lines“ (Der Raum um die Linie). In action, the inner- and outerspaces are just as important as the structural elements. Dieter Bogner called it “intervals“ in an analogy to the twelve-tone music of Josef Matthias Hauer. Naturally the eye of the viewer should look for and find connections and references over the empty locations – not only comprehend my principals of construction, but rather move freely in the work.

MD: There is a current perception among concrete artists in the United States that concrete art as a whole is better understood and valued culturally in Europe than here. Do you agree with this perception?

HB: Yes.

MD: Lastly, you have been making concrete art for more than 45 years. I often read, however, that concrete art has reached a dead-end. What are your thoughts about this perception? Is concrete art still valid in 2004?

HB: I don’t believe that what we, for a lack of a new comprehensive concept call “concrete art,” is at an end. I believe much more that the concept, as Van Doesburg had formulated and Max Bill had presented it, has in between become obsolete. The historical lines of concrete art and minimal art fused together long ago. American and European lines of development are for both American and European artists available and still yield new room to move.

There are artists, and there will be further artists, that will systematically investigate, exactly and consciously work on a lucid art that reveals its methods. The MINUS SPACE artists are the best example of that. However, would they describe themselves as “concrete artists?”

I considered and assessed MINUS SPACE’s terms “reductive + concept-based” as a working concept, which are modest on the one hand, but, on the other hand, are inclusive of artists of very different strategies and media, thereby opening up a new discourse.

The preceding interview was translated from the German by Matthew Deleget. Hartmut Böhm’s original responses are published below.

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1.
Die ersten Jahre nach dem Krieg waren geprägt durch Mangel, die Anstrenungen des täglichen Lebens und den Wiederaufbau der zerstörten Strukturen.

Sicherlich war die documenta 1 in Kassel 1955 der Anschluß an die internationale Kunstdiskussion; sie fand im notdürftig hergerichteten, im Krieg stark beschädigten Fridericianum statt.

Die Kunstakademie in Kassel war 1948 wieder neu gegründet wordenmit teilweiser.

Übernahme von Lehrmethoden des Bauhaus, das drückte sich auch in der neuen Bezeichnung „Werkakademie“ aus. Noch deutlicher am Bauhaus orientierte sich die 1953 gegründete „Hochschule für Gestaltung“ in Ulm. Sie hatte den Anspruch umfassender intellektueller Auseinandersetzung mit der Umwelt; Initiatoren waren Otl Aicher und Inge Scholl im Gedenken an ihre von den Nazis hingerichteten Geschwister Hans und Sophie Scholl. Max Bill wurde ihr erster Rektor und plante das Schulgebäude.

Anton Stankowski kehrte aus der Schweiz zurück nach Stuttgart und setzte sein in den 30er Jahren begonnenes Werk in Kunst und Graphikdesign in Stuttgart fort. Max- Hermann Mahlmann kam aus dem Krieg und fand in den 50er Jahren zu seiner konstruktiven Bildsprache in Hamburg, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, der während des Krieges in Holland lebte, ging als Lehrer an die Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Josef Albers blieb in den USA, kam aber zwischen 1953 und 1955 als Gastdozert nach Ulm, Otto Ritschl arbeitete in Wiesbaden.

Die jüngere Generation formierte sich erst Ende der 50er Jahre im Rheinland, Düsseldorf und Köln werden zu den wichtigen Kunstplätzen, ich denke an Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker und den weiteren Kreis der europäischen „Zero“-Künstler.

Die eigentlichen konkreten Künstler aber lebten, arbeiteten und lehrten an verschiedenen Orten und blieben weitgehend isoliert, bis nach und nach durch Galeriegründungen Fokusierungen entstanden, etwa durch die Galerie „Der Spiegel“, Köln, die Galerie Teufel, Koblenz, später Köln, die Galerie Hoffmann, Frankfurt, später Friedberg und andere.

2.
Die „Züricher Konkreten“ hatten das Privileg, in der neutralen Schweiz die konstruktive Tradition der Pioniergeneration weiterzuentwickeln. Max Bill war ja als Schüler am Bauhaus gewesen. Er hat mich mit seiner weitreichenden theoretischen und kuratorischen Arbeit neben seinem großartigen grafischen, malerischen und bildhauerischen Werk sehr beeindruckt und beeinflußt. Ich weiß noch heute, wie unmittelbar seine Skulptur „22“ mich bei der documenta 1959 überwältigt hat.

Seine Schrift von 1949 „Die mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst“ gab der konkreten Kunst ein theoretisches Fundament. Noch im Krieg (1944) zeigte er in der Kunsthalle Basel unter dem Titel „Konkrete Kunst“ die erste Ausstellung zum Thema; 1960 stellte er im Helmhaus Zürich eine zweite Ausstellung „konkrete kunst“ zusammen, die auch nordamerikanische und südamerikanische Positionen mit einbezog (Alexander Liberman, Ad Reinhard, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Mary Vieira, Luiz Saciloto, Hermelindo Fiaminghi und andere.

