Installation view.

November 23, 2011 – January 7, 2012

Drawing provides a space, a place for me to go to where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself.
—Richard Serra

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Drawings,” an exhibition introducing two new series of work by Richard Serra, July and Rifts. This is his first major drawing exhibition in Paris since 1995.

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938. His groundbreaking bodies of work in both sculpture and drawing have been celebrated with major retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art, “Richard Serra Sculpture Forty Years,” (2007) and “Richard Serra/Sculpture,” (1986). “Richard Serra Drawings: Work Comes Out of Work” was presented at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2008. He has produced large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings spanning the globe, from Iceland to New Zealand. In addition to the eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time, conceived for the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2005, Serra presented Promenade for MONUMENTA at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2008. “Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective” opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010, and is currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It will travel to The Menil Collection, Houston in 2012.

Tilman, Artitecture (Cabane Communale), 2011
Lacquer on wood
197 x 165 x 118 inches

September 17 – December 8, 2011

On view at Columna 01, a satellite of the Lyon Biennial, are works by Tilman.

Installation view.

September 30 – October 22, 2011

The works in this exhibition have spent much of their life in my studio drawers. Over periods of time they are pulled out and unpacked to see what dialogue I may still have and the conversation I haven’t yet had with them.

They started as fragments of this and that and I see them as drawings – notes to myself when my mind is my own.

The opportunity to show this work is opportunity to dialogue with a new space. Perhaps in unpacking them again, they may find a new voice for themselves.

Lynne Eastaway
Paris, August 2011

Installation view.
Works by Joseph Kosuth, Guillaume Leblon, and François Morellet.

March 17 – July 9, 2011

The title of this project ‘STRATES ET ARTS, autour de Francois Morellet’ refers to a palindrome created by Francois Morellet in 1999.

It takes place at the gallery simultaneously to the current retrospective exhibition, ‘Francois Morellet, Réinstallations’ (March 2 – July 4), to be held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The Galerie Hervé Bize, which has a special relationship with the artist since over twenty years, is conceiving an exhibition that includes works by French and international artists: Bernard Piffaretti, Claude Closky, Stéphane Dafflon, Vera Molnar, Silvia Bächli, Yann Sérandour, Guillaume Leblon, Alan Charlton, Joseph Kosuth, Günther Főrg, Olivier Mosset, Chuck Nanney, Blinky Palermo, Helmut Federle, Daniel Dezeuze, Franz Erhard Walther and naturally Francois Morellet.

This exhibition should be considered as a small constellation of affinities woven around a towering figure in contemporary art, Francois Morellet, whose influence, constantly growing, is not always measured as it is not limited to field strictly connected to geometrical abstraction: the introduction of a process, the establishment of a program or system, the reduction of subjective decisions, questions about color, monochrome , black / white, or delegate the execution and the introduction of new materials or a technique of reproduction, the relation to the language, etc. are some of the parameters which are the heart of the approach shared by Morellet and the invited artists.

‘STRATES ET ARTS’ is assembling paintings, drawings, installations and some rare editions.

It is also returning the viewer to an aesthetic whose foundations derive the intellectual revival of the 1960-70 period, largely anticipated by Morellet in the early 1950s.

It is naturally impossible, through this exhibition, to understand what connects all these different personalities but so far, all these works give ostensibly a corpus of art thoughts at the junction of minimalism and an impression of radicalism iconoclast.

Installation view. Work by Karen Schifano.

June 30 – July 30, 2011

Three artists working out of the understanding that the painting is an object rather than an image carrier: Alexandra Kennedy (nz), Mario Kolaric (hr), and Karen Schifano (us) will captivate us with their subtle objective plays.

Lisa Oppenheim and Ana Cardoso, Untitled, 2011
Unique color photogram
14 x 11 inches

July 2 – September 4, 2011

We are pleased to announce YIN YANG MUSIC, our sixth summer NOS exhibition and residency program curated by artist Amy Granat.

Artists included:
Richard Aldrich, Amy Granat & Stefan Tcherepnin
Ann Craven & Peter Halley
Jacob Kassay & Dan Graham
Ana Cardoso & Lisa Oppenheim
David J. Merritt
Carlos Reyes
G. William Webb
Elliott Wright

Inspired by Dan Graham’s Pavilion (2002), YIN YANG MUSIC will focus on pairings and relationships between artists. The exhibition will include sound, music and video. In addition, wall works, sculpture and site-specific installations will complete the exhibition.

