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.

January 6 – February 18, 2012

Ward Jackson was born and grew up in Petersburg, Virginia. He studied painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute of the College of William and Mary, now Virginia Commonwealth University, earning his Master’s Degree there in 1952. While still in school Jackson began the correspondence with Guggenheim curator Hilla Rebay that would eventually lead to his long tenure with that institution. In a series of letters he sent drawings to her for comment and received critique and encouragement. Following graduation Jackson spent a summer studying under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Mass., settling in New York in the autumn of that year. Jackson’s student work had already attracted the attention of painter and critic George L.K. Morris who invited him to contribute to an American Abstract Artist annual exhibition in 1949. Morris, a founding member of the AAA, took Jackson under his wing and the two developed a close collegial relationship which lasted until Morris’ death in 1975. Jackson later was invited to join the group and was for many years its recording secretary.

Ward Jackson had his first solo exhibition in NYC at the Fleischman Gallery in 1956. In the early 60′s, inspired by the work of senior painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Jackson moved away from the gestural style that had marked his work of the ’50′s, developing his signature style of austere, hard edged geometric compositions on square and diamond shaped canvases. In 1964 he showed a group of black and white diamonds in an important exhibition at the Kay Mar Gallery that included such figures as Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Don Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella, and which marked a pivotal moment in the early development of minimalism. For the rest of his life Jackson expanded upon this personal and rigorous approach to abstraction, developing his ideas in the hundreds of 4 x 6 inch “drawing books” that he always carried with him.

Ward Jackson continued to exhibit widely in NYC and throughout the United States as well as in exhibitions in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan. Some of the high lights of his career were solo exhibitions in the late 1960′s and 1970′s at the Graham Gallery, NYC, French and Company Gallery, NYC, and the short lived but seminal John Daniels Gallery, (founded by Dan Graham and David Herbert), NYC, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg. As winner of two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowships; Ward Jackson had two solo exhibitions at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts during the 1970′s. In the 1980′s into the 90′s, Ward Jackson developed an active career in Europe with numerous solo exhibitions in Germany, in Berlin at Galerie Adlung & Kaiser, at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. He continued to have a foothold in the New York art world throughout the 1980′s and 90′s, with regular exhibitions at the John Woodward and Marilyn Pearl galleries in Soho.

Posthumously his work has been championed, by Lisa Dennison who included his painting in the 2004 Guggenheim Museum exhibition; Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present. In 2007 Ward Jackson had a comprehensive memorial retrospective at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn NY, which included a catalog with an essay by Stephen Westfall and a panel discussion with Westfall, Jed Perl, Phong Bui, and Matthew Deleget. The show received several good reviews and was immortalized in a you-tube virtual tour with his artist nephew; Julian Jackson by the James Kalm Report. An informative interview about Ward Jackson’s work and life is available at the Minus Space blog: Ward Jackson – Heat at the Edges, A Conversation with Julian Jackson, by Matthew Deleget In 2008 Gary Snyder included Ward Jackson’s paintings in “New American Abstraction 1960 – 1975″ at his gallery in NYC. Gary Synder and David Richard Contemporary in Santa Fe, included Ward Jackson in “1960s Revisited” in the 2010 exhibition and catalog in Santa Fe where Jackson’s work was singled out in a favorable review. David Richard Contemporary is now representing Ward Jackson’s work.

His paintings and drawings can be found in numerous public collections including; The National Museum of American Art Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., The Brooklyn Museum of Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, CA, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University MA, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Va., Edward Albee Collection, British Museum, London, and in Germany at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, the Museum Morsbruch, Leverkusen, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

In addition to his long career as a painter, Jackson was the archivist and the director of the viewing program at the Guggenheim Museum for nearly 40 years. Two visible legacies from this long involvement is the remarkable group of photographs that Jackson curated from the archives on permanent display in the cafe of that Museum illustrating the history of the Museum and its’ associated artists, and an art work in the Guggenheim collection by Dan Flavin dedicated to Ward Jackson and commemorating their time working at that museum together. In 1969 Jackson joined forces with publisher Roger Peskin and staff photographer Paul Katz to found an experimental folio publication, ART NOW New York. This interesting venture paired loose 8 1/2 x 11 inch prints of art works recently exhibited in the galleries with brief statements solicited from the artists. Over a four year run ART NOW New York published the work of well over a hundred of the most significant figures of that period, from Jasper Johns and Brice Marden, to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Smithson. ART NOW gradually developed into the ubiquitous and well known ART NOW Gallery Guide for which he served as advisory editor until 1998.

