Works by Ahn Hyun-Ju, Eric Knoote, Wilma Vissers

September 4-25, 2010

Henri Matisse painting Bathers by a River, May 13, 1913
Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn
Courtesy of George Eastman House,
International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester

July 18 – October 11, 2010

In the time between Henri Matisse’s (1869–1954) return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, the artist produced some of the most demanding, experimental, and enigmatic works of his career—paintings that are abstracted and rigorously purged of descriptive detail, geometric and sharply composed, and dominated by shades of black and gray. Works from this period have typically been treated as unrelated to one another, as an aberration within the artist’s development, or as a response to Cubism or World War I. Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 moves beyond the surface of these paintings to examine their physical production and the essential context of Matisse’s studio practice. Through this shift of focus, the exhibition reveals deep connections among these works and demonstrates their critical role in the artist’s development at this time. Matisse himself acknowledged near the end of his life the significance of this period when he identified two works—Bathers by a River (1909–10, 1913, 1916–17) and The Moroccans (1915–16)—as among his most “pivotal.” The importance of this moment resides not only in the formal qualities of the paintings but also in the physical nature of the pictures, each bearing the history of its manufacture. The exhibition includes approximately 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, primarily from the years of 1913–17, in the first sustained examination devoted to the work of this important period. The exhibition will be on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from March 20 through June 20, 2010.

Installation view

July 11 – September 12, 2010

Non-Objectif Sud (NOS) is pleased to present its fifth exhibition and residency program with le beau le bien le vrai, an exhibition curated and organized by Tilman and Petra Bungert of CCNOA (Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium).

Participating Artists:
Massimiliano Baldassarri (IT/CH)
Francisco da Mata (PT/CH)
Camila Oliveira Fairclough (BR/UK)
Sacha Goerg (CH/BE)
Alexandra Guillot (FR)
Colombe Marcasiano (FR)
Guillaume Millet (FR)
Roland Orépük (CH)
Benjamin Rivière (FR)
Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (FR)
Damien Sorrentino (FR)
Cédric Teisseire (FR)
Wilson Trouvé (FR)
Emmanuel Van der Meulen (FR)

The exhibition project le beau le bien le vrai (named after a work of the same title by Damien Sorrentino) presented by NOS aims to survey artistic production focusing on the realm of reductive and conceptual art within the perimeters of a more regional context. For this exhibition CCNOA has invited 14 artists working in the francophone -and neighboring francophone countries- cultural landscapes. The participating artists live and work in Paris, Marseille and Nice (France) as well as Grenoble, Geneva and Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and have studied at renowned art schools including the Villa Arson, Nice.

In addition to painting, sculpture and video works, le beau le bien le vrai will also present site-specific works – both indoors and outdoors. Turning NOS into their temporary studio, the artists will expand and reflect on NOS’s magnificent setting and the environment.

Since its inception in 1998, CCNOA, a multidisciplinary non-for-profit art organization currently based in Brussels, has established a platform to review and introduce contemporary artistic positions, strategies and developments in the field of reductive art on an international level. Focusing for the past 12 years on the dialogue between artists, art-professionals and art-lovers from around the globe, CCNOA has helped to renew the discourse surrounding the subject of contemporary reductive art and has inspired many others to set up similar organizations.

To broaden communication and exchange between artists and the public, CCNOA has also organized a series of traveling group exhibitions in the USA, Australia and Europe in addition to its ongoing exhibition program in Brussels. Visit www.ccnoa.org for further information.

NOS was founded by co-directors Andrew Huston and Karole Vail in 2005 as a non-for-profit alternative to the institutional space of the commercial art gallery. NOS is located at La Barralière, a farmhouse with an adjoining exhibition space in the Rhône Valley 50 kilometers north of Avignon. Each summer, artists are invited in residence to collaborate, create and exhibit site-specific artworks within this Kunsthalle platform.

Connie Goldman, Jason Hoelscher & Vitor Mejuto (l to r)

June 26 – July 24, 2010

Carmen Herrera, Black and Yellow, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, diptych, 72 x 72 inches

April 30 – June 26, 2010

Frederico Sève Gallery/latincollector proudly announces Carmen Herrera: Recent Works. For this show, Carmen Herrera has created 7 new works that convey the expression of space like never before. Through elegance and economy Herrera once again stakes out new frontiers.

In this new suite of paintings Carmen Herrera is still breaking new ground. Drawing on her recurrent themes of space, time, & place, Herrera expresses the monument themes that have dominated her life of making art. She alerts our senses to contemplate an architecture that is internal.

