Installation view

March 19 – April 9, 2011

Atsuo Hukuda has shown his Color and Monochrome paintings at Hebel_121 for the first time in 2005, together with Kenzo Onoda, a light and performance artist also from Japan. Atsuo Hukuda has been producing his Color and Monochrome works since 1990. In his one man show at Hebel_121, he will present a new development in his work.

Atsuo Hukuda is engaged in bringing together old traditional Japanese painting with his own chosen contemporary idea of painting. Old and new work have the same importance for him, and he does not make any difference. He is choosing gold foil as one of the antique colors of Japan, and together with the transparent color of his own choice, which is changing its appearance as time goes by, he is creating works of reflection and transparency.

Work by László Ottó

February 18 – March 26, 2011

dr. julius | ap is pleased to present “Bilder des Anfangs” [Images of the Beginning] by Hungarian artist László Ottó, an exihibition which features recent paintings made from various shades of black pigment.

The artist writes:

“As a European my work is western, but at the same time I am consciously relating to East thought. Existential questions of life and death are the subject of my work. I construct geometric objects with a symmetry that focus on meditative contemplation. This particular exhibition only shows black images that serve as vehicles for viewers to open their mind to the fundamental questions of being. This spiritual claim takes the viewer out of everyday life and asks him to face the inevitability of impermanence.”

László Otto was born in 1966 in Pécs, Hungary, the birthplace of both Victor Vasarely and Marcel Breuer. Originally trained in architecture, he began painting in 1989 as a Constructivist. A few years later, he worked with the geometric painter Ferenc Lantos. In search of spiritual knowledge, he began to study Hindi philosophy [the Advaita Vedanta] and Japanese Zen Buddhism, studies which have taken him on a number of extended trips to the East. He writes extensively and refers to the writings of Ad Reinhardt as having had a great influence on his artistic attitude.

He has had numerous exhibitions in Japan and Europe and currently lives and works in Vékény, Hungary, not far from his birthplace.

After contributing to the exhibition mehrfach_ multiple, “Bilder des Anfangs” [Images of the Beginning] at dr. julius | ap is his first solo show in Berlin.

December 3, 2010 – January 15, 2011

Informal Relations: Contemporary works on paper curator Scott Grow selected 32 artists from the United States, Germany, Spain and Japan to focus on the diversity of practices within painting and abstraction today.

The exhibition’s title refers to kind the “informal relations” artists have with one another, their predecessors, with the modernist tradition, the future, and even with their own work. While works on paper may stand as finished works, they are also often places for exploration, thinking, planning, taking chances, and failure.

The show explores the challenges of abstract art. Since it typically refuses expected representation, language and absolute interpretation, it requires the viewer’s engagement and participation. Abstraction is not a singular school or style, the term itself is not necessarily helpful in identifying the qualities or concepts of the art object. Abstract artists often have shared and conflicting objectives for the art they make.

In response to these challenges with their genre of art, each artist in Informal Relations presents a definition of abstract painting. The exhibition explores the similarities, differences, and connections between these artists, their dialog with abstraction’s history, and various directions forward for abstraction.

Participating artists include: Patrick Alt, Chris Ashley, Patrick Berran, Kadar Brock, Matthew Deleget, Laura Fayer, Keltie Ferris, Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, Connie Goldman, Brent Hallard, Rachel Hayes, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Michael Just, Matthew Langley, Jim Lee, Rossana Martinez, Rob Nadeau, Melissa Oresky, Paul Pagk, Danielle Riede, Maximilian Rödel, Eric Sall, Susan Scott, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Jessica Snow, Henning Straßburger, Garth Weiser, Wendy White, Paige Williams, Douglas Witmer, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and John Zurier.

October 28 – December 11, 2010

Pelavin Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of recent work by american artist, Kate Beck. this show will include large scale poured oil paintings and graphite drawings on aluminum panel. this will be Beck’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, and in New York city.

In this new body of work, Beck continues her engagement with repetitive tonal rendering as a means of interaction between light and shadow, human thought and consciousness, and the dynamic architectonics of space. this time she takes the essence of form further by using aluminum substrates, allowing modulating marks of graphite and poured oil to accumulate and shift amidst the confines of the geometric shapes. tension oscillates between formalistic geom- etry and existential space; an allusion to thought and consciousness, and the passage of time.