Widely known for his encyclopedic knowledge of art and artists, Ward Jackson was an active, opinionated, and informed participant in the New York art world that he so loved. He passed away in February of 2004.

- Julian Jackson / Rene Lynch

Bernard Frize, Suite Segond 100 No 3, 1980
Household paint on canvas
51 x 64 inches

 January 14 – March 10, 2012

The Indiscipline of Painting is an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to now. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, it considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years. It goes on to demonstrate the way in which the history and legacy of abstract painting continues to inspire artists working today.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brings together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside other lesser known artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré, Mary Heilmann and Jeremy Moon.

The Indiscipline of Painting is a collaborative project between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. The exhibition travels to the Mead Gallery and opens on the 14 January 2012, running until 10 March 2012.

As part of The Indiscipline of Painting, Newlyn Art Gallery has commissioned John M. Armleder to make a major new work. John M. Armleder is at Newlyn Art Gallery 8 October 2011 – 3 January 2012.

The exhibition will be showing works from the following 49 artists (in alphabetical order):

Tomma Abts born 1967; John M. Armleder born 1948 ; Tauba Auerbach born 1981; Martin Barré 1924 – 1993; Francis Baudevin born 1964; Daniel Buren born 1938 ; André Cadere 1934‑1978; Ingrid Calame born 1965 ; Keith Coventry born 1958 ; Michael Craig‑Martin born 1941 ; Karin Davie born 1965; Peter Davies born 1970; Gene Davis 1920‑1985; David Diao born 1943; Moira Dryer 1957 – 1992; Bernard Frize born 1949; Michelle Grabner born 1962; Tim Head born 1946; Alex Hubbard born 1975; Katharina Grosse born 1961; Peter Halley born 1953; Jane Harris born 1956; Mary Heilmann born 1940 ; Jacob Kassay born 1984; Richard Kirwan born 1969; Imi Knoebel born 1940; Bob Law 1934‑2004; Sherrie Levine born 1947; Jeremy Moon 1934‑1973; Olivier Mosset born 1944; Carl Ostendarp born 1961; Blinky Palermo 1943‑1977; Steven Parrino 1958-2005; David Reed born 1946; Gerhard Richter born 1932; Bridget Riley born 1931; Ruth Root born 1967; Robert Ryman born 1930; Sean Scully born 1945; Frank Stella born 1936; Myron Stout 1908-1987; Daniel Sturgis born 1966; Cheyney Thompson born 1975; Niele Toroni born 1937; Richard Tuttle born 1941; Dan Walsh born 1960; Andy Warhol 1928‑1987; Peter Young born 1940; Heimo Zobernig born 1958.

The exhibition has been selected by British artist Daniel Sturgis, and curated with Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives and Sarah Shalgosky, Curator, University of Warwick.

Milton Resnick, Straws in the Wind II, 1981
Oil on canvas
104 x 110 inches

September 22 – October 29, 2011

Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by the late Milton Resnick. The gallery has been the exclusive representative of the artist’s estate since 2006. Cheim & Read’s previous exhibition of Resnick’s paintings was in 2008 and focused on works from 1959-1963. This show looks to later works from the 1960s to the 80s. It is accompanied by a full color catalogue with an essay by Philip Larratt-Smith. The essay, “Play Dead,” combines art historical analysis with juxtapositions of texts and images from film, literature, and history.

Born in Bratslav, Ukraine in 1917, Milton Resnick immigrated to the United States with his family in 1922, escaping the civil war of his homeland. In 1933, he left his studies in commercial art at Pratt Institute and transferred to the American Artists School in order to focus on painting; he graduated in 1937. From 1940 -1945, Resnick served in the US Army, returning to New York at the rise of Abstract Expressionism. As part of the first generation of the New York School, Resnick has long been admired as a “painter’s painter,” his thickly layered canvases originating from a purist notion of paint itself.