At the close of the exhibition, NOS will publish a catalogue with a text by Amy Granat and curator/art historian Anthony Huberman.

Installation view with work by Andre Leocat.

April 16 – June 11, 2011

Participating Artists:
Götz Arndt, Samuel Beckett, André Léocat, Chris Martin, Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Barbara Steppe, Esther Stocker

John Storrs, Abstract Forms No. 1, 1917-1919
Granite and marble
Collection of the Newark Museum of Art, NJ

April 12 – July 9, 2011

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist is the first major museum exhibition of work by this important American sculptor in 25 years. Opening at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery on April 12, the show features most of the known works—some 40 items including sculptures, paintings, and drawings―from Storrs’s most innovative period, from 1917 through the early 1930s. Focusing on Storrs’s elegant abstractions of skyscrapers, Machine-Age Modernist remains on view at the Grey Art Gallery through July 9, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that situates the artist within an international avant-garde milieu.

John Storrs (1885–1956), one of America’s foremost modernists, reinvigorated what had become primarily an academic medium, with a dynamism previously unknown in the United States. Situated at the forefront of both European and American avant-garde movements, Storrs participated in a vibrant, early 20th-century culture enthralled with invention. Although he lived and worked in France for most of his career, Storrs was born in Chicago and maintained partial residency there throughout his life due to a stipulation in his father’s will. “This transatlantic life allowed Storrs to straddle multiple artistic communities, audiences, and debates, a situation that resulted in his radical renewal of sculpture in both France and the United States,” observes guest curator Debra Bricker Balken, who organized the show with the Boston Athenaeum. Storrs drew inspiration from American life and culture, whatever the lure of France and its staggering, seductive heritage.” While Parisian artistic developments influenced his aesthetic, Storrs continued to be drawn to a particularly American subject: the iconic skyscraper.

The sculptures—29 examples are featured—range in size from intimate to impressive, with some over six feet tall. Included in the Grey Art Gallery’s presentation are major works from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. Storrs’s interest in soaring verticality was influenced by the burgeoning field of American architecture, which saw the construction of the earliest steel-framed buildings capable of reaching heights never before possible. Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery, notes, “We are pleased to present the sculptures of John Storrs at NYU. Our location amidst the cityscape of downtown Manhattan provides an evocative environment for his distinctive architectural forms.”

In addition to studying architecture on his own, Storrs received a peripatetic formal education, spending brief periods at various art academies including the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also trained abroad, with artists Arthur Bock in Hamburg in 1905 and Auguste Rodin in Paris in 1913. Perhaps even more formative were his childhood years in Chicago, where he was impressed by the modernist structures at the World’s Columbian Exposition and works by local architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Storrs much preferred the simplified, functional approach of Sullivan and Wright to the Beaux-Arts architectural aesthetic then in vogue in the United States, which he viewed as too traditional and conformist. In contrast, in his stylized, architectonic sculptures, Storrs absorbed and referenced the austere style of Chicago modernism.

Explorations of planar forms are at the core of the works featured in Machine-Age Modernist. Examples carved from stone in the late 1910s and early ’20s reflect Storrs’s interest in Native American art, which he discovered while travelling through the American West in 1914 with his wife Marguerite, a French writer. In the later 1920s, Storrs’s interest in geometry was realized in lustrous metal structures. These pieces reflect Storrs’s attraction to the skyline of New York City―which he visited on several occasions―and to the Machine Age’s streamlined aesthetic.

Embracing sleek industrial design and characterized by an obsession with mass-produced objects such as the automobile and the steel-framed skyscraper, the Machine Age provided an ideal context for Storrs. During the 1920s, he successfully melded his interest in Americana with his earlier explorations of pure geometric abstraction. While many of the sculptures produced during this period retain surface decoration that recalls Art Deco, others are quite spare and anticipate Minimalism’s reductivist aesthetic of the 1960s. Storrs’s approach appealed to a Machine Age society eager to celebrate modernism and technological advances. Several large sculptural commissions resulted. One, a 31-foot-high aluminum figure of Ceres, would serve as the Chicago Board of Trade building’s renowned finial and is represented in the show by two studies. A stylized, svelte, metallic Art Deco goddess, Ceres resembles a classical column. Adorned with sheaves of wheat, she symbolizes American agricultural fecundity.