In front of a Herrera’s painting we feel the subtle transitions from objectivity to subjectivity produced by seeing one form as dominating, or one color as recessing. This dialectic potential between positive and negative space throws one off-kilter & into redundant understanding of how the flat depiction of shape can stir within us the most physical feelings toward a vastness usually only experienced in the landscape. Hers is a visuality that produces a freedom from our fixed position. In front of one of her paintings, we feel our dependence on comprehending space through the referencing of gravity and question it. Her paintings insist at once that we free ourselves from this center. They beg of us to reexamine our choices through the contemplation of an image that is free of all but the most reductive signals of relationships and interconnectivity. Her paintings depict an idyllic architecture of thoughts. Here consequence is examined from the vantage point of an elegant removal of the body and it’s gravity through the mere fixation on form.

Carmen Herrera has had a flurry of international news coverage during the past few months. Last summer art critic, Laura Cumming, in the London “Observer” sang her praises by writing, “Carmen Herrera is the discovery of the year – of the decade” & The New York Times featured a front page story about her on Sunday, December 20th, 2009. In addition to these two exciting citations, she has been featured in the January issue of “Art News”, been interviewed by German public television, German public radio and a host of others. In this climate of post-post-modernism, when people are looking back at the abstract movements- wondering they didn’t miss some things along the way,her work is finally receiving the attention that it deserves.

During the past 5 years she has been acquired by MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London and the Hirschhorn, Washington DC. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1915, Carmen Herrera settled in New York in 1954 where she has since resided. During the 1930’s she studied in painting in Paris and architecture in Cuba, finally returning to Paris for 9 years before settling in New York City. While in Paris she participated in a number of key exhibitions of the Salon des Realities Nouvelles that focused on concrete constructivist work.

Work by Jesus Rafael Soto

May 8 – June 19, 2010

Participating Artists:
Mario Ballocco, Julije Knifer, Marco Maggi, Francois Morellet, Olivier Mosset, Jesus Rafael Soto

After World War II, many artists turned to geometric abstraction as a springboard for experimentation, leaving behind figurative art. Some said that was the death of painting. I prefer thinking of it as a new start.

I was first introduced to geometric abstract art when instructed by Serge Lemoine at lʼEcole du Louvre and have been since then fascinated by the subject. My strong continued interest in geometric art has led me to creating this exhibition to explore what is beyond geometry. Since the Renaissance, viewing a painting has been described as looking through a window onto the world. I would like to engage a more experimental approach and to bring the viewer inside the “world” made available by these artworks.

Francois Morelletʼs serigraphs abolish the system of one point perspective. His systematic method of image making is a study of the eyeʼs perception. Only using flat solid shapes on a monochromatic background, Morelletʼs layer effect creates depth, which can be experienced from multiple angles. This play on the eye is also seen in Mario Balloccoʼs work. And through his chromatic problems, Ballocco utilizes color to reveal how it has a positive and stimulating effect over the eye, provoking a psychic action on the whole human body.

This idea of action and movement has been synthesized by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty, who described perception as ʻan immediate and physical fluid, involving the whole body and not just the eyeʼ. Physical movement becomes a means of reaching a revelation about the art works by shifting the viewerʼs sensory and perceptual point of view. With Sotoʼs installation, a piece of the actual set of the 1978 ballet Genesis, choreographed by Alicia Alonso, at the Great Theatre of Havana, this is precisely how the viewer will experience this theme by literally walking into geometry. In another way, Marco Maggiʼs study explores the threshold between the second and third dimension. These works intensifies the viewerʼs physical relationship to the art.  His objects- papers – sit directly on the floor without pedestals and share our same space.

Finally, our experimental interaction ends with Julije Knifer and Olivier Mosset. Both have explored where flatness and surfaces can lead us – a rhythmic close up of a pattern, which develops into an independent surface that we can admire.

To answer the problematic of this showʼs title, what is beyond geometry is something that is over points, angles, surfaces and solids; what we find is a window to a world, which can function as a mirror of our sensations.

All the works presented have an impact to our senses and they envelop us into a mesmerizing geometric and transcendent atmosphere.

Hartmut Böhm
Untersuchungen eines Quadratsystems, IV, 1964/68
Silkscreen on paper, 40 x 40 cm
Photographer: Grzegorz Zabłocki

May 8 – June 12, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Hartmut Böhm: Graphic Systems, Prints 1965-1975. This is the Berlin-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City and it will feature ten silkscreen prints produced between 1965 and 1975.

