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

January 14 – February 25, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus Soto, Composición dinámica (Dynamic Composition), 1950
Oil on canvas
Collection Christophe Soto

A key figure of the Paris avant-garde in the 1950s and ’60s, Jesús Soto (1923–2005) is widely recognized for his groundbreaking innovations in color theory, serial composition, and movement in art. Less well-known is the wide range of styles and mediums that he explored early on. Drawing inspiration from optics and serial music, Soto employed repeating geometric forms and superimposed surfaces to convey a sense of physical displacement. In deconstructing the notion of stability, Soto radically transformed the relation between object and audience. Encouraging viewers to interact physically with his work, Soto engages them as active participants in the process of perception.

Born in the Venezuelan provincial capital of Ciudad Bolívar, Soto trained at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas. Frustrated with his country’s increasingly repressive environment, he left in 1950 for Paris, the adopted home of many Latin American intellectuals and artists, including members of the radical Madí group, as well as U.S. artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman. In France Soto entered a period of intense activity, exhibiting at the annual Salon des Réalités Nouvelles alongside other artists of the Parisian avant-garde. At the invitation of Victor Vasarely, Soto participated in the pivotal 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René, which boosted the young artist’s reputation in both Europe and Venezuela as an innovator and vital member of the Kinetic movement.

Focusing on the two decades following Soto’s move to France, the works exhibited here are grouped in five sections, revealing his investigations into new modes of artistic engagement, his contact with European artists Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and the Group Zero, and his anticipation of later conceptual strategies. From his first experiments with “dematerial-ization” to his monumental Penetrables environments of the late 1960s, Soto’s achievements in the fields of perception and interaction during this twenty-year span established him as one of Latin America’s most influential 20th-century artists.

Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970 is organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and curated by Estrellita B. Brodsky.

Ellsworth Kelly, Black Curve in Relief, 2009

October 7, 2011 – January 20, 2012

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923 in Newburgh, New York) is among the most important protagonists of colour field painting. His paintings, in large format for the most part and consisting usually of several panels, are an impressive interplay of form, colour and space. Kelly’s works are notable for their very lean imagery: the forms are geometric or organic, the contours are drawn sharply, the colours are intense. Form, derived from real observation, is at the source of Kelly’s creative process. the window of a museum, the floor of a Paris café, the diagonal shadow of a garage entranceway – fragments of everyday reality that the artist translates into the simplest, most memorable forms, hence turning the quotidian into two-dimensional signs. Kelly does not find refuge in invented lines or shapes and is therefore liberated from the need to compose an image: “the things that interested me were always there”.

Karlos Cárcamo, Hard Edge Painting (Stan 153), 2011
Latex and enamel paint on canvas over panel
48 x 48 inches

April 7 – May 14, 2011

“Combining my interest in urban culture and art history I navigate toward making work that is in constant dialog with each other. Through the use of high and low cultural iconography and art historical references I create a working space between both cultural identities in which samples could be built upon with new content. The specific subject matter of my work touches on issues related to inner city life while balancing elements that address a broad spectrum of formal issues that engage contemporary art discourse. Creating a vocabulary that speaks of and reflects the world we currently live in today.”

-Karlos Cárcamo

Karlos Cárcamo will present a new series of paintings, sculptures, and mixed media collages that continue his on-going exploration of urban culture, its history, and the social-dynamic impact it has on all aspects of mainstream popular culture.

Adopting a conceptual process similar to the constructed nature found in hip hop music. Cárcamo incorporates its working methodology as a tool to appropriate or “sample” from, a broad spectrum of art historical sources that include, hard-edge painting, constructivism, geometric abstraction, and neo-concrete art. Cárcamo’s unique blend of work straddle the line between form and content while also paying homage to a diverse group of people that include artists Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, and Kurt Scwhitters, musician James Brown, The Incredible Bango Band and early graffiti pioneers, Pistol 1, Stan 153, Stay High and Flint 707.

Installation view.