With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, commissions became scarce and sculptural materials too costly. In response, Storrs increasingly turned toward painting, a less expensive medium. The paintings included in Machine-Age Modernist convey Storrs’s sculptural concerns translated into two dimensions. They also introduce Surrealism’s influence, demonstrated by Storrs’s addition of biomorphic forms to his vocabulary of angular geometries. Storrs also created many works on paper. Some were studies for projects that were later executed in three dimensions; others are pure exercises in imagination.

The sculptures, paintings, and drawings in Machine-Age Modernist represent a high point in a long and influential international career. Storrs’s Franco-American lifestyle allowed him to foster friendships with prominent artists on both sides of the Atlantic. In Paris, he became familiar with the Cubist sculptural experiments of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Jacques Lipchitz, which profoundly informed Storrs’s own manipulations of geometric shapes. He later met the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, with whom he shared an interest in representing essential forms in three dimensions. Back in the United States, Storrs knew members of Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York, a circle of artists that included Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, and Morton Schamberg. Other artistic acquaintances of Storrs during the 1920s included Francis Picabia, Marsden Hartley, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, and Fernand Léger. This international, avant-garde context is reflected in the many dynamic works on view in John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist. Poised at the forefront of European and American artistic movements, Storrs created an art that convincingly attests to the multi-faceted concerns of a society enraptured with the sleek aesthetic embodied by early skyscrapers.

Facade by Jan van der Ploeg

Each year, the Passerelle Contemporary Art Center in Brest, France selects an artist to realize a project using the facade of its building. This year, Jan van der Ploeg has created a monumental work that aligns itself with geometric abstraction while exploring the optical effects of color. The mural will be on view until August.

Tilman, House of Colours I

March 5 – April 1, 2011

At first sight we detect in Tilman’s works a language shaped and haunted by the ghosts of minimalism and concrete art. But we are soon overwhelmed by a multitude of information giving us the opportunity to read the various components of this oeuvre from a personal angle. The works emanate from a careful approach to subjects other than art-inherent; they refuse to dominate the dialogue but rather try to open up and invite the viewer to take part in a visual and mental journey. The formal information we read seems to function as a method for luring us into the process of seeing and to form an overture for a bigger event. The superimposition of the language of form and colour inherent in the preoccupation with reductive painting on to a strong connection to a real visual world leads us to a complex construct of opportunities to participate in an experiential process. Objects seen and found in the context of everyday life, functioning together with discarded objects disconnected from their intrinsic context of production and use, find their way into the artist’s mind and language, mediating for higher claims but also highlighting the visual poetry within. Is it a mere projection of the creative mind or are those things talking for themselves, providing information about their existence?

The memory of objects experienced in Tilman’s work leads us to a possible dialogue broader than that of a formal discourse about painting, although exposing notions of it or at most partially appropriating the language to serve his personal universe. The work is concerned with the basic act of seeing and perception as a constructive approach towards reading one’s surroundings, mentally and physically, digesting information from subjective and objective matters at the same time and place. We are entering a world of possibilities, angles, openings, spaces, sensualities and intimacies; traces of thoughts in memory and presence come to mind. We are invited to look, to search, to discover and satisfy our curiosity, given the fact of sharing our own presence with the presence of these objects, in their seductive and physical qualities. These objects could be considered as concrete in art-historical and formal reading but with the same momentum they distance themselves from this self-reflective language. In this context the objects are talking about possibilities of opening up a dialogue transcending their intrinsic concrete properties, opening up this tight margin of reading an object to move towards a more personalized universe with all its edges and hurdles, its traces and marks, towards perception and reflection.

Installation view

February 14 – April 5, 2011

Artists include: Pam Aitken (au) Christoph Dahlhausen (de) Caroline de Lannoy (be/uk) Matthew Deleget (us) Daniel Göttin (ch) Billy Gruner (au) Brent Hallard (jp/us) Clemens Hollerer (a) Andrew Huston (us) Sarah Keighery (au) Roland Orépük (fr) Charles Payan (fr) Jacek Przybyszewski (pl/fr) Paul Raguenes (fr) Giles Ryder (au) Sato Satoru (jp/fr) Karen Schifano (us) Bogumila Stroja (pl/fr) Tilman (de) Richard van der Aa (nz/fr) Jan van der Ploeg (nl) Henriëtte van ’t Hoog (nl) Guido Winkler (nl)

February 5 – March 12, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Kyle Jenkins: Sunken Treasure. This is the Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States and it will feature a new site-specific painting installation.