For more than fifty years, Hartmut Böhm has been working in installation, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work focuses almost exclusively on the aesthetics of systems that highlight the relativity of perception. Böhm’s practice is organized around four primary areas of investigation: Systems (serial structures), Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity), Gestalt (partition and outline), and Concept (linear principles and infinite progressions).

Perception is the dominant facet of the work he produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which includes the prints on view at MINUS SPACE. About his work of this period, Böhm states, “It was about investigation, comprehension, and perception as active learning…it wasn’t about optical sensations.” Böhm views the systems in his work as pictorial strategies, rather than metaphysical vehicles pointing toward the realm of utopia. He continues, “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.”

A comprehensive interview with Hartmut Böhm, his first in English, was conducted by Matthew Deleget and published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004. Böhm’s work was recently included in the group exhibitions Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in 2009, and MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008.

Hartmut Böhm is one of the most important European reductive artists of his generation. He was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1938, and studied with Arnold Bode, the founder and curator of Documenta, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel. Böhm produced his first systems-based work in 1959. Several years later, he was included in the seminal constructivist exhibition Nouvelle Tendance: Propositions visuelles du mouvement international at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 1964. The exhibition heralded in the Op, Kinetic, and Zero Art movements.

Böhm has mounted more than sixty solo exhibitions and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions internationally. His work is included in nearly seventy public collections worldwide. The Chelm Museum Collection of Contemporary Art in Chelm, Poland, mounted a retrospective of Böhm’s prints in 2008.

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

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Buzzer #28
Brooklyn, NY 11231
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Installation view of NOS 2009
Work by John Finneran (left) & Linda Francis (back wall)

Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Daytime Preview: 10am – 5pm
Evening Sale & Cocktails: 6-8pm

Robert Goff Gallery
537 B West 23rd Street
NYC

Tickets
Advance Purchase: $25
Door Price: $30
NOS Patron: $50 (includes acknowledgment in the 2010 catalog)

Featuring the work of more than 80 international artist.  All sales benefit NOS’s 2010 exhibition. For further information, please see www.nonobjectifsud.org.

Non-Objectif Sud is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

March 30 – May 29, 2010

The Mayor Gallery is hosting an exhibition of works by Argentinean born artist Luis Tomasello, with his first solo exhibition in the UK. Tomasello, a leading representative of Latin American Kinetic art, worked extensively in Paris from the late 1950s onwards exhibiting with Galerie Denise René, alongside Victor Vasarely and Jesús Rafael Soto.

Born in La Plata in 1915, Tomasello studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, and began as a Concrete artist, looking to Mondrian for inspiration. It was after settling in Paris in 1957, however, that he began working in relief, moving away from the linear nature of geometric abstraction, directing his interest to form and colour effects:

‘I went to relief as an experience and in that process, I discovered the wonderful world of light. The reflection of color on the surface fascinated me and that is what I’ve worked in from that time on.’

(A Conversation With Francesca Bellini Joseph, Literal Magazine, Autumn 2009)
Tomasello is most famed for his Atmosphère Chromoplastique works, where white cubes with painted undersides are arranged at varying angles onto a white surface. This results in subtle reflections of coloured light, and an optical sensation of movement. He manages to put the emphasis on the coloured reflections, and limit the geometric aspect to the introduction of simplified forms. It was Tomasello’s decision to pass from painting to sculpture that allowed him to overcome the linear aspect of abstraction, and focus on form and colour effects. Later on in his career, this allowed environmental and architectural applications for his work.

Tomasello has been involved with the following international exhibitions: the landmark show ‘La Lumiere et Mouvement’ at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 1967 as well as the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid in 1985. He has also realised a certain number of architectural projects such as Chromoplastique Mural installed in 1971 at the façade of the San Pedro Edifice in Guadalajara, Mexico. There followed an Environment for the Conference Hall of the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, 1975 among other architectural projects.

The exhibition at The Mayor Gallery reviews Tomasello’s Atmosphère Chromoplastique works from the 1960s to date and will feature 3 of his Lumière Noire series (his experiments with black on black) as well as 4 Objet Plastique.

Paul Pagk, Red insertion, 2009
Oil on linen, 193 x 188 cm

March 13 – April 17, 2010

George Rickey, Diptych – The Seasons, 1956
Stainless steel and polychrome

February 18 – March 20, 2010

Marlborough Gallery announces that a major exhibition of works by George Rickey will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on February 18 and continue through March 20, 2010. Twenty-four important indoor and outdoor works from Rickey’s personal collection and now held by the George Rickey Estate will be exhibited in the first floor gallery.