Upon his death in 2004, Resnick was qualified as the “last Abstract Expressionist painter” (Roberta Smith). Though his later work eclipsed more traditional notions of Abstract Expressionism, he remained fiercely committed to the tenets of non-representational painting. As evidenced in this exhibition, he denied the infiltration of image or illusion, and strived to distill abstraction to its very essence, championing an “all-over” approach to the canvas. As Larratt-Smith argues, Resnick was fundamentally anarchist, refusing hierarchy and authority in painting as well as in life. The same intensity was applied to his work; he once described his painting as a “defiant act.” Later paintings are especially indicative of this – the massive, heavily-impastoed, near-monochrome canvases are impenetrably dense, refusing entry or prescribed “meaning.” Yet, in their focus on negation, Resnick’s works acquire a visceral duality. Unyielding surfaces become reflective, almost luminous. For the patient viewer, his paintings are transcendent.

Resnick’s allegiance to the physical properties of paint, its viscosity and “actuality,” was predictive of younger painters like Robert Ryman and Frank Stella. His incessant paint layering was, in Larratt-Smith’s words, a Sisyphean task, an existential exercise marking the passage of time. The effect of time, or rather the aspiration to timelessness, is apparent in the paintings, which seem to hover in a zone without beginning or end, in a constant state of “becoming.” For Resnick, painting was necessary and all-encompassing, almost a requirement for preserving his sanity and sustaining his emotional self. The mature paintings bear witness to his “presence,” and reflect his tenacious personality. But the work also anticipates and complements other artistic movements, especially those focused on process, materiality, and perception. As quoted in Larratt-Smith’s essay, Resnick states, “There is no eccentricity in the way I paint…I have processes.” And then: “What I like is for a painting to act in many different directions at once, so strongly that it will shatter itself and open up a small crack, which will suck the world in.”

Installation view.

September 22 – October 29, 2011

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce “Geometric Variations,” the first New York gallery exhibition to explore the historical importance of Frank Stella’s iconic square paintings from the 1960’s and 1970’s. The exhibition will include large single and double canvasses from Stella’s Concentric Square and Mitered Mazes series, as well as the seminal “New Madrid” painting from his Benjamin Moore series.

Stella began covering square canvases in alkyd house paint in 1961. Like his earlier Black, Aluminum and Copper paintings, these new square paintings articulated the relationship between the two-dimensional picture plane and its three-dimensional support. Unlike the previous works, they were characterized by a crisp regularity, rigid symmetry and all-over flatness. As the art historian and curator William S. Rubin wrote, “In their extreme simplicity, and the absolute evenness of their matte surface, these pictures have a kind of immediacy that was not to be found in the more complex structures, the more elusive and ambiguous light and the more painterly execution—relatively speaking—of the Black, Aluminum and Copper pictures.”

The squares played a pivotal role in the development of Stella’s work, where the ultimate goal was to make paintings whose pictorial force came from their materiality, and whose presence would be immediately available to the eye. “The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard,” he said, “Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured.” These systematic experimentations with color and value relationships provided Stella with a departure point for the more radically shaped canvasses and three-dimensional wall reliefs of his later works. As the French art historian Alfred Pacquement wrote, “Coming to grips with the use of color, he rediscovered without much difficulty how to appropriate the effects of illusionism. The multicolor Concentric Squares are, nevertheless, premonitions of his evolution toward volume.”

Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. Recent solo exhibitions include Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series at The Phillips Collection in 2011, Polychrome Relief at Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2009, Moby Dick: Frank Stella and Herman Melville at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in 2009, and Frank Stella on the Roof and Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture at the Metropolitan Museum in 2007. A major five-decade retrospective of his career, organized by Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is planned for 2013.

Carrie Moyer, Stroboscopic Painting #1, 2011
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
60 x 72 inches

September 14 – October 16, 2011

Carrie Moyer’s new paintings are the most lyrical and personal works to date in her ever-evolving painting practice. “Canonical” displays a confidence in expressive power of pure abstraction. These paintings are simultaneously stripped down and filled up, full of surprising interplay between figure and ground, and enlivened by a brightly nuanced and carefully considered palette.