Working in a wide array of media, including painting, wall painting, works on paper, artist books, photography, film, and sound, Kyle has developed a distinct form of intuitive abstraction that incorporates both hard-edge and organic strategies. Informed by the geometric regularity of the urban environment, the artist’s core concern has been the integration of art and architecture over the past decade.

For Sunken Treasure, Kyle will present a new wall painting, new acrylic paintings on canvas, and a suite of new paintings on paper recently produced during a residency in Denmark. The title of the exhibition stems from an ongoing series of projects planned by the artist in which the architecture of the gallery space and the art works presented within it collapse into each other. About this idea, Kyle states, “Sunken treasure is something that is there and present at the bottom of the ocean, but at the same time, it is hidden from view by its position at the bottom of the sea. The work in this exhibition will function in the same way, with no separation between the paintings, the wall painting, and the gallery space.”

Kyle Jenkins (b. 1975, Dungog, New South Wales, Australia) has exhibited his work internationally for the past 15 years, including in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. Kyle’s work was included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008-2009. His work is included in the collections of Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Qantas (both Australia), and Esbjerg Museum (Denmark), as well as countless private collections worldwide.

In addition to his artistic work, Kyle is Coordinator of the Visual Art Department and Senior Lecturer in Painting & Art Theory at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. During his career, he has curated numerous exhibitions about contemporary reductive abstraction throughout Australia. He has also played pivotal roles in the development and leadership of countless artist-run projects in Australia, including CBD Gallery, SPHERE press, Project 11, MOP Projects, Sydney Non-Objective, Non-Objective Toowoomba, i.e. gallery, and Buttons and Zippers.

Kyle is also a member of the rock bands Bloodspots and Suicide Swans. He holds a PhD in Visual Art and Theory from the University of Sydney, Australia.

SUPPORT
This exhibition has been supported by The University of Southern Queensland, Faculty of Arts Research Committee. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Installation view.

January 8 – February 12, 2011

I am delighted to announce Claude Rutault’s first personal exhibition from January 8 to February 12 in my gallery. The exhibition will bring together 23 works in 10 rooms in the gallery. Historical works from the 1970s in particular (definition-method 208c painting, depainting, repainting and definition/method 98 : to be continued), and nine new works will be presented for the occasion. It is a new stage in a story between Claude and I that goes back 20 years.

I met Claude Rutault in 1987 thanks to Dominique Pasqualini, a member of Information Fiction Publicité (IFP), a group of artists who currently present a retrospective at Mamco in Geneva. I was a young gallery assistant and Claude Rutault’s work opened me up to conceptual art, although Claude Rutault doesn’t see himself as a conceptual artist, but as a painter (which no longer surprises me, because Bernard Frize doesn’t see himself as a painter). Back in 1989 already, I offered to computerise Claude Rutault’s archives. In 1992, I offered to organise an exhibition. Rutault kindly refused both proposals. Finally, twenty years later, in September 2010, Claude agreed to a group exhibition. Having renewed our collaboration it seemed obvious to prolong it with a personal exhibition. I would like to enable Rutault’s work to be understood and circulated on the international scene with the same critical and institutional success that he enjoys in France. At the end of the exhibition, the gallery will publish the first monograph of the artist in English.

Claude Rutault’s work is elaborated with a vocabulary that was established in 1973 in definition/method 1, ‘a canvas braced on a stretcher, painted the same colour as the wall on which it is hung. All commercially available formats can be used, be they rectangular, square, round or oval.’ The identity of the canvas colour with the wall has led to development of a corpus of over 300 definitions/methods. Rutault’s texts form the instructions of an evolving work that is ‘updated’ by its ‘taker’ (collector, museum…). In an absolute gesture, all of Rutault’s paintings prior to 1973 have been entirely repainted following the same principle. The artist has broken away from the strict colour identity between the canvas and the wall by taking his paintings away from the wall: canvases are stacked, placed on the floor or up against the walls…

Rutault’s works integrate the market dimension of art and do not hesitate to draw inspiration from it. In this way,definition/method 189 : at number 189 we sell, 1988, is defined by its very selling process. The auction conducted by Christie’s on the day of the opening will involve a stack of 40 white canvases. With each bid, one canvas from the stack will be removed and go to TRANSIT, a storage space for ‘mediums that have served or will serve to update or re-update existing definitions/methods.’ It is the auction process that will define the composition of the work. The higher the price rises, the smaller the work becomes. We have dared to let a wolf into the fold. I’d like to take this occasion to thank Christie’s for
participating in this novel project.

