Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964 Oil and mixed media on canvas 69 1/8 x 66 inches Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. February 21, 2010 – January 9, 2011 The second in a series of Tower exhibitions focusing on contemporary art and its roots offers a rare look at the black-on-black paintings that Rothko made in 1964 in connection with his work on a chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston. A recording of Morton [...]
Howard Mehring, Untitled (gray all-over), c. 1960-1962 Magna on canvas, 108 x 118 inches September 17 – October 31, 2009 Conner Contemporary Art presents Conversations in Lyrical Abstraction: 1958-2009, an exhibition that elicits visual conversations among work by Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, Howard Mehring Jeremy Blake, and Leo Villareal. Breathing luminous color and varying in media from stain paintings to digitally controlled light emitting diodes, this select gathering of abstract images showcases Lyrical Abstraction as [...]
Do you have to be a Medici or a Rockefeller to collect art? Not according to Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. This documentary film tells the extraordinary story of Herb, a postal clerk, and Dorothy, a librarian – an ordinary couple of modest means who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, Herb [...]
Jaromír Funke, Spiral (Spirala), 1924 Gelatin silver print, 23.3 x 28.4 cm Collection National Gallery of Art May 3 – August 9, 2009 Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was one of the foremost photographers of the 1920s and 1930s in Czechoslovakia, a country that stood at the forefront of creative photography during these two decades. In the first extensive presentation of Funke’s work outside Europe, some 70 works by the artist and leading contemporaries—including Josef Sudek [...]
In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions. Why abstract art? What is abstract art good for? These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar. It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work. They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we [...]