The use of masking and transparency feels boldly reinvented in these paintings; there is a boisterous give-and-take between shapes and contours. The evocative possibilities of ambiguity are evident. A strong use of line has newly emerged: no longer limited to preparatory drawing, the lines here have a heft, spontaneity and near symbolic significance. Decentralized, forms flow across the canvas, often passing through across and through one another. In “Canonical”, the lively, ongoing dialogue Moyer has had with abstract painting feels absorbed and integrated; exuberant shout-outs to Georgia O‚Keefe, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray give the work a fresh sense of expansiveness and assurance.

The materiality of Moyer’s paintings is subtle and deeply mysterious. Acrylic paint is transformed to conjure up sunsets, boxes of jewelry, coral reefs and other indelible effects of light and atmosphere such as fog, shimmery afterimage and splashy crescendos. Carrie Moyer’s command of material is cut by a teasing tickle as she plays the canonical against the comical. Her paintings lightly walk a line between Saturday morning cartoons and the fourth floor of MoMA.˜ Wallace Whitney

Mary Heilmann, Primalon Ballroom, 2002

October 8, 2011 – January 3, 2012

The Indiscipline of Painting is an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to now. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, it considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years. It goes on to demonstrate the way in which the history and legacy of abstract painting continues to inspire artists working today.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brings together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside other lesser known artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré, Mary Heilmann and Jeremy Moon.

The Indiscipline of Painting is a collaborative project between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. The exhibition travels to the Mead Gallery and opens on the 14 January 2012, running until 10 March 2012.

As part of The Indiscipline of Painting, Newlyn Art Gallery has commissioned John M. Armleder to make a major new work. John M. Armleder is at Newlyn Art Gallery 8 October 2011 – 3 January 2012.

The exhibition will be showing works from the following 49 artists (in alphabetical order):

Tomma Abts born 1967; John M. Armleder born 1948 ; Tauba Auerbach born 1981; Martin Barré 1924 – 1993; Francis Baudevin born 1964; Daniel Buren born 1938 ; André Cadere 1934‑1978; Ingrid Calame born 1965 ; Keith Coventry born 1958 ; Michael Craig‑Martin born 1941 ; Karin Davie born 1965; Peter Davies born 1970; Gene Davis 1920‑1985; David Diao born 1943; Moira Dryer 1957 – 1992; Bernard Frize born 1949; Michelle Grabner born 1962; Tim Head born 1946; Alex Hubbard born 1975; Katharina Grosse born 1961; Peter Halley born 1953; Jane Harris born 1956; Mary Heilmann born 1940 ; Jacob Kassay born 1984; Richard Kirwan born 1969; Imi Knoebel born 1940; Bob Law 1934‑2004; Sherrie Levine born 1947; Jeremy Moon 1934‑1973; Olivier Mosset born 1944; Carl Ostendarp born 1961; Blinky Palermo 1943‑1977; Steven Parrino 1958-2005; David Reed born 1946; Gerhard Richter born 1932; Bridget Riley born 1931; Ruth Root born 1967; Robert Ryman born 1930; Sean Scully born 1945; Frank Stella born 1936; Myron Stout 1908-1987; Daniel Sturgis born 1966; Cheyney Thompson born 1975; Niele Toroni born 1937; Richard Tuttle born 1941; Dan Walsh born 1960; Andy Warhol 1928‑1987; Peter Young born 1940; Heimo Zobernig born 1958.

The exhibition has been selected by British artist Daniel Sturgis, and curated with Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives and Sarah Shalgosky, Curator, University of Warwick.

Kris Chatterson, Blue Copper, 2011
60 x 66 inches

February 19 – March 26, 2011

Western Project is proud to present the second solo exhibition of paintings by Kris Chatterson. Living and working in New York, the artist has created a body of work using printing, painting, digital imaging and iPhone drawings. Clipping and selecting gestures from previous prints, drawings and paintings, Chatterson excavates his past; a kind of digital surgery and recombination process. He presents the natural calligraphic gesture as synthetic, abstract elements; transforming the physical object-ness of the mark into non linear spatial compositions. The results are a kind of futuristic weather; informed by static patterns – both visual and audio; and enhanced by iPhone drawings as familiar yet displaced marks. Chatterson’s images seem to map immense territories or conversely, unseen microcosms. They reference his interest in fractals; beginning with his approach of building the images from a matrix to find unlimited possible combinations of forms. But akin to Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Warhol, Chatterson uses repetition, and a lo-fi printing to construct his paintings. The messy production of his printing and rubbing contrast with his high tech realms; visually reminiscent of Stella’s work from the mid 1980′s, or the haunting emotional tones of Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The paintings provide a mirror of the world of destruction and creation we are all a part of; as formal inventions they evidence the short distinctions between the physical and the abstract world of phenomena – the difference, being merely language and concept.