George Rickey is internationally regarded as among the most inventive and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. His iconic kinetic works were the outgrowth of experiments with wire and metal that began during his service in World War II. By the late 1950s and 1960s he reduced sculptural forms to simple, geometric shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, cubes, and lines and largely limited his materials to stainless steel, creating a body of work that is a mesmerizing combination of minimalism and movement.

Important Works from the Estate will focus on Rickey’s sculptural exploration of light, line and shadow as effected by the changing air currents, wind and other natural phenomena; and will feature rare, unique works including the stainless steel and polychrome Diptych – The Seasons (14 x 55 x 22 • in.), 1956, Personage (98 x 20 x 39 in.), 1958 and Harlequin (78 x 25 x 25 in.), 1958, all of which were foundational in the development of Ricky’s kinetic oeuvre. Additionally Two Lines Vertical (20 • x 3 • x 2 in.), 1965, will be shown on the outdoor sculpture terrace at Marlborough on 57th Street. Two Lines Vertical was created by Rickey for his personal collection following the exhibition of the earlier but similar work Two Lines Temporal, 1964, at Documenta III in 1964 which established Rickey’s international reputation. Two Lines Temporal has been in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection since 1964.

Whether in columns, clusters, lines, or suspended shimmering planes, Rickey’s sculptures capture the expressive moment of the intersection of material form, light and movement in space. As art critic Alexandra Anderson-Spivy comments in the catalog essay: “His works mesmerize viewers even when they are still. But these fluid geometric constructions are born to move and they partner best with natural forces. Rickey often declared that he aimed ‘to make things [that are] as contemporary as the weather report,’ And gentle winds and changing weather usually are his sculptures’ greatest friends. The artist never ceased to explore the possibilities offered by the symbiotic relationship between his sculpture and the physical laws of natural motion, chance and light. ”

George Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 the family moved to Scotland, where his father, an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. While studying modern history at Oxford, Mr. Rickey also took courses in painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie L’hôte and at the Académie Moderne, where he worked under the Modernist painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

Rickey served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry, an experience that reawakened earlier interests in science and technology. After the war, he resumed his peripatetic teaching career. A year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of Design in the late 1940s was decisive; for it was there that he seriously began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement. In 1949, while working as an associate professor at Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture using window glass.

In 1960 Rickey moved to East Chatham, N.Y., which remained his home base until the end of his life. He retired from teaching in 1966 after five years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., but continued to make sculpture and to travel incessantly. To keep up with his many public commissions and exhibitions, he maintained studios in Berlin and in Santa Barbara, California. Rickey’s last sculpture — his tallest, at 57 feet 1 inch – was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Japan in 2002.

Rickey received Honorary Doctorate degrees from nine institutions and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974 and received the Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.

Installation view

March 4 – May 1, 2010

One might think it easier to photographically reproduce a recent monochromatic painting by John Griefen than a 50’s painting by Ad Reinhardt, as the acrylic paint on a Griefen is textured and thick in contrast to Reinhardt’s matte application. But both Reinhardt and Griefen defy reproduction, and that is just one of the things they have in common. Both demand that the viewer powerfully and authentically engage the actual painting, and both are inextricably bound to the physical act of painting.

This physicality is probably why Griefen prefers a motorcycle to a car, his rustic home in Southwest France to Brooklyn, or wine to water. Life is lived fully in the art of John Griefen, and the viewer can sense this in front of his paintings.

Griefen has been showing in New York City since the 1960s, with numerous exhibitions at Kornblee Gallery, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, and others. His work is in major public and private collections, and has been discussed by writers as diverse as Rosalind Krauss (Artforum, 1969), Hilton Kramer (NY Times, 1973) and Terry Fenton, 1981. Gary Snyder/Project Space is pleased to present its first exhibition of John Griefen’s paintings.

Installation by Roland Orepuk

thru February 27, 2010

Cecilia Vissers, Goath, 2010
Aluminum, 84 x 77 x 1 cm, each
Photo by Peter Cox

January 9-30, 2010

Installation view

November 28 – December 19, 2009

C, an installation by Bergman at ParisCONCRET, configures the chemical symbol for carbon using an innovative architectural product called ‘softwall’ by Molo Design to make a translucent white curve of vertical pleats.

C, in its reductive simplicity, aims to place the viewer “in an indeterminate, luminous space, in attentive contemplation” experiencing the light and space of symbolic carbon.