Another work, composed of six stacks of paintings, definition/method 290 : the jinxed stack, 2010, changes with every subsequent sale of the piece. Stack after stack, with each resale the work will join a museum collection, playing on the reconciliation between private collections and museum collections, and the frustration artists experience every time a work is resold. Rauschenberg will thus be avenged by Claude Rutault’s mischief.

Through December 18, 2010

November 13 – December 23, 2010

Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Bertrand Lavier’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, his first exhibition at Yvon Lambert New York. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on November 23 from 6-8pm and will be on view until December 23, 2010. The internationally acclaimed artist is featured in prominent collections around the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, Museo d!Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, Musée du Louvre, Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva. In 2012, the artist will have a major solo retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

A contemporary of Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, Bertrand Lavier (b.1949, Chatillon-sur- Seine, France) is one of the most innovative and influential French artists of his generation. Celebrated for his works that encourage the viewer to consider the distinctions between art and reality, he is best known for his work with readymades. Lavier seeks to elevate the everyday object to the status of an artwork as he explores the complex relationship between the mundane and the artistic. The artist presents objects as works of art, strategically manipulating the items while still adhering to their intended aesthetic. For Lavier, the appropriation of images and objects is key, as this allows him to destabilize the viewer’s expectations and reevaluate the status of the object in society.

For this exhibition, Lavier has designed the formal and conceptual context in which his works are displayed. Using Frank Stella’s minimalist stripe paintings as inspiration, Lavier presents four works from a series initiated in 2004. Lavier reconceptualizes Stella!s paintings in neon, thus preserving the fundamental basis of the paintings while creating a new aesthetic interpretation. By presenting these paintings in neon, a material that references marketing and technology, the artist relinquishes an aspect of the artwork to the world of communication and design. This is exemplary of his artistic practice, as Lavier repurposes works to reveal new meanings. The usage of Stella’s works, vital to minimalist art historical discourse, mirrors the significance of Lavier!s own practice in contemporary art.

December 1, 2010 – March 21, 2011

A new exhibition studies the interwoven progress of the artistic movement De Stijl and Piet Mondrian, its leading figure. This important retrospective is the very first in France to shed light on this key moment in the history of 20th century art. Beginning towards the end of the century’s first decade and continuing through the twenties, De Stijl combined an aesthetic and social vision, total art, which forms a basis for understanding the sources of modern art. In Paris between 1912 and 1938, Mondrian, a central figure of this avant-garde who drew from its experience, laid down a vocabulary and a “new abstract visual language”, a radical undertaking which was to revolutionise painting and art, along with Theo Van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld, the other founders of this crossover movement which influenced painting, sculpture, city planning, architecture, furniture design and graphic design.

View of Robert Swain’s studio, NYC

October 23 – December 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the solo exhibition Robert Swain: Primary Research.  This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will focus on his life-long investigation into color sensation.

In 1969, Robert began developing his own color system, the centerpiece of which is a 30-part hue (color) circle.  When joined with the attributes of value (the lightness or darkness of a color) and saturation (the pureness of a color), his system grew exponentially over the following decades to now include 4,896 distinct parts.

Robert Swain: Primary Research will feature an array of material facets from his color inquiry, including a 30-part hue circle painting, original hand-painted and numbered color charts from the early 1970s, jars of premixed and color-calibrated acrylic paint from his exhaustive paint library, a suite of portfolios containing digital inkjet prints serving as color studies for potential paintings, a set of small brushstroke painting studies, as well as other related ephemera including color chips, mixing spoons, and more.  The exhibition will also include two paintings spanning 30 years: a grid painting entitled Untitled 801 (1978, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches) and a brushstroke painting entitled Untitled 9-25-8 x 13-25-7 x 23-25-6 x 27-25-6 (2010, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches).

