June 27 to August 12, 2016
531 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 9100

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In “Shapeshifters,” now at Luhring Augustine, 19 artists are brought together who explore the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay “Art and Objecthood,” though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, such as Martin Kippenberger, for example, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, as in Jeremy DePerez’s Untitled (Unknown) (2016), or in working with one form or another, such as Imi Knobel’s Kartoffelbild 15 (2012) leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

Among the large-scale works in the main gallery, David Novros’s extraordinary 4:30 (1966/2000) is a multipanel painting that extends horizontally in four joined parts, two panels running horizontal and two at an angle. The parts are stepped alternately, allowing the wall to form inducted negative shapes to the positive shapes of the panels themselves. The pale tone of the white pearlescent paint changes color to a pink as the viewer moves and the light hits its surface differently. The modular panels identify the piece as an object within an architectural context — it’s as far away from the notion of painting as a window onto fictional space as can be imaged. This is now nothing to do with a perspectival view set in a rectangular portal; it is an encounter with organized physical elements in real space. Above the doorway to the other galleries is Blinky Palermo’s Untitled (1966) a nine-by-eighteen-inch black triangle of muslin over wood. This small work punctuates the architecture like a subtle votive object, altering the straightforward experience of passing through a doorway into a consideration of passing through a particular architectural space.

Several paintings in this exhibition very successfully use actual gaps within the format of the painting itself: Kippenberger’s N.G.D. hellblau (1987), Richard Tuttle’s Red Brown Canvas (1967), and Steven Parrino’s Touch and Go (1989–95) all expose the wall behind within the painting to simple, and inventive effect. Parrino’s work shows painterliness in the form of stains and drips visible along the edges and in two cut-out segments. Ruth Root combines, in Untitled (2015), fabric, Plexiglas, enamel and spray paint in a piece that fits various planes at diagonals to each other that only in the top left corner conform to a rectangle. Elsewhere they simply amass frontally as if slotted and layered together. The feel is collage, the format a construction from disparate parts.

Although stacked vertically, like Root’s painting, 3 Part Variation #5 (2011–13) by Joanna Pousette-Dart departs methodologically. Three conjoined rounded forms contain curvilinear shapes; the relationship between them is seamless, as they appear to generate one another. The color relationships are also compelling; again, moving visually backward and forward, the colors seem to call each other into being.

There is no doubt that the artist list for this exhibition could be longer, I’m thinking for example of Joe Overstreet, Alan Shields and Al Loving, to name just three. There is much very good work to be seen already here and the point is well made that a standard rectangle is not only unnecessary, but alternatives await further exploration in any number of directions and for many reasons — one being that there is no good reason not to.

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In 1963 William Rubin identified in the work of Ellsworth Kelly “a particularly American combination of hedonism and the puritanical.” Kelly, who died December 27th, aged 92, at his home in Spencertown, NY, was, indeed, an artist who defied easy categorization. An exponent neither of minimal art, color field abstraction nor hard edge geometric abstraction, Kelly’s hybridity was equally typified by his diversity of medium, ranging from three dimensional layered canvases to free standing, flat, sometimes folded, painted metal objects. Always deceptively simple, the focused acuity of his work could be mistaken as reductionist, or purely formal, if viewed too quickly or carelessly. He settled early in his career into a preoccupation with observed line and shape, often realized in exactingly defined forms with intensely saturated color, or through the contrasts of black and white. He continued to explore such subject matter with the same urgency his entire life. In a recently -filmed interview we see him gesture towards paintings in his studio that he had to finish, he said, within his lifetime. There was no letting up, for this artist, exhibiting in all four of Matthew Marks’ gallery spaces in May and June of this year.

Before moving from Paris to New York, in 1954, Kelly had spent the previous six years working and traveling in France—a hugely formative experience that set him apart from the Abstract Expressionist scene, setting him up for the independent orientation that would characterize his position in the city he where he would soon be living and working. In France it was the non-performative abstraction of Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi that most absorbed Kelly. An appreciation of Romanesque churches, meanwhile, led to an awareness of painting’s relationship to architecture. The move to New York was, in part, inspired by a favorable review of Ad Reinhardt that signaled possibilities for his own distinctly non-gestural work back home.

The spare and rigorous beauty of Kelly’s paintings continued a process of refinement and depth that was unabated. The search for shapes and colors that correspond to the memory of selective visual events made his art thoroughly life-engaged, a way for memory to remain in the present tense in relationships between forms and colors. Though his paintings were often derived from things actually seen—the source admittedly not usually evident—in the sublime plant drawings the source was, of course, abundantly clear. But the same visual pleasure and intellectual curiosity in found or revealed form evident across his oeuvre, whether in drawings, paintings, collages, carved reliefs or painted objects. His works derive from, and bear, deep contemplation,

The select number of artists truly able to sustain passionate reverie in distilled form makes one realize, how difficult and rare is the ability to expose emotion and poise in subtly modulated, streamlined form. Blinky Palermo, himself indebted to Kelly, is one such artist. Another example would be the late cut papers of Matisse, . Kelly’s project for the design of a chapel offers comparison to Matisse’s own Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the Côte d’Azur. Kelly’s chapel designs, dating from the 1980s, were gifted by the artist earlier this year to the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas which is working towards its realization. Fittingly, the chapel brings full circle Kelly’s French connection. In 1951, he had made a trip to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles where he had noticed the large colored panels on the façade. “I didn’t want to use color for decoration but I liked the idea of color used in architecture,” he has said. After a lifetime of producing dynamically balanced paintings and sculptures, it is anticipated that architecture and the colored light from colored glass windows will add to and combine with the experience of a suite of black and white paintings in Kelly’s chapel. As with Matisse’s chapel, another great colorist and innovator will offer us an immersive, sensual encounter that amounts to the deletion of boundary between physically felt space and visually allusive color and light—a spirituality, embodied in the continuous present.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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