With this project Bergman references Agnes Martin’s “To the Islands” work from 1974-1979: “This kind of color, a lapse in pure whiteness, is an imperfection. Through it, you imagine the perfect “white” of light.”

In its shape, C also references a 1983 steel work by Richard Serra, Clara-Clara: two mirrored Cs shown in Paris at the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde. Like Serra’s work, this installation is also a phenomenological sculpture that “exists in primary relation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation, in all its senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale.” C, however, is situational rather than site specific because this work engages ParisCONCRET and redefines its space.

Gottfried Honegger & Aurelie Nemours
Restaurant Chez Georges, Paris, France, 1990

December 4, 2009 – January 23, 2010

Works by Jose Heerkens

thru November 21, 2009

Installation view

October 16, 2009 – February 14, 2010

The French-born international artist Daniel Buren is considered one of the fiercest critics of contemporary art. It is particularly towards the museum, its circumstances and conditions, that he likes to turn his critical attention. For the “museum is the place, with regard to which and for which works are created.”

For well over forty years Buren has applied his mischievous intuition to develop works that directly play on their surroundings. Thus, in institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or, most recently, in the Musée Picasso in Paris, he has created breathtaking installations in dialogue with their specific contexts, thereby opening these up to new perspectives. But he has frequently performed his artistic interventions in outdoor locations too, where he typically applies 8.7 cm wide stripes – his characteristic artistic trademark – to give heightened visibility to certain aspects of reality.

In Nuremberg Daniel Buren encounters the striking architecture of Volker Staab, whose symbiosis of different architectural traditions represents a milestone in the history of modern museum architecture. In the exhibition “MODULATION Works in situ” conceived exclusively for the Neues Museum, Daniel Buren explores certain distinctive elements of the museum’s design. Making specific reference to the façade, to the foyer and its staircase, and to the exhibition hall, Buren has evolved works of his own that combine light and movement to create singular and exceptional situations.

Curators: Melitta Kliege, Angelika Nollert, Neues Museum

Nathan Hylden, Untitled, 2009
Acrylic on aluminum, 34 x 28 inches

October 1-31, 2009

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents “Affinities,” a show that juxtaposes new paintings by Nathan Hylden with works by Josef Albers, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Curated by Meredith Darrow, the show connects Hylden’s geometric forms and repeated gestures with those of his art historical predecessors.

Like Albers, Stella and Warhol, Hylden uses a regulated process to create variations within a systematic sequence and to continue Modern Art’s redefinition of pictoral space. Starting with a stack of identically sized aluminum panels, Hylden adds layers of paint and ink to these reflective surfaces, changing the order of operations for each panel. As the series progresses, older panels are used in the creation of newer ones— for example, vertical bands of white paint bridge the borders of separate panels, forming an indexical link between these individual works within the larger series. Another unifying motif presents itself in the screen-printed image of a one-to-one photograph of a blank canvas hanging on a wall. Hylden deliberately chose the loaded notion of a “blank canvas” to evoke long-standing concerns about the relationships between the illusory depth of an image and its physical support. Grounding itself in Albers’s pure geometry, Stella’s insistence on the potential of formal abstraction, and Warhol’s interest in serialized imagery, Hylden extends the conversation to the next generation of artists and viewers.

Nathan Hylden was born in 1978 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. His works have been shown in several international group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo, Art: Concept in Paris and Johann König in Berlin.

Meredith Darrow is an independent curator living and working in New York City.

Steven Parrino, Untitled, 1993

October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The MAGASIN is starting its season with a portrait of the artist Olivier Mosset. The exhibition takes the form of a tribute, gathering works by different artists, but never showing Olivier Mossetʼs own work. The artists are of all generations, from Carl André to Stéphane Kropf including the famous group of artists 1m3 among the youngest. As a key figure of the artistic scene and part of a family with the same artistic sensitivity, Olivier Mosset keeps close links with them. He collects or swaps works with them. He has today gathered an important collection, most of which was offered to the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other works are to be found at the MAMCO in Geneva, the Consortium in Dijon and in Tucson.

The exhibition aims at drawing a portrait of the artist through a series of rooms organized around different specific subjects. A first room will introduce his roots, with Chardinʼs engravings (given each year by his grandfather to his colleagues), or Gregoire Müllerʼs portrait. Another one will highlight portraits of Olivier Mosset with Steven Parrinoʼs photographs of him and acrylic paintings by Walter Steding. Another room will reveal quotations, borrowings and copies (from Hugo Pernet in particular). The following rooms will show monochrome paintings, floor-based works, and the indestructible link between Olivier Mosset and the bikers world.