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.

Carl Andre, Grecrux, 1985

January 19 – March 05, 2011

Sadie Coles HQ is delighted to present an exhibition of stone sculptures by Carl Andre, comprising a sequence of works in Icelandic basalt and two major works in travertine.

Throughout his fifty year career, Andre has created sculptures by placing standard units of stone, metal or wood in simple geometric arrangements. In early works such as Equivalents (1966; eight different configurations of 120 bricks) and Cuts (1967; a negative variant in which eight voids were made by removing combinations of blocks from a grid), Andre articulated the concepts of horizontality, repetition and implied extension that have remained central to his methodology.

Andre’s ALTBASE series of floor sculptures, made in Reykjavik in 1996, consists of differently sized groups of basalt squares (12, 15, 21, 24), variously stepped and layered in order to occupy the same three-by-three grid. GRECRUX (Rome, 1985), one of Andre’s earliest works in travertine, uses fifty-three blocks to form a square-shaped Greek cross or crux quadrata. Its intersecting lines accord with the artist’s famous statement in 1970 that “my ideal of sculpture is a road. That is a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point … I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view.” SUM ROMA (Marseille, 1997) arranges the same material in a thirty-unit solid triangle whose stepped form recurs throughout Andre’s oeuvre.

Eschewing metaphorical connotations, the sculptures draw attention to their essential materiality and to the stone’s intrinsic aesthetic qualities. The travertine works recall the material’s use in iconic Modernist buildings and in Roman art and architecture – an association underscored by the title of SUM ROMA. Andre was indeed originally inspired to use travertine by a trip past the quarries on the road to Tivoli. In common with the majority of Andre’s work, these pieces also foreground the dynamic between work, viewer and architectural context. The artist has tellingly described the progression of his own work, and twentieth century sculpture in general, as a shift in emphasis from ”sculpture as form” to “sculpture as structure” and finally “sculpture as place”.

Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, Andre emerged in the 1960s as one of the key exponents of Minimalism. In the late 1950s he shared a studio with Frank Stella, whose minimal black paintings of that period provided a formative influence, and in the 1960s he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in linear forms and materials excised from pre-existing masses and contexts. A similarly significant episode was his realisation during a canoeing trip that sculpture could be “as flat as water”.

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.

November 11, 2010 – January 29, 2011

Gary Snyder Project Space is pleased to announce Sven Lukin: Paintings, 1960–1971, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at 250 West 26th Street. Opening on November 11, 2010, the exhibition is the first, most comprehensive presentation of Lukin’s work in almost forty years. Eleven of the artist’s famed “three-dimensional paintings” will be on view, as well as a selection of preparatory drawings, many of which were featured in Lawrence Alloway’s landmark exhibition The Shaped Canvas (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). A 104 page monograph — Lukin’s first — will accompany the exhibition, with contributions from Lawrence Alloway, Elizabeth C. Baker, Jeanne Siegel, and Frances Colpitt.

The exhibition and its accompanying publication offer a retrospective view of the artist’s work during the 1960s — from the dissolving geometries of early paintings such as Malleus Maleficarum (1960) to the artist’s groundbreaking experiments in “shaped canvas.” Works in the exhibition such as Lemon Peel (1962), San Diego (1966), and Pink Buttress (1969), illustrate Lukin’s progressive movement out from two-dimensional space and into the realm of architecture. Unlike his peers Richard Smith, Frank Stella, and Neil Williams, Lukin was not satisfied with merely changing the shape of his stretchers. He wanted his paintings to exist in real space, to attack and confront it.