Opens March 3, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 2 – April 30, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Zinsser, Geometry and Ego, 2007
Enamel and oil on canvas
30 x 28 inches

December 18, 2010 – February 12, 2011

Get Me to the Church on Time
It was a simple enough assignment, drive the painter Marcia Hafif to her opening at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. What I couldn’t have predicted was that a massive wreck on I-95 would shut down the highway completely. The trip became a seven-and-a-half hour odyssey, zig-zagging across strip mall New Jersey with no GPS, to arrive, finally, already late, to the opening.

The Trip
Hafif was unflappable, an intrepid traveler, centered and calm throughout. I was in a state of nervous agitation. I had been looking forward to catching up with this great monochrome painter, whom I had first met in 1988, when we both were doing shows at Julian Pretto’s tiny storefront gallery in SoHo.

Anxiety and Its Influence
The episode on I-95 describes, to some extent, my larger protracted history with a family of reductive artists a generation older than me, a case of “anxiety of influence,” in the words of literary critic Harold Bloom.

You Can Take a Guru to a Mountain,
But You Can’t Take the Mountain
There was a time in my life when I tried to think of Hafif as a possible guru figure. There was much to admire in her adherence to material-specific methodologies and the literal nature of color application and its receivership. She didn’t so much tell me what I was, as what I wasn’t: “a monochrome painter.” She liberated me by declaring me: “a duochrome painter.”

A More Thoreau Understanding
But there was more to it than that. In our verbal exchanges, I came to realize that Hafif wasn’t so much a practitioner of Zen (as many would no doubt falsely believe) as she was, ultimately, a “self-reliant” American pragmatist of the first order. If I came away with a lesson, it might be this: “If you do something, then it is appropriate to do.”

Monochrome and its Moment
Over the past 25 years, I have continued to study the American monochrome painting movement since the 1970s. Robert Ryman is the best-known among this group, but it also includes, notably, Marcia Hafif, Olivier Mosset, Phil Sims and Joseph Marioni. All emerged directly from core issues raised by “The New York School” of the 1940s and 1950s.

Collapsing History
For my generation, the three great movements of post-war painting – abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop — are not so much antithetical to each other (i.e., movement/counter-movement, assertion/repudiation) as they are part of a larger ongoing redefinition of the form of painting itself.

After Warhol
Yet this trajectory, the developing “DNA” of painting, was radically altered by Andy Warhol’s re-invention of its most basic structures. Not only are his works more “mechano-morphic” in their execution, they further heighten “objectivity” through the photographic repetition of imagery and the reduction of color to a single, planar presence. The affect is startling: all abstract painting is now “seen” differently as a result.

Drawing Legacies
Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling came to me a year ago, expressing interest in a series of drawings that I had just begun: representational renderings of abstract and reductive post-war American paintings. I was working from photographic reproductions from auction house catalogues — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — along with their accompanying texts.

A “Devotional” Practice
I came to informally refer to these drawings as “devotionals,” as I was working like a monk on an “illuminated manuscript” version of the originals. At first, the issue of the “cultural currency” of such images seemed important. In other words, a painting, in its original form, is so material, visceral and immediate. Yet in its entry into shared visual culture through reproduction, it becomes “iconic” in a much different fashion.

The Impossible Act
These follow the age-old tradition of artists drawing from respected originals to learn from them. Yet, in my case, they’re made from “respected” reproductions. In the act of drawing, they return to a primacy of act. The painting is re-transformed anew through direct material engagement.

A Room of One’s Own
Drawing an Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, or even an Andy Warhol became a way of getting inside the form. There is a moment in the process when the work “becomes” my own: my hand, my eye.

Pre-Cognition and Viewer Response
When a viewer looks at these drawings, they bring their own pre-association. From having planned many art history lectures, I’ve come to call it “a mental slide carousel.” That is, one “projects” one’s own foreknowledge of the known icon “onto” the newly-drawn image, seeing it through the terms of one’s own subjective receivership.

You Knew It All Along
Of course, in doing this literal “devotional” act, I came to discover that I was only reinforcing and repeating what I had been doing all along for the last 20 years. My paintings are largely a “response” to that which I have already visually “internalized.” Between material and action, what emerges, seemingly on its own, is a fully developed “iconography” of that which we already know.

Beginning Again
And so the DNA cycle regenerates itself, through mutation and adaptation, all over again.

—John Zinsser, New York, January, 2011

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.”

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.