Critic Philip Isaacson writes: “…Beck’s work ultimately achieves moments so insistently animated that each succeeding viewing becomes an initiation… one of those sought-after moments in art, a moment of vision, here… which allowed the artist to reach beyond aesthetics to a consideration of movement in perpetual opposition to structure. Beck’s lines and the spaces between them are never at rest. They resonate in perpetuity…” coalesced of intensity, intimacy and silence through muted color cadences and detailed surfaces, the new works at Pelavin Gallery are evidenced within Beck’s signature palette of black, white and grey.

“… I am involved in the visual and philosophical pursuit of exploring the architectonics of space. I create works that result from a systematic starting point of materials and geometric shape. My life work, however, reflects a persistent inquiry into the nature of the world around me, and my role within this world. I create work because it is my habitual form of personal expression.”

Born in Maine in 1956, Beck has studied art and writing at the University of Maine at Orono, Bennington College, Goddard College and the Maine College of Art. She has been the focus of numerous articles and interviews, including Drawing Lines, by Brent Hallard, Tokyo, Japan, 2009, and Writings on Art by Fiona Robinson, London, UK, 2010. She is a contributing essayist on contemporary art and culture at The Drawing Research Network, Loughborough University School of Art & Design, Leicestershire, UK and publishes a blog, KATE BECK :: ART NOTES. Her essay, Brooks Run to the Ocean: The Paintings of Steven Alexander, was published in 2010 by Gremillion and Co. Fine Art, Houston, TX.

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

Work by Emmanuel Van der Meulen

June 26 – July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the first installment of the Brussels, Belgium-based Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art’s (CCNOA) most recent initiative 30/30 – Image Archive Project (IAP).

Conceived by artist and CCNOA Chief Curator/Artistic Director Tilman, the exhibition will feature a diverse group of small works by 9 international artists, including Delphine Deguislage (Belgium), Clemens Hollerer (Austria), Atsuo Hukuda (Japan), Andrew Huston (USA), Camila Oliveira-Fairclough (Brazil/United Kingdom), Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (France), Emmanuel Van der Meulen (France), Jan Maarten Voskuil (The Netherlands), and Lars Wolter (Germany).

With 30/30-IAP, CCNOA seeks to establish a collective collection that will showcase the mesmerizing breadth and depth of approaches reductive artists are currently pursuing on the international level.  The project’s title refers to the size restriction for all works to be included in CCNOA’s emerging registry, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm.  This will enable CCNOA to easily travel the project worldwide (museum in a suitcase).

30/30-IAP is administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with artists CCNOA has collaborated with over  the past 12 years, as well as newly invited artists from around the globe.  CCNOA is currently planning forthcoming 30/30-IAP exhibitions at artist-run venues in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand,  and the United States.

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

Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Untitled (from the series “Katsura”), 1953-54
Gelatin silver print, printed 1980—81

June 20 – September 12, 2010

Photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro (born 1921) is one of the most influential figures in post-World War II Japanese photography. Among his most celebrated bodies of work are the photographs he took during 1953 and 1954 of the legendary 17th-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. These images infuse the iconic structure with a modernist Bauhaus aesthetic. Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture presents 70 of these photographs, for the first time uncropped and as Ishimoto had originally intended them to be seen.

For the last 50 years these photographs have been known only from the landmark 1960 book Katsura: Creation and Tradition in Japanese Architecture by architect Tange Kenzo with an introduction by Walter Gropius. For that publication, Tange rigorously cropped and sequenced the photographs to promote his agenda in a debate that consumed post-occupation Japan´s cultural elite in the mid-1950s: that of the vital relevance and existence of tradition in their efforts to define modernity. Against this backdrop, the exhibition explores the nuanced and complex relationship between architecture and photography, and the profound impact these photographs had on the public´s interpretation of Japanese tradition in modern architecture.

Daniel Göttin, Diamond Shapes, 2010
Installation view

May 10 – June 4, 2010

Supported by
Abteilung Kultur Basel, Switzerland
kulturelles.bl Kanton Baselland, Switzerland

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

February 18 – March 20, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Witmer, Things Mean a Lot at the Time, 2010
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 20 x 24 inches

March 4-27, 2010

Blank Space Gallery presents Ring The Bells Anew, an exhibition of recent paintings by Douglas Witmer. This is the artist’s third solo show in New York, and his first with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Witmer has gained increasing attention for his uniquely distilled sensibility related to his paintings’ surface and color. His recent canvases feature one or two rectangles of solid color on top of and interacting with varied gray washes that cascade down the painting’s surface. Though reductive in their attitude and appearance, the resulting works are anything but “minimal.”