Richard Paul Lohse beeindruckte mich in der rigiden Konsequenz, mit der er seit den frühen 40er Jahren seine modularen und seriellen Ordnungen entwickelte. Ich habe ihn seit den 60er Jahren mehrfach in Zürich besucht und er ist so etwas wie ein „väterlicher Freund“ geworden. Er hat sich zeitlebens für die Arbeit der jüngeren Künstler interessiert und engagiert; meine Arbeit hat er intensiv verfolgt und mit strenger Genauigkeit analysiert. Ihm verdanke ich insbesondere die Einsicht in die schlüssige Konsequenz, die ein Werk strukturell zusammenhält.

Es ist schwer nachzuvollziehen, warum diese beiden einflußreichen Künstler in den USA so wenig beachtet wurden, Max Bill hatte immerhin 1974 eine große Ausstellung in der Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, die danach im LACMA und im San Francisco Museum of Art gezeigt wurde. Lohse wurde meines Wissens erst 1988 von Don Judd in 101 Spring Street und in Marfa mit einigen Bildern in einer Einzelausstellung vorgestellt.

3.
Arnold Bode war ein charismatischer Mann, inspirierender Lehrer und genialer Ausstellungsgestalter. Er selbst malte abstrakt expressiv, in seiner Klasse sammelten sich aber sehr unterschiedliche Positionen; ich war der einzige, der systematisch konstruktiv arbeitete, stand aber in engem Kontakt mit ähnlichen „Einzelgängern“ aus der Klasse von Fritz Winter mit Kunibert Fritz und Horst Schwitzki, aus der Bildhauerklasse mit Werner Krieglstein und Klaus Müller-Domnick oder aus der Graphikklasse mit Helmut Schmidt-Rhen und nicht zu vergessen mit Heinz Nickel, damals Lehrbeauftragter für Druckgraphik.Bode hatte als mein Lehrer also keinen direkten Einfluß auf die Entwicklung meiner Arbeit, aber seine Großzügigkeit gab mir den Raum, meinen Weg zu finden.

Ich machte meine ersten systematischen weißen Reliefs, begann in Serien zu arbeiten, das Thema „Progression“ wurde bestimmend.

Die documenta 2 1959 war für uns Bode-Schüler das bestimmende Ereignis des Jahres; wir waren buchstäblich täglich im Friderizianum bzw. in der Orangerie, wo wir beim Aufbau halfen, näher konnte man an Kunst nicht sein. Ich erinnere mich, wie Bode uns dirigierte, Bilder von Franz Kline oder Mark Rothko zu den von ihm bestimmten Wänden zu tragen.

Nach der Eröffnung waren wir als Aufsicht und für Führungen tätig (übrigens alle in von Bode verordneten grauen Hosen und weißen Hemden – er haßte die Uniformen des üblichen Aufsichtspersonals).

4.
Ich hatte 1961 meine theoretische Examensarbeit „Über den Konstruktvismus“ geschrieben, in der ich die historische Linie von Malewitsch, Van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy, Bill bis zu Gerstner anhand ihrer Manifeste und Bilder analysierte. Karl Gerstner stellte mit seinen variablen Bild-Systemen für mich damals die avancierteste Form der konkreten Kunst dar. Ich besuchte ihn in Basel und zeigte ihm eine grafische Serie, die aus der fotografischen Überlagerung von Positiv und Negativ identischer Vorlagen entstanden war, die er wiederum Matko Mestrovic aus Zagreb zeigte, der dort Inspirator und theoretischer Kopf der seit 1961 veranstalteten „Nove Tendencije“-Ausstellungen war.

Dem Interesse und der Wertschätzung von Karl Gerstner und Matko Mestrovic verdanke ich meine Teilnahme an wichtigen „Nouvelle Tendance“Ausstellungen.

Gerhard von Graevenitz war als eine Art künstlerischer Kommisar für die deutschen Beteiligten an der großen Pariser Ausstellung tätig, er besuchte mich und suchte die 12-teilige graphische Serie aus, von der ich gerade sprach.

Mir ging es, ähnlich wie bei Lily Greenham, Andreas Christen oder Francois Morellet um die Systematisierung des Werkprozesses, um Recherche, um Nachvollziehbarkeit, um Wahrnehmung als aktive Aneignung; mir ging es nicht um optische Sensationen, wie sie bei einigen anderen Künstlern der NT im Vordergrund standen (wie eben Cruz Diez oder Bridget Riley) und wie sie 1965 in der Op Art Austellung im MOMA zum beherrschenden Thema wurden.