Born in Riga, Latvia in 1934, Sven Lukin immigrated to the United States in 1949. After graduating high school in 1953, Lukin was accepted into The University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. While enrolled, he attended lectures by the influential architect and urban designer Louis I. Kahn. Although Lukin left the program in 1956, Kahn’s ideas had a profound impact on the young artist. Kahn’s celebration of monumental scale, unadorned surfaces, and volumetric forms was a source of endless fascination for Lukin—one that continues to this day.

In 1958, Lukin moved to New York to pursue his career as a painter. During the 1960s, he had solo-exhibitions at many of New York’s most influential and prestigious galleries, including: Betty Parsons Gallery (1961), Martha Jackson Gallery (1962), and The Pace Gallery (1963, 1964, 1966, and 1968). During this period, his work also figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as The Quest and the Quarry (1961, Rome-New York Art Foundation, Inc.), Vormen van de Kleur (1964, Stedelijk Museum), Color, Image, and Form (1967, The Detroit Institute of Arts), Painting: Out from the Wall (1968, Des Moines Art Center), and L’Art Vivant aux Etats-Unis (1970, Fondation Maeght), among others. In 1972, at the height of his success, Lukin shocked the art world by dissolving his relationship with The Pace Gallery and refusing to display his work in a commercial setting. His paintings were not seen again publicly until 1978, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a solo-exhibition of his work.

Lukin’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the country, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

October 30 – December 21, 2010

David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of works from the 1960s and 70s by American artist Michael Heizer (b. 1944) at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space.

As a pioneer of the 1960s Land Art movement, Heizer has created a prolific and ambitious practice encompassing painting, sculpture, and large-scale earthworks. His paintings and sculptures, which he has produced intermittently throughout his career—manifest many of the ideas explored in his monumental works—which use land as a material form. Bringing together rarely seen paintings and sculptures from the 1960s and 70s, this exhibition reveals Heizer’s early engagement with the contrasting qualities of negative and positive forms.

Heizer moved from California to New York City in 1966, where he began his career as a painter. He was attracted to the concepts and aesthetics of what is now referred to as Minimalism, and his practice, during this period was in close dialogue with that of the artists he befriended, such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Walter de Maria, and Tony Smith. By the late 1960s, Heizer had left the constraints of New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he could create large-scale works that did not conform to the institutional and commercial boundaries of museums and galleries. It is in these empty deserts that he created some of his most impressive and laborious earthworks, among them Double Negative (1969-70). Inspired by Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan architectural ruins—which his father, an archeologist, exposed him to at a young age—Heizer’s earthworks often employ depressions and trenches in the ground as a means of addressing displacement and space. A prominent feature in the artist’s oeuvre has been his preoccupation with the opposing relationship between presence and absence (or form and void), an idea that originated with Heizer’s earliest paintings, and which is clearly pronounced in many of his renowned earthworks.

With an emphasis on reevaluating the relationship between positive and negative forms, as well as the confrontation between mass and space, Heizer’s output focuses on the tension that occurs when these juxtaposing elements are presented together; his paintings and sculptures reflect this complexity. The periods in which Heizer has concentrated more on studio production mark an intensely important stage in his artistic formulations, as he has used painting and sculpture as a way of working through his interest with mass and emptiness in various proportions. As Ellen Joosten suggests, Heizer’s studio works “are by no means ‘relaxations’ between the great earthworks, but rather [represent] periods of tremendously intense involvement in the formation of [the] questions that are engaging him.”

In his paintings, Heizer mostly uses hues that are associated with the colors of the desert (dark ochre, olive green, mauve, and slate grey), which he rolls over the canvas in large, rapid gestures, sometimes covering the entire surface and in other cases creating a transparent layer of color. This technique creates a positive and negative surface in which the transparent mass simultaneously frames and demarcates the empty canvas, thereby drawing attention to the presence and absence of space in relationship to mass and color. This method, which is clearly illustrated in Slate Tripych, 1979, mimics the traces left on the earth’s surface by the effects of erosion and weather. As Joosten further explains, “In his painting, erosion manifests itself as a phenomenon not so much in the material as in the form: through the interplay of closeness and emptiness (or transparency). The closed form (or material) is attacked from out of the white, while on the other hand form (the material) disturbs the silence of the (‘empty’) canvas.”