Contrary to first impressions, Witmer’s compositions are not planned or diagrammed. For the artist, painting is a process of inquiry; each piece is an individual result of decisions made intuitively and directly.

The critic and art historian Vittorio Colaizzi has written, “Witmer paints the inheritance of modernist abstraction, and perhaps, metaphorically, the more ecumenical spirituality of today, in the openness of his compositions, their perpetual almost-ness, and their refusal of closure or perfection.”

About the title for this exhibition the artist states, “I am trying to underscore the idea that my paintings embody new acts of declaration using long-existing means. Taken further, it communicates a hope in the continued relevance of abstract painting.”

Douglas Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In New York his work has recently appeared at P.S.1/MoMA in the group exhibition “Minus Space,” as well as The Painting Center and M55 Art in Long Island City. Other recent venues include: Pharmaka in Los Angeles, Gallery Siano in Philadelphia, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton in Ohio, Sydney Non-Objective in Australia, and Bus-Dori Project Space in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Sydney Ball, Zianexis, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 168 cm

March 4-21, 2010

The following extract is taken from ‘Sydney Ball: prophet of abstraction’ by Wendy Walker, Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings 1963–2007, p21

The emergence at the end of the 1990s of an insistent form in Ball’s paintings – reminiscent of shapes in early drawings of rock formations from his landscape works – gave rise to the asymmetrical, ragged-edged motifs in the abstract paintings of Structures 1, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art in 2005. Striking in its formal ascetic restraint, the subtitle of Structures 2 (2007), Abstract Architecture, is an indication that Ball’s point of reference for the new series of work was architectural form in space; specifically, both the contemporary architecture of Zaha Hadid and the reductive modernist constructions of Mies van der Rohe (prior to his art studies Ball’s background was in architecture).

The dynamism of Ball’s paintings is predicated on arigorous attention to the nuances of colour relationships. His selection of colours (secondary and tertiary) is compelling for they are rarely straightforward and frequently unexpected.

From the outset, Ball has maintained that the circle motif – critical to the graphic potency of the highly-resolved Cantos – represented the Chinese symbol for infinity. In the vibrant paintings of the 2007 Structures 2 series Ball reinstates the disc within a square as a strategy (as it was in the 1960s) for the introduction of additional colour.

Ball’s oeuvre may be regarded as a succession of evolutions, in which each concept is comp-rehensively worked through and continually reassessed, so that even within series there is conscious variation. Paralleling the ambitious scale of his paintings is a continual desire to push the boundaries. This willingness to experiment and to take risks propelled his move to New York and, later, his extensive travels in Japan, China, Korea and India, where he sought out sites of spiritual and cultural significance. His journey has resulted in a remarkable body of work of which the enduringly authoritative colour paintings in this exhibition are a significant part.

Work by Brent Hallard

November 12 – December 19, 2009

An international, visual conversation between abstract painters; a traveling, transformable series of shows.

Exhibiting artists – Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier

Meridian Gallery is pleased to present TRANS: form | color the San Francisco manifestation of a series of international traveling shows by nine artists from Japan, Germany and the United States who are engaged in a dialogue about Painting and Abstraction.

Begun as an in-person and online conversation between Richard Schur in Munich, Mel Prest in San Francisco and Brent Hallard in Tokyo, TRANS has grown into an exhibition with nine artists. Three of the artists hail from Germany, four artists live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, one in upstate New York and one lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a visual dialogue between themselves and as a means to join today’s contemporary painting dialogue.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference, as well as, the ways that the works align both formally and conceptually, with a range of abstraction spanning hard-edge, optical, minimal, expressive and conceptual. An aspect of the artists’ continuing dialogue is the installation of TRANS: form | color, which is done onsite by the artists together. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic and timely exhibition.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century, with its awareness of history as well as conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

“…These painters, calling themselves TRANS, meeting in person or on the Internet, found that they share a common interest in the painting process, pure, and often not so simple. Unlike previous groups, they share no common ideology and they certainly are not likely to publish a manifesto. And they all agree that it is the viewer’s response, which completes the work…”
—Peter Selz

TRANS:Abstraktion opened in November 2007 at Weltraum, a non-profit gallery space in Munich, Germany. In March 2009 TRANS:formal traveled to Pharmaka, a non-profit space in Los Angeles. Each show includes new work by each artist –thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. TRANS: form | color at Meridian Gallery will be the first time all artists will be present at the exhibition.

Catalogue available, with notes on TRANS: form | color by Peter Selz.

Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron
Photographer: Ryuichi Maruo

September 26 – December 13, 2009

How many points are there in a line?
What is the number of numbers?
How can we verify that the random is random?

Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda exhibits two works from his datamatics project, a series of experiments that explore such questions, physically and mathematically.

data.tron and data.scan are audiovisual installations composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. In both works, each single pixel of the visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle. Visitors to the exhibition will experience the vast universe of data in the infinite between 0 and 1.

data.tron and data.scan present audio-visual relationships relating to large sets of data from two recent meta-scientific investigations that have mapped the human body and the astronomical universe. The large scale vertical projection of data.tron heightens and intensifies the viewer’s perception and total immersion within the work, while the horizontal monitor-based data.scan is registered more intimately in relation to the viewer’s body. The dialogue of sound and image between data.tron and data.scan address notions of randomness, extremities of scale, and binaries of the visible/audible and invisible/inaudible.

The exhibition is produced in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary of the Surrey Art Gallery’s TechLab digital art residency and exhibition program. The TechLab has incorporated close to 40 exhibitions, projects and residencies of leading edge contemporary digital media art over the past decade. In conjunction with the Surrey Art Gallery’s larger program featuring more traditional media, TechLab has presented projects that have ranged from telerobotic sculpture to interactive virtual environments, GPS drawing to artificial intelligence and social networking systems.

Anne Truitt in her Twining Court studio, Washington, DC, 1962
Photo by John Gossage

October 8, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents the first retrospective of the work of Anne Truitt (1921–2004), a pioneering figure in the development of American abstract art. “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection,” on view Oct. 8–Jan. 3, 2010, is organized by Hirshhorn associate curator Kristen Hileman. The exhibition features more than 35 two-dimensional works alongside 49 examples of the radically reduced and evocatively painted sculptures that were the hallmark of the artist’s profoundly focused 50-year career. Accompanied by the most comprehensive monograph on the artist to date, the exhibition explores Truitt’s under-recognized role in the development of geometric abstraction during the second half of the 20th century.

“This exhibition is a long-awaited look at the depth and scope of this significant artist’s work,” said Richard Koshalek, director of the museum. “We are pleased to present this exhibition here on the National Mall and to recognize her unique contribution to art history.”

Following a loose chronology that traces the arc of Truitt’s career from initial abstract sculptures through pieces made only weeks before her death at age 83 in 2004, “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection” investigates the artist’s use of proportion, scale and above all, color. Truitt’s early works, such as “First” (1961), “Southern Elegy” (1962) and “Watauga” (1962), were made from wood painted with acrylic and, in part, were inspired by her exposure to the paintings of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt in 1961. These early pieces seem to reflect the built environment and topography of the artist’s childhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and that of her teenage years in Asheville, N.C. In work from this period up to 1964, Truitt established her interest in making sculptures with dimensions that relate to the human body in ways similar to architectural barriers and monuments. Equally important, her concern for grounding her art in personal experience is suggested to viewers through form, color and allusive titles, a concept that continued throughout her career.

By the late 1960s, important critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried had noted Truitt’s work in their discussion of trends in abstraction that had come to be categorized as Minimal. Vividly hued selections from the end of this decade, such as “A Wall for Apricots” and “Morning Choice” (both from 1968), are representative of the expansion of the artist’s palette after living in Tokyo between 1964 and 1967. During her years in Japan, Truitt replaced the wood armatures of her sculptures with aluminum. Dissatisfied with the result, she destroyed most of these works in the early 1970s after she returned to working in wood. This exhibition documents her time in Tokyo with rarely seen works on paper.

The second half of the Hirshhorn’s project comprises a unique overview of Truitt’s sculpture and major two-dimensional series from the 1970s, spanning three decades of Truitt’s career not previously considered in its entirety. “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection” examines her sculptural practice from the 1970s, when she began adding horizontal extensions to her columnar shapes, through the early 2000s, when she was most often creating gracefully proportioned vertical works. The major two-dimensional series included in this presentation are the “Arundel” paintings that she started in 1973, and the “Piths,” begun around 2001. The “Arundels” feature barely visible graphite lines and accumulations of white paint on white surfaces. The “Piths,” canvases with deliberately frayed edges and covered in thick black strokes of paint, indicate Truitt’s interest in forms that blur the lines between two and three dimensions. Both these series reveal an artist who was pushing into new areas of exploration, even at the end of her life.

At the conclusion of the exhibition, a separate gallery features the short film “Anne Truitt: Working” by Jem Cohen, a colleague and friend of Truitt’s. The film includes images of Truitt’s studios in Washington, D.C., and at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, and features the artist working and speaking about her practice and the role of color in her art.