Regarding the development of his color system, Robert states “I became interested in color in the early 1960s.  There wasn’t a great deal of written information about it, but I work intuitively.  I started to look at color and to make charts and experimental work trying to understand the phenomenology of color.  I don’t look at the work as being objective.  I simply look at it as a way of trying to get into the subject matter of color and to understand it through experience.  And all of this was done visually.  It wasn’t done mathematically.  It wasn’t done in some kind of progression.  It was simply done by painting color charts, looking at them, and deciding in that moment of looking if they were correct or not.”

About his increasing interest in color over the years, he continues, “One thing that fascinates me about color is that each individual color has its own connotation, which can be perceived as emotional or can affect you in some particular way.  One of the things I strive for is to try to bring out the uniqueness of color itself as an expressive force.  Color is involved with radiant energy.  It’s not passive, and in that sense, when you look at color, it’s actually transferring energy into your physical self.  One of the things you try to do is isolate some kind of vehicle, some kind of configuration that allows color to speak of itself and for itself.”

ROBERT SWAIN
Robert Swain is one of the most influential artists of his generation.  He was born in Austin, Texas, in 1940, and grew up in Arlington, Virginia.  During high school in the late 1950s, he spent his summers in Guatemala and Nicaragua working on the Pan-American Highway.  He attended The American University in Washington, DC, where he later received a BA in Fine Art in 1964.  During his undergraduate studies, he spent two years in Madrid, Spain, studying at the University of Madrid. In 1964, he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and worked as a studio assistant to the American Modernist painter Karl Knaths.  Robert moved to NYC in 1965 where he permanently settled in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.

In 1966 Robert began his first color-based work followed a year later by his first work utilizing the grid.  He participated in his first group exhibition, Light and Line, organized by John Baldwin at the legendary Park Place Gallery in NYC in 1967.  That same year he met Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith who became his close friend and mentor for many years.  In 1969, Robert began to develop his own color system, a project that continues until today.

Robert has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for more than 40 years.  His paintings have been including in countless landmark exhibitions.  He participated in the seminal exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1968.  The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais, Paris, France; Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland; and The Tate Gallery, London, England.  Robert exhibited in The Structure of Color curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, in 1971.  In 1974, he mounted his first solo museum exhibition at The Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, New York.  In 1974, he participated in Color as Language curated by Kynaston McShine and organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled throughout Central and South America, including to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.  His work was also twice included in the Corcoran Biennial at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1969, 1998).

Robert’s work is represented in nearly 300 public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Everson Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, among others.  He has completed major commissions for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, American Republic Insurance Company, Schering Laboratories, Harris Bank, Travenol Laboratories, Tupperware World Headquarters, and the University of Buffalo.  He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1989), New York State Council on the Arts, and the City University of New York.

In addition to his artistic work, Robert has taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College since 1968, where he has influenced and mentored countless generations of artists.  For his teaching, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1998.

Robert is also currently the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain curated by Gabriele Evertz at Hunter College Times Square Gallery located at 450 W. 41^st Street, NYC.  The exhibition dates are October 7 – November 13, 2010.  The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with texts by Gabriele Evertz, Professor of Art, Hunter College; William Agee, Professor of Art History, Hunter College; and artist and MINUS SPACE founder Matthew Deleget.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artist Gabriele Evertz for her incredible assistance with this exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Robert Swain: Hunter College Times Square Gallery & MINUS SPACE, by Stephen Maine, Art in America, February 2011
Robert Swain at Hunter College and MINUS SPACE, The Kalm Report, December 6, 2010
Gallery Chronicle: On “Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain, 1967–2010” at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery, by James Panero, The New Criterion, November 2010

Installation view

thru October 23, 2010

“I’ve chosen artists’ work that I feel share something of a fetish with/in the production/object, particularly based on an aesthetic predisposition that can run formally, culturally, adding the social/personal. How I personally interpret this is with a Tokyo sensibility, how Japanese respond to objects and their placement, their positioned sense of worth, a cuteness, an austere vs. touch. The exhibition consists of individual pieces, multiples, or artists books, which may sit on the wall, or on shelves within the grid, mixing up the idea of ‘art object’, ‘art multiple’, and/or simply as a ‘monogram’ [a copy record of the art/practice] to bring together a whole presentation, inviting communication and contact. And that, in a nutshell, is touch.” –Brent Hallard, Oct. 2010