Participating Artists:
Donald Alberti, Carl André, Ian Annul, Janine Antoni, Matthew Antezzo, John Armleder, Art Club 2000, Richard Artschwager, Olivier Babin, Fia Backström, Donald Baechler, Francis Baudevin, Jérôme Beauvarlet, Lisa Beck, Ford Beckman, Joseph Beuys, Alexandre Bianchini, Mike Bidlo, Dike Blair, Philippe Bodenmann, Serge Bramly, Gavin Brown, Neil Campbell, François Chessex, Robert Colescott, Collectif 1m3, Michael Corris, Mark Dagley, Jamie Dalglish, Ricardo De Olivera, Steve Di Benedetto, Alain Dister, John Dogg, George Dupin, Gretchen Faust, Helmut Federle, Sylvie Fleury, Roland Flexner, Christian Floquet, Catherine Eyde, Jonathan Genkins, Fritz Glarner, Janine Gordon, Christophe Gossweiler, Dan Graham, Amy Granat, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Bill Gruner, Wang Guangyi, Raymond Hains, Marcia Hafif, Isabel Halley / Joanna Avillez, Peter Halley, Stephane Huitmere, Nicole Hassler, Drew Heitzler, IFP, Alain Jacquet, Kyle Jenkins, Michael Jenkins, Kim Jones, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Ben Kinmont, Yves Klein, Serge Kliaving, Jeff Koons, W.J.M. Kok, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Kozik, Stéphane Kropf, Alix Lambert, L/B, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler/Sherrie Levine, Ange Leccia, Serge Lemoine, Lépicié dʼaprès Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Renée Levi, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Russel Maltz, Christian Marclay, Jackie McAllister, Matthew McCaslin, Allan McCollum, Mathieu Mercier, Haley Mellin, Tom Merrick, Jonathan Monk, Elena Montesinos, Valentine Mosset, Grégoire Müller, Chuck Nanney, John Nixon, Cady Noland, Eric Oppenheim, Dimitry Orlac, Elisabeth Oser, Virginia Overton, Steven Parrino, Laurie Parsons, Nicolas Pasche, Yan Pei-Ming, Luciano Perna, Hugo Pernet, Gilles Porret, Philip J. Reilly, Delphine Reist, Bettina Rheims, David Robbins, Christian Robert-Tissot, Walter Robinson, Gerwald Rockenschaub, David Row, Claude Rutault, Lisa Ruyter, Frederic Sanchez, Adrian Schiess, Peter Schuyff, Michael Scott, Donald Sheridan, Tara Sinn, Howard Smith, Keith Sonnier, Walter Steding, Frank Stella, Valentina Stieger, Rudolf Stingel, Vincent Szarek, Blair Thurman, Jean Tinguely, John Tremblay, Li Trincere, Allan Uglow, Günter Umberg, Lily van der Stokker, Jean-Thomas Vannotti, Ben Vautier, Not Vital, Joan Wallace, Wallace & Donohue, Dan Walsh, Joan Waltemath, Andy Warhol, Stephen Westfall, Larry Weiner, Peter Young, Michael Zahn.

Installation view

October 4 – November 1, 2009

Non-Objectif Sud presents Ian Tyson: Recent Sculpture.

For the last 10 years the British artist Ian Tyson has been living and working in the Vaucluse, France. His work centres on a variety of sculptures and drawings, which are shown in this exhibition. The sculptures are constructed from, either, wood, steel tube, bronze or stone. They range from 3 meters to 50 centimeters in height and breadth and are geometric in construction. They are, above all, reflections of the light and architectural space of the South of France. These works represent a very personal Platonic interpretation of the world the artist inhabits and range from homage and votive to the formal, altering space viewed through the openings in the sculptures.

Born in 1933, Tyson went to art schools in Birkenhead (Birkenhead School of Art), and London (Royal Academy School, Painting). He taught at Farnham, St Martins, and Wimbledon schools of art as a part time lecturer with spells as visiting professor at University of Wisconsin and University of California San Diego. His work is included in many public and private collections in Europe, the UK, and the USA.

Installation view at Non Objectif Sud, France, 2009

Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was that because you felt the image had reached a stage whereby via the residue the movement just kept going on all by itself? I sense the building of form and then the letting go, engaging in a perfect slip, of folding in and out, in pairs, a synchronizing of different stages.