Born Anne Dean, Truitt grew up in the town of Easton on Maryland’s remote Eastern Shore. She studied psychology at Bryn Mawr College and, during World War II, worked at Massachusetts General Hospital as an assistant in the psychiatric lab and as a nurse’s aide. She left the field of psychology in the mid-1940s, first writing fiction and then enrolling in courses offered by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., a city to which she relocated with her husband, James Truitt, in 1948. As a result of her husband’s profession as a journalist, the artist found herself placed among the political and cultural leaders of Washington during the Kennedy era.

A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Truitt was a highly influential professor at the University of Maryland at College Park (1975–1996) and was the acting executive director of Yaddo in 1984. She was also the author of the acclaimed autobiographical journals “Daybook” (1982), “Turn” (1986) and “Prospect” (1996).

The exhibition is accompanied by the most comprehensive monograph on the artist to date, with essays by Hileman and James Meyer, Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University, and a chronology of the artist’s life and career. The fully illustrated book is co-published with D Giles Limited, London and distributed in the United States by D.A.P. (Distributed Arts Publishers).

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.

New York City pigeon

Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.  Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.

The team–which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso–was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other. For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.

The researchers then displayed the pictures on a screen to the birds and gave food rewards to those that picked at the “good” paintings while denying rewards to those pigeons that displayed poor artistic taste. The researchers used a variety of images, including pastels and watercolours, still lives and landscapes, which were judged on their artistic merit, including how clear and discernible the images were.

Through the month-long experiment, the pigeons learnt to peck only at “good” paintings said Professor Shigeru Watanabe of Keio’s Faculty of Letters and Graduate School of Human Resources. Crucially, they responded appropriately even to paintings they had not seen before, said Watanabe.

Keio University in a report clarified that the research “did not deal with advanced artistic judgements.” ”But it did indicate that pigeons are able to learn to distinguish ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ paintings the way an ordinary human being can,” it said. The findings of the government-funded study by the university’s Centre of Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility are due to be published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Work by Cildo Meireles

From The Art Newspaper, June 6, 2009:

Exhibitions axed as recession bites:
US worst hit as sponsorship withdrawn and endowment wealth shrinks
By Jason Edward Kaufman and Martin Bailey

“An Art News paper survey suggests that a growing number of exhibitions are being cancelled because of the recession. We have identified over 20 important shows that have been axed (or, in a few cases, postponed) later this year or in 2010.

Our list almost certainly represents the tip of the iceberg. Many venues have not yet published their 2010 programme, and some unannounced shows that had been provisionally scheduled are being quietly dropped. Decisions may have been influenced by a number of factors, but according to our research financial concerns were key.

The situation seems considerably worse in North America than in Europe. This is probably because North American museums are much more dependent on private sponsorship and endowments—particularly hit by the recession—while Euro pean institutions receive more government funding.

Among the worst-hit institutions is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), with at least three major shows being lost. In August it was to have presented “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, coming from New York’s International Center of Photography, where it was shown last year. This has now been cancelled.

In November, an exhibition on Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles was due to come to Lacma after first showing at Tate Modern in October 2008 and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (where it closed in April). The entire North American tour has been cancelled, including presentations at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (originally scheduled for June) and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (in March 2010).

Meanwhile, a retrospective on the Armenian-born Ameri can artist Arshile Gorky who died in 1948 had been scheduled for Lacma in June 2010, but has been dropped. Organ ised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (opening October 2009), Tate Modern is now the only other venue for the exhibition (spring 2010).

In some cases, late moves have been made to rescue shows. Tate Britain had long planned a major exhibition on Zoffany for autumn 2010. Earlier this year it was dropped, partly because of its financial viability in the present economic circumstances.

The Royal Academy has now stepped in and has taken the show for spring 2012. It is notable that the Academy felt it could make the project viable, despite Tate’s concerns.
Tate Britain, therefore, has a gap in its programme, and plans are being considered to extend its yet-to-be-announced Henry Moore exhibition. This large show will look at the sculptor’s place in modern art, supported with loans from the Henry Moore Foundation.  The proposal is to extend it from a normal three-month run to six months.

Even if it is mainly American museums that are cancelling shows, this can directly impact on European institutions, in the case of touring exhibitions. Presenting an exhibition at several venues spreads costs or brings in a fee to the originating museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum is touring “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, which was due to have been presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February 2010. This has now been cancelled. V&A director Mark Jones told us that “we have seen some cancellations of our travelling exhibitions, and it would be foolish to pretend there are no problems”.