Paintings such as Untitled No. 5, 1967-72, Untitled No. 1 (Slate), 1974, and Untitled No. 7 (Red), 1974, reject the conventional square or rectangular canvas through the artist’s removal and replacement of segments of their surface area. In these works, Heizer demonstrates his concern with framing elements according to geometrically-calculated subtractions and reconfigurations, a process which he also employs in his earthworks.

The awareness of space and form articulated in Heizer’s paintings and earthworks is further pronounced in his sculptures, or “object sculptures” as he refers to them, in which scale, mass, gesture, and process are explored. The Minimalist shapes which he employs reference objects and architectures of ancient cultures; however, an extreme reduction of form underlines the artist’s interest in the spatial function form has within the “emptiness” of space. His preoccupation with the elementary forms of the square, rectangle, and circle, which reappear throughout his practice, come to full fruition in his sculptural works such as Vermont, 1977. Made using grey granite, this work is comprised of circles and their equivalent segments or fractions, arranged together in such a way that the harmonious relationship between the parts and the whole is emphasized.

Heizer currently lives and works in Nevada, where he is in the process of producing possibly the largest earthwork ever created in contemporary art. City, located in the remote desert, is comprised of five phases, each of which consists of a number of elaborate structures which the artist refers to as complexes. This monumental work has been an ongoing project for Heizer, and is currently the central focus of his artistic practice.

September 4 – November 7, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view

September 10 – October 30, 2010

As the Cedar Tavern played a role in the formation of abstract expressionism, Max’s Kansas City galvanized a younger generation of artists from when it opened in 1965 to when it closed its doors in 1974. This exhibition will feature the amazing diversity of artists from every major reference point in the New York art world of the period: Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual and Performance Art – a creative efflorescence rarely seen in art history.

Max’s Kansas City was a social venue where ideas could be thrown out, tested and formed. But a salient distinction was signaled to the art world at Max’s as important new art was installed; and the art was a “permanent installation,” as Donald Judd phrased it, rather than a changing show. John Chamberlain’s galvanized iron sculpture imposed itself dramatically at the entrance while Dan Flavin’s bold red florescent sculpture defined the corner of the back room and cast a glow over the entire space. Frank Stella’s large abstract painting dominated the side wall, while the frame of Dorothea Rockburne’s folded paper collage gathered nicotine above the bar and Forrest (Frosty) Myers’ laser beam ran from the front window to a mirror on the juke box and then across the entire restaurant to the back room.

The commitment at Max’s to the current generation was communicated and understood by everyone in the bar, and it prompted the idea that this was the locus of serious art talk and thought. At the front of Max’s stood owner Mickey Ruskin. Regulars included John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Larry Rivers, Larry Poons, and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the back room Andy Warhol held court with his entourage of film and factory people including Brigid Berlin, snapping Polaroid pictures and making audio-tapes of conversation. Hard drinking “heavy hitters,” in contrast to the clientele in the back room, gave off an aura of testosterone in the front room. The virtual hegemony of men there prompted the appellation “hetero-holics.” Women artists nevertheless were seen at Max’s, including Dorothea Rockburne, Lynda Benglis, and Alice Aycock.

In this exhibition we attempt to recreate with curatorial accuracy the art that hung in Max’s and that artists traded with Mickey for bar tabs. Increasingly this art is seen to rank with the most extraordinary periods of history in centuries.

Artists:
Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Larry Bell, Lynda Benglis, Brigid Berlin, Ronald Bladen, John Chamberlain, Dan Christensen, Willem De Kooning, Friedel Dzubas, Dan Flavin, Al Held, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Forrest Myers, Adrian Piper, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Dorothea Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Neil Williams, Larry Zox

This project has been organized by Maurice Tuchman for Loretta Howard Gallery. Interviews with many prominent artists by noted video documentary filmmaker Bill Maynes will be on view in the Gallery.

Loretta Howard Gallery’s exhibition runs simultaneously with Steven Kasher Gallery’s exhibition Max’s Kansas City which will feature over 100 vintage and modern photographs and large-scale sculptures and paintings by some of the artists of Max’s Kansas City. The exhibition will be accompanied by the launch of the book, Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll by Steven Kasher with an afterword by Lou Reed (Abrams Image; September 2010).