In Dark Nebula in Saggitarius, 1979, the marks have a similar feel in touch, and there appears to be some pairing, folding, and twisting. Though any geometric sub-structural hint is well hidden under what lay on top. I have an image of this as the remnants of a bout.

Linda: That was a smaller try of a group of large (approx 4×7′ or larger depending upon the space) drawings I made on the wall. The grid was ruled in with pencil and made a rectangular pattern. Each part of the symmetrical grid was drawn upon with chalk using simple rules: only quarter arcs, straight lines, changing the movement at a crossing, etc. They were freehand and each section done with each hand. That is to say, the right grid drawn on with the right hand and the left with left. I just started in the middle and drew out and then came back. I not quite erased what went before to push it into the background and then did it again, responding to the first drawing. I thought of it as re-seeing in time that could have gone on forever. I guess I stopped when I thought the movement was over. Kind of with a long exhale very much as you describe.

I went from the analytical gesture to some years of drawings in which I used the chalk and eraser to literally remake various spiral galaxies. I was looking at small photos in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies. The epiphany was that these galaxies were the analog of the gestures in the earlier work, and of course by extension the body and brain alike were similarly organized natural phenomena. Drawing for me was a kind of research. Looking at those small pictures united my hand and mind as I tried to find the structure that was simultaneously building and destroying the form. This info was not commonly available as it is now and the few books that existed like Mandelbrot’s first and Pirogene’s were the only references I had to try to find out more of what I intuited to be true. In 1982 I did an exhibition of big drawings in Copenhagen. The show was titled The Order of Chaos and here is a picture of one of them done from the galaxy M101…

Brent: Finding. You come out of a bit of a painting history; gesture; hints of constructive; a kind of record keeping; painting that pays attention to relationship more than heroics, though the mark and scale suggests that’s where you were initially coming from?

Richard: Yes, I do feel that what I do comes out of, and actually continues within, a history of painting. I trained as a painter initially during the early 80s in Christchurch, NZ and my teachers were predominantly abstract expressionists who were extolling the virtues of the New York school and the theories of Clement Greenberg (20 years after the fact.) Being young and impressionable, I came out loving that stuff and have been working my way out of there ever since. Even now, I feel that what ever I do is inflected by a way of thinking about painting which I took on board way back then. In brief it is about: The painting as evidence of process and most importantly for me, the painting as an object. When you say record keeping you are bang on. Perhaps it is more obvious in my earlier work, but I would say even now – I think of the artwork as a kind of physical residue of a physical activity that has taken place. I don’t try to hide the evidence of an artist at work – touch is important to me.

You do well to speak of it being about scale/relationship more than heroics. I had dreams of being the next Franz Kline or Motherwell or de Kooning – a big gestural guy – but soon found that I had a tendency to want to structure things more and tidy them up, to some extent. So I veered towards the Rothko and Newman side of the NY school, and with a touch of Mondrian thrown in, my work became much more about simplicity, solidity, scale and proportion than the grand gesture. I think that to this day relationship is key to everything I do. In fact that word could well summarise it all…

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Sin titulo (pez) [Untitled (Fish)], 1932
Oil on canvas

September 6 – November 29, 2009

Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874—1949) is one of the most influential artists of the early 20th century to have emerged from Latin America. Revered not only as a Modernist painter but also as a teacher and author, the Uruguay native spent most of his life in Spain, Italy, France, and New York before returning to his place of birth.

This presentation of major works selected exclusively from Houston collections complements the related exhibition Joaquin Torres-Garcia: Constructing Abstraction with Wood on view at Houston´s Menil Collection from September 25, 2009, to January 3, 2010.

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Planos de color con dos
maderas superpuestas (Planes of Color with
Two Superimposed Wood Pieces), 1928
Collection: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

September 24, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The exhibition will center chiefly on works from the 1920s to the 1940s, spanning the time from when Torres-Garcia lived in Spain, New York, Italy, and France, developing toys and the vocabulary for his wood constructions, to his eventual settlement in Uruguay as the founder of a Constructivist art movement. These sculptural works will be accompanied by a selection of Torres-García’s oil paintings and drawings, which demonstrate the connections between his experiments in two and three-dimensional forms.

Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874–1949) is revered today as one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century to have emerged from Latin America. A charismatic figure of the international art scene, he exhibited with the most famous artists of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Jacques Lipchitz in Paris, and Marcel Duchamp in New York. Though Torres-Garcia was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the artist spent most of his life in Spain, Italy, France, and New York before returning to his native Uruguay in 1934 and settling in Montevideo. There he founded the “Taller Torres-Garcia,” a school that promoted avant-garde experimentation and sought to blur the hierarchical distinctions between arts and crafts.