These things that may sit on the wall, on a table, draw attention not only unto themselves but also in proximity, of ideas, of soothers and disquietude: two grids on tangential walls, another formed by a mass of white, tabletops bunched together, anticipate a social meeting of sorts, like-minded, or in location disparity, objects intertwine ideas, engage an audience that may lead them, us, to a precipice of the inexorable… a spree, a want, desire, an enchanted moment with what is there, a champagne bubble, a twist of color, an abstract motif turned clock tower, some things something suggested… other times not… shiny surfaces, bars of color, dingle dangles that pull on the psychological purse, strings… these but a few of my favorite things… Touch is a meeting place, not always bound by the physical, though often unleashed via the temporal… a get-together, a conversation, where we can touch.

Participating Artists:
Shinsuke Aso, Kasarian Dane, Brent Hallard, Lynne Harlow, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog, IS projects, Linn Meyers, Mel Prest, Karen Schifano, Jessica Snow, Clary Stolte, Hadi Tabatabai, Cecilia Vissers, Don Voisine, Nancy White, Patricia Zarate

Peter Soriano, Other Side #81 (AMDI), 2010
Steel Cable, aluminum pipe, and spray paint
Dimensions variable

September 24 – Saturday, November 6, 2010

I am drawn to that polarity between movement and stasis. I think I needed to rid myself of making forms to get closer to this situation between the spatial and the planar, the sculptural and the drawn, between the decision and the doubt. I am looking for a transparency between thought and space.
— Peter Soriano

Frederico Sève Gallery is pleased to present drawings and a new series of installations by Peter Soriano.

This is the latest in a new series of installations for interior spaces in which Soriano continues to substitute contemporary manufacturing materials such as the resin and plywood of his well known sculptures for lighter, more fluid materials—spray-paint, aluminum pipe and wire. The show comprises eight “situations”, a term that he uses to describe the new installations, coalescing sculptural, painted and conceptual forms. Vivid symbols sprayed directly onto the wall anchor tautly drawn cable, while an aluminum pipe provides a point to lift the cable away from the wall, suspending the straight lines into a tangible albeit indeterminate space. The pipe also becomes a conjunction of rupture where the angle of the cable-line can change course or end on its trajectories away from the pipe’s center. Soriano began this new body of work in 2007. The series is titled the Other Side. There have been two solo shows of the Other Side series to date—in Paris, France and in Zurich, Switzerland. Dimensions Variable is the first solo show of his new work in the US and the third so far.

Using a limited vocabulary of a few spray-painted symbols, cables and aluminum pipe to articulate space and time, Soriano has succeeded in dematerializing sculpture. His daily practice is based on the translation of experience through systems of organization meant for other disciplines, through a cross-disciplining of language and measuring systems both formal and informal.

In his working process, Soriano continuously locates new centers through his engagement of rupture. A continuous mapping of the location of new dislocations, his is a engagement of the emblematic frontier of conceptual progress of contemporary life. Soriano’s prolific production is achieved by forging a path that demands lighter, more efficient modes of distribution given the demands of globalization and economy. Moving away from the heavy mass of material reality of his early sculptures, such as Koolman (1997) & Zugunruhe (2006), which are derived from psychological objects and embodied in polyester resin, the new Other Side series embraces disembodiment as a methodology for production that is at once conceptual & sculptural without weight.

Soriano’s exploratory use of simultaneous multiple perspectives both in his “sprays”, the installations, and his drawings, make use of: macro and micro views, birds-eye and one- point perspective, transparent and opaque information, and interior vs. exteriority to confound reasons insistence on objective truth.

Peter Soriano was born in Manila, Philippines. He studied Art History at Harvard and Sculpture at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before moving to New York in 1981 where he taught at SVA and RISD for over a decade. Soriano has shown in numerous prestigious group shows throughout Europe and the US. Previous solo shows include: Galerie Jean Fournier (Paris), Galerie Bernard Jordan (Zurich), & Lennon Weinberg Gallery (New York). In addition to numerous private collections Soriano’s work is held in many public collections including: the Frac Auvergne, Fondation Cartier and FNAC in France. Peter has received a residency grant from the Calder Foundation and was a Senior Fellow at the Terra Foundation in Giverny, France (2009).

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

September 4-25, 2010