Mit meinen kinetischen Objekten der 60er Jahre habe ich mich auch nicht als dogmatischen Kinetiker gesehen, sondern nahezu parallel dazu ab 1966 mit der Werkgruppe meiner „Quadratreliefs“ begonnen, die sich auf der Grundlage systematischer Strukturfelder durch den Wechsel des Betrachterstandorts und der Lichtrichtung visuell veränderten und damit die Relativität der Wahrnehmung thematisierten.

5.
Ich kann mich nicht genau erinnern, wann und wo ich zum erstenmal eine Minimal Art Ausstellung sah, aber über die Kunstzeitschriften der späten 60er und frühen 70er Jahre waren wir in Deutschland gut über die theoretischen Grundlagen und die ästhetische Erscheinung informiert.

Unbegreiflich war mir, mit welcher Wucht, Intensität und Publizität diese (letzte?) rein amerikanische Bewegung absolute Meinungshohheit erhielt, wenn ich daran denke, daß verschiedene Parameter der Minimal Art wie Raster, Addition, Serialität, Progression, prinzipielle Nachvollziehbarkeit, neutrale technische Ausführung, Verwendung von Industriematerialien durchaus vorher vorhanden waren.

Neu und aufregend war für mich die Radikalität, die Dimensionen, der Raumbezug, die theoretische Fundierung.

Gesehen und bewundert habe ich 1968 auf der documenta 4 bei den amerikanischen Künstlern die raumgreifenden Skulpturen von Robert Morris, Kenneth Nolands große Querformate mit horizontalen Querbändern, die Arbeiten von Jo Baer, ebenfalls im Gedächtnis geblieben sind die absoluten Reduktionen von Ellsworth Kelly, die riesigen Formate von Al Held, die Systematik Sol Lewitts.

Bei den europäischen Künstlern hatten für mich die stillen, kleinen Formate von Antonio Calderara, die formal reduzierten Reliefs von Jan Schoonhoven und Ad Dekkers und die Bilder Günter Fruhtrunks große Bedeutung.

6.
Mit Ausnahme der kinetischen Objekte der 60er Jahre hatte ich mich ausschließlich mit dem Thema Progression beschäftigt, Progression verstanden als regelmäßige, in gleichen Schritten verlaufende Bewegung von Element zu Element, die zur gleichen bzw. entgegengesetzten Position des Anfangselements führten, also in ihrer Grundgegebenheit formal geschlossene Systeme waren (die dann über Licht-und Standortwechsel relativiert wurden).

Ich suchte nach einer Möglichkeit, bei gleicher methodischer Stringenz eine Progression zu finden, bei der der letzte Progressionsschritt außerhalb des Sichtbaren liegt und nur in der Vorstellung existent ist: eine Progression vom Sichtbaren ins Denkbare. Ich fand die Lösung in dem einfachen geometrischen Axiom, daß sich Parallelen im Unendlichen schneiden, umgekehrt ausgedrückt, daß sie sich nicht im Endlichen schneiden, es korrespondieren also ganz rational die sichtbaren Parameter der Progression mit der nur denkbaren letzten Stufe der Progression, der Dimension Unendlich.

7.
Meine Titel geben den Hinweis auf meinen Begriff des Unendlichen, z.B. Progression gegen Unendlich mit 30° oder Progression gegen Unendlich mit 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°.

Sie bezeichnen das regelmäßige Vorrücken gegen Unendlich als einen geometrischen Vorgang, allerdings auch einen, der das Sichtbare vom Unsichtbaren trennt. Ich weiß um den hoch philosophischen, metaphysischen Begriff des Unendlichen der Künstler im christlichen Mittelalter, bei Caspar David Friedrich, bei Kasimir Malewitsch bis Barnett Newman oder Roman Opalka. Ich möchte den Begriff des Unendlichen in meiner Arbeit aus der Utopie herauslösen, die Faszination für mich liegt in der gleichzeitigen logischen Verknüpfung der sichtbaren und nicht sichtbaren Elemente und ihrer aus der gleichen Logik stammenden prinzipiellen Trennung. Manfred Schneckenburger trifft in einer saloppen Formulierung in einem Katalogtext den Sachverhalt, indem er feststellt, daß meine Progessionen gegen Unendlich keine „metaphysischen Codes“ sondern „bildnerische Strategien“ sind.