Celebrated for his work as a modernist painter, teacher, and author, Torres-Garcia is also known for breaking new ground in the realm of wooden constructions or “maderas.” Beginning in the late 1920s in Paris, Torres-García adapted the language of Neo-Plasticism from his colleagues Mondrian and Van Doesburg into a new three-dimensional concept for grids and planes made of wood. These maderas informed his simultaneous experiments in children’s toys, which he promoted and sold as educational tools for young minds. His unique innovations in the medium of wood would foreshadow later artistic developments in Europe and the Americas, one example being the work of Louise Nevelson.

Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Josef Helfenstein, director of The Menil Collection, this exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Ramirez, Margit Rowell and Cecilia de Torres, as well as an illustrated chronology and newly translated texts by Joaquín Torres-García.

This exhibition will travel to the San Diego Museum of Art from February 20–May 30, 2010.

Nasreen Mohamedi, untitled, undated
Pen, pencil and ink on paper, 49.5cm x 69 cm
Courtesy Glenbarra Art Museum Collection, Japan

September 5 – November 15, 2009

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) was born in Karachi, (formerly India, now Pakistan) before moving to Mumbai. She travelled abroad to study, spending time in London at Saint Martin’s School of Art (1954–57) and in Paris. After extensive travels to Iran and Turkey in the 60s, she returned to India and settled in Baroda in 1972; here, she became a teacher at the prestigious M.S.University, Faculty of Fine Arts.

In Baroda, Mohamedi produced her classic works: small-scale, abstract geometric drawings, painstakingly composed using pencil and pen – working with the grid and creating deviations with diagonal lines. Virtually alone amongst her peers in India, who generally favoured a figurative narrative style, her lineage can be traced back to an earlier generation of Indian artists engaged with abstraction, such as V.S. Gaitonde. Other parallels for her practice can be drawn with works on paper by the American artist Agnes Martin, or with the utopian abstraction of Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Suprematists, whom she admired greatly.

Despite Mohamedi’s cosmopolitanism, her work also reflects her identity as a female Indian artist working during the second half of the twentieth century, as the subcontinent, its landscapes, urban centres and Islamic heritage are often intimated in her work, particularly her photographs.

About Mohamedi’s Work
Mohamedi worked in various media, including drawing, painting and photography. These works are rarely dated, but fall roughly into three different periods. Early works, which include watercolour and ink on paper, oil on canvas, collage and lithography, are lyrical and semi-abstract. Influenced in part by Japanese calligraphy, they often suggest plant life or landscapes.

In the 1970s Mohamedi moved closer to abstraction, producing serial works based on the grid on square sheets of paper, which have become a hallmark of her practice. She constructed these compositions by means of lines rendered in pen and ink and used technical drawing equipment. In her final works from the 1980s, Mohamedi abandoned the grid, and began to compose geometric shapes, combining diagonal lines, triangles and spheres, suspended on an empty ground.

Throughout her career, Mohamedi produced photographs as a visual record of the places she visited. Although she never regarded them as works in their own right, today they stand as an important part of her oeuvre.

Mohamedi’s diaries, filled with reflections on her work and personal life, attest to the link between her struggle for equilibrium and a disciplined commitment to her practice. The ephemera from her studio, which includes calendars, pages of letterset and magazine cuttings, along with notes, sketches and photographic experiments, reveal her working process and the way she developed a language that is both visual and conceptual.

Mohamedi’s futuristic visions around the grid resonate in time and form with the utopian aspirations of the founders of the city of Milton Keynes itself, built in the late 1960s around a precise and repetitive geometry composed of vertical and horizontal lines. The city provides a fitting context for the artist’s most substantial exhibition in the UK.

This exhibition is an expanded version of Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes – Reflections on Indian Modernism curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, and organised and initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo. It includes an additional section of works from the Artist’s Estate and other collections, courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi. A variation of this exhibition will travel to Lunds Konsthall, Sweden.

Installation view

July 4 – October 4, 2009

A retrospective of the Dutch artist Kees Visser.

September 5- 26, 2009

August 8-30, 2009

During August, Richard van der Aa (nz/fr) will present a selection of his ‘Easy Pieces’ at ParisCONCRET. The exhibition will consist of monochrome paintings on wooden panels found discarded on the streets of Paris. Subtle relationships of colour, scale, surface and placement will activate the entire space.

Installation view

thru July 25, 2009