Another example is the French 19th-century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, which opens at the Getty in late 2010 and will then be presented at the Musée d’Orsay in early 2011. The showing at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum in spring 2010 has been cancelled. Walters’ director Gary Vikan said that the show would have resulted in a net loss of $300,000. “In normal times, we could have lived with that,” he said.

Shows cancelled or postponed
• Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, “Jean-Léon Gérôme”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Subversion of the Images: Surrealism and Photography”, spring 2010, cancelled
• Chicago, Field Museum, “Lucy’s Legacy: the Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”, planned for 2009-10, dropped
• Denver, Denver Art Museum, “Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library”, July-September 2009, cancelled
• Honolulu, Contemporary Art Museum, “Japan Fantastic” (11 contemporary artists), December 2009-March 2010, cancelled
• Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Cildo Meireles”, June-September 2009, cancelled
• Kansas City, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer”, February-May 2009, cancelled
• London, Tate Britain, “Johann Zoffany”, autumn 2010, cancelled and moved to Royal Academy
• Los Angeles, Getty Museum, “Franz Messerschmidt”, September 2009-January 2010, postponed
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, August-November 2009, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Cildo Meireles”, November 2009-February 2010, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Arshile Gorky: a Retrospective”, June-September 2010, cancelled
• Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Donald Saff and the Art of Collaboration”, September 2009-January 2010, cancelled
• New York, Metropolitan Museum, “Duncan Phyfe: America’s Legendary Cabinetmaker”, January-April 2010, postponed
• Paris, Centre Pompidou, Indian contemporary art, 2010, postponed to 2011
• Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, “The Kingdom of Aragon” (15th-century Spanish painting), spring 2010, postponed to 2011
• Reykjavík, National Gallery of Iceland, “Off the Beaten Track: Violence, Women and Art”, September-December 2009, cancelled
• Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, “Cildo Meireles”, March-June 2010, cancelled
• Vienna, Albertina, “Jörg Immendorff”, October 2009-January 2010, cancelled “

Installation view

April 24 – June 10, 2009

Organized by Olivier Renaud-Clement

Participating Artists: 
Matthias Bitzer, Burgoyne Diller, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Kazimir Malevich, Katja Strunz

Spanning nearly 100 years, the works in this exhibition offer insight into the shape of our culture and the movements of inspiration—moments in time radically altering the course of history and the present forever constructing the past. Constructivismes – (A visual essay) originated with a specific interest in the rare geometric drawings of Russian Supremacist Kazimir Malevich from 1914 through 1917. Malevich was an activist for a new visual environment to bring about a change in perception. His revolutionary style left an indelible impact on the future of art. Following Malevich the artists of the Constructivist movement were early pioneers of applying new technologies to art making and the development of an industrial and angular visual language.

Each work in this exhibition, in relationship to Malevich’s drawings, will illustrate how remarkably influential the motifs of these two movements have been and continue to be. This exhibition brings together a compelling constellation of works that share an underlying purpose, whether that is social, process oriented or the representation of a formal language.

Akira Kanayama is best known as a key member of Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association), based in Osaka, Japan, in the late 1950s. Kanayama’s minimalist works pay conscious attention to the edges of the picture. His conceptual practice and participation in the avant-garde group exemplify the Constructivist model. Lesser known American artist Burgoyne Diller began exploring constructed and architectural forms in his unique drawings and collages from the 1960s, which were later to transform into painting and sculptures. Throughout her long practice, the veteran American photographer Barbara Kasten ‘documented’ her own ephemeral constructions and assemblage. Her early black and white photograms from the late 1970s are examples of this process which she then retouched with color.

The most recent works in the exhibition are from two German artists known primarily as sculptors, Katja Strunz and Matthias Bitzer. In a series of letterpress prints, Strunz has collaged aged paper, which purposefully creates an ambiguous origination date, into geometric forms. Bitzer deconstructs figures and then using formal language an image is reconstructed to the edge of abstraction. We are delighted to continue our ongoing focus of exploring dialogues between historical artists and the current generation.

Daniel Göttin, True Memory 9, 2009 (detail)
Adhesive tape on anodized aluminum, 50cm / 50cm

Daniel Göttin: New Works, Concept Space / Concept Space/R2, Gunma, Japan
May 16-23, 2009

Daniel Göttin: True Memory, Embassy of Swizerland, Tokyo, Japan
May 22 – June 19, 2009

November 4-29, 2008