8.
Die vier Qualitäten, die Du aus meinem Ludwigshafener Katalog zitierst und die den Katalog in vier entsprechende Abschnitte gliedern, sind in der Tat die Eckpfeiler meiner Arbeit geblieben. Aber sie bezeichnen eben auch die Verlagerung des Interesses im zeitlichen Ablauf: System als Grundbegriff der ersten Werkphase, Wahrnehmung als Kernbegriff der 60er und frühen 70er Jahre, Gestalt als Hauptmerkmal der Spanplattenarbeiten der 80er Jahre und Konzept als Hauptbegriff der Progressionen gegen Unendlich und der Gegenüberstellungen aus Stahlprofilen der 90er Jahre bis heute (natürlich gibt es auch Vor-und Rückgriffe). Eine neue Qualität ist hinzugekommen:

Seit etwa 1990 (wenn auch schon in einigen Arbeiten früher realisiert, z.B. meine Installation in Schloß Buchberg 1984/85) suche ich die Auseinandersetzung mit dem gegebenen Raum. Das heißt für mich nicht, eine Arbeit aus einer räumlichen Gegebenheit abzuleiten, sondern ein vorher erarbeitetes Projekt sozusagen in Übereinstimmung mit der Gegebenheit zu bringen und sie dann bei anderer Gelegenheit in einer anderen Situation zu überprüfen. Ein Beispiel ist meine „Bodenarbeit für Odense“, die für ein klassizistisches Museum gemacht wurde (ich kannte die Maße des Raums), danach stellte ich sie in einer Industriehalle in Oberhausen aus und danach im Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, einem ehemaligen Verwaltungsgebäude. Es ergeben sich also „Überblendungen“ der jeweils gleichen Arbeit (genauer: ihrer materiellen Strukturelemente, der I-beams) mit der jeweils anderen Untergrundfläche (Farbe und Material des Bodens) und natürlich eine jeweils andere räumliche Gesamt–Atmosphäre. Oder ich gehe so vor, daß ich eine bestimmte Anzahl gleich großer I-beams zu einer Ausstellung mitnehme, um dort zu entscheiden, welche Skulptur ich aus dem Arsenal der vorher festgelegten Möglichkeiten ich im Einklang mit der Situation realisiere.

9.
Eigentlich beginne ich immer mit einer Ideenskizze, meistens sind es lineare Struktur-Zusammenhänge. Ist die erste Skizze gemacht und von mir „genehmigt“, untersuche ich die Eigenschaften zur Serienbildung, z.B. kann ich das, was ich mit 4 Linien ausdrücke, auch mit 5, 6, 7… oder 3, 2, 1 Linie ausdrücken? Was geschieht, wenn ich bestimmte Parameter verändere? usw.

Es ist im Prinzip der gleiche Vorgang, ob ich auf Papier, mit Spanplatten oder mit Stahlprofilen arbeite. Natürlich interessiert mich die Ausdruckkraft des jeweiligen Materials.

Plexiglas wurde mir ab einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt zu elegant (es wurde zu dominant in der Konsumwelt) und ich suchte nach einem raueren Material, das ästhetisch unverbraucht war und fand die Spanplatte,die in der Warenwelt ein eher verstecktes Dasein als Rückwände von Schränken bzw. bedeckt von Furnieren führte. Ich klebte keine Elemente mehr auf, sondern sägte die Linien mit der Kreissäge aus, schließlich entdeckte ich für mich die Verwendung von industriellen, international standardisierten Stahlprofilen, die es mir ermöglichten, mit dem gegebenen Leerraum der Wand oder des Bodens als Bestandteil der Arbeit umzugehen.

10.
Ich habe 1990 meine Ausstellung im Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt.

„Der Raum um die Linie“ genannt. In der Tat ist der Binnen-und Außenraum gnauso wichtig wie die strukturierenden Elemente. Dieter Bogner hat das in Analogie zur Zwölftonmusik von Josef Matthias Hauer „Intervalle“ genannt. Natürlich soll das Auge des Betrachters über die Leerstellen hinweg Verbindungen, Bezüge suchen und finden- auch solche, die nicht nur mein Konstruktionsprinzip nachvollziehen, sondern sich frei in der Arbeit bewegen.

11.
Yes.

12.
Ich glaube nicht, daß das, was wir in Ermangelung eines neuen, umfassenden Begriffs konkrete Kunst nennen, am Ende ist, vielmehr glaube ich, daß der Begriff, so wie ihn Van Doesburg formuliert und Max Bill präzisiert hat, inzwischen obsolet geworden ist.

Längst sind die historischen Linien von Konkreter Kunst und Minimal Art zusammengewachsen, amerikanische und europäische Entwicklungslinien sind sowohl für amerikanische wie europäische Künstler verfügbar und ergeben neue Spielräume. Es gibt Künstler und es wird weiterhin Künstler geben, die systematisch recherchierend, genau und bewußt an einer klaren Kunst arbeiten, die ihre Mittel offenlegt. Die Minus Space Künstler sind das beste Beispiel dafür – aber würden sie sich deshalb als konkrete Künstler bezeichnen?

Ich betrachte und schätze den Terminus von Minus Space „reductive + concept based art“ als einen Arbeitsbegriff, der einerseits bescheidener ist, andererseits aber Künstler ganz unterschiedlicher Strategien und Medien einschließt und damit einen neuen Diskurs eröffnet.