Installation view

January 6 – February 20, 2010

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present the first New York show of shaped, monochromatic paintings from 1965-66 by Ronald Davis – including four iconic examples that have not been on public view since the 1960′s.

In the fall on 1965 Ronald Davis introduced a series of eight geometrically shaped, richly painted monochromatic canvases at the newly opened Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. Consisting of rectilinear forms (e.g. a rhomboid, a parallelogram etc.) this body of work presented an illusionistic spatial order while also projecting an even greater sense of depth than their 4″ deep stretchers provided.

At play in Davis’s applications of two- point perspective were the lessons of spatial fictions learned from methods artists had employed in the past – from early Renaissance painters to Duchamp and, more contemporaneously, to the shaped canvases of Frank Stella. With this new and relatively radical body of work, however, Davis introduced the notion of depicting a three-dimensional abstract shape emanating from the wall as a monochromatic form. The idea of painting as object, hotly considered at that time, took on even greater depth with this work as it seemingly beamed out images of colors and shapes. Davis’s concerns with articulating space and perspective amounted to an investigation of form as it encompassed matter. “The nature of form in space…” as curator Susan Larsen has noted “… is the subject of Davis’s continuous probe.”

The work of Ronald Davis resides in over forty museum collections in North America and Europe. It has been the focus of over eighty solo exhibitions including six at Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles, five at Leo Castelli, New York and five at Blum Helman, New York.

Davis was born in Santa Monica, CA and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 – 64, and then moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked until 1993. Davis currently resides with his wife Barbara in New Mexico.

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.

The new James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection celebrated its opening on April 22, 2009 in Colomé, Argentina. The museum is the only one worldwide dedicated specifically to the work of James Turrell, who is regarded as one of the most important contemporary light and space artists. The new museum is based on a plan created by Turrell himself. Commissioned and built by Swiss businessman, wine producer and art collector Donald M. Hess, the museum showcases nine light installations representing five decades of Turrell’s career over 18,084 square feet (1.680 m2) of exhibition space.

Donald Hess has been collecting works by James Turrell for the past 30 years and has commissioned two new installations for the museum in Colomé: Spread (2003), a 4,000-square-foot walk-in environment of blue light, and Unseen Blue (2002), the world’s largest Skyspace. Other permanent works in the Hess Art Collection include Alta Green (1968), an early piece that demonstrates Turrell’s first experiments with light and architecture, as well as Lunette (2005), a corridor whose interior has been punctuated by a vertical portal to the outside sky and filled with natural and warm white neon light. Additional site-specific works include Stufe (White), (1967), City of Arhirit (1976), Slant Range (1989) and Penumbra (1992).The permanent exhibition is supplemented by numerous drawings and prints. All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which James Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.

Donald Hess is one of the world’s major collectors of contemporary art. His impressive collection spans five decades of recent art history from Abstract Expressionism through current positions. It contains over 1,000 pieces by 65 international artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Gilbert & George, Franz Gertsch, Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Motherwell, Yue Minjun, Shigeo Toya, Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella, James Turrell and Ouattara Watts among others.

Beginning in 1989, Hess began sharing his passion for art with the greater public by exhibiting his collection in museums built on wineries owned by the Hess Family Estates. The first museum opened at the Hess Collection in Napa Valley, California, USA in 1989 and the second at Glen Carlou in Paarl, South Africa in 2006. The third and newest – The James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection, opened on April 22, 2009, at Bodega & Estancia Colomé, in the Province of Salta in northwestern Argentina. A fourth museum is planned for the Peter Lehmann winery in the Barossa Valley, Australia. All are free of admission and offer guided tours.

A newly updated, comprehensive catalogue of the Hess Art Collection will be published by Hatje Cantz in Autumn of 2009.

Bodega and Estancia Colomé, Ruta Provinvial 53, Km. 20, 4419 Molinos, Salta Province, Argentina

Works by Burgoyne Diller

January 23 – March 6, 2009

Featuring artists Matthias Bitzer, Liz Deschenes, Burgoyne Diller, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, Yuichi Higashionna , Gregor Hildebrandt, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Camilla Low, Sherrie Levine, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Pearson, Florian Pumhosl, R.H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Anselm Reyle, Alexander Rodchenko, Haim Steinbach, Frank Stella & Katja Strunz.