October 22 to December 31, 2016
158 Main Street
East Hampton, NY, 631 324 0806

When art historian Gail Levin approached Connie Fox about a joint exhibition of her paintings with sculptural works by her late husband, William King, Fox reported to friends that she was incredulous. What do Bill’s quirky figurative sculptures have in common with her convulsive abstract paintings? But Levin persisted—thankfully so. Her instinctive grasp of the empathy that across three decades connected—and inspired—this prolific artist couple has resulted in an intriguing, thoughtfully integrated exhibition.

King and Fox, together since 1983, married in 2007: it was his fourth marriage, her third. Easy going with a quiet but barbed wit, King grew up in Jacksonville, Florida which he left to study art, first at the Cooper Union and then, as a Fulbright Scholar, in Rome. Returning to New York during Abstract Expressionism’s headiest moment, King made an unexpected splash with his signature figurative works — wacky but humble spoofs on human types that mimicked his own his leggy 6’2” frame. Fox, a no-nonsense mid-westerner, was born in Fowler, Colorado, at the edge of the dust bowl. In 1950 she biked through the shambled ruins of postwar Europe before studying art in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There she met Elaine de Kooning, who in 1978 convinced her to move to East Hampton. Spirited, independent and, like King, immune to art’s various “isms,” Fox pursued her unique brand of expressionist abstraction.

Throughout this exhibition and in her concise catalogue essay, Levin peppers their respective biographies with tales of old love affairs, Hampton friendships, and the couple’s shared love of early modernism, music, literature, and politics. All of this informs Levin’s sharp visual pairings, such as the duo greeting viewers — King’s My Pleasure (2007), a life-sized, stilt-legged figure dressed in a red vinyl suit, flanking Fox’s Bill’s Vinyl Man with Stool (1985). King’s vinyl characters usually portray slick sinister scoundrels, but this red-hot fellow stands lovingly by Connie, whose acute sensitivity to his work clearly animates her own abstract painting. When she saw strips of King’s vinyl fabric strewn about a table, she reinvented them as a pile of abstract brushstrokes set beside King’s studio stool.

Fox and King’s stylistic differences consistently bow to one another. The figurative elements she embeds within her energized brushwork attest to own her grip on representation. King’s proportions, simplicity of line, and play of negative and positive space affirm his keen eye for the abstract structure of things as underpinnings to character. Both artists were influenced by early modernists: Fox gravitated towards Klee, Kandinsky, and the Delaunays; King towards Picasso, Braque and Elie Nadelman. Both artists were particularly fascinated with Marcel Duchamp. Fox’s Marcel’s Star: You don’t have to be a star baby to be in my show, (1993) featuring Duchamp’s famous star-shaped tonsure, is here paired with King’s carved wooden portrait of Duchamp. Fox and King also independently pursued Duchamp’s iterations of Rose Sélavy as explorations of their own alter egos through self-portraiture.

Almost all of King’s figures embody the artist’s physical self — from his early Self in San Francisco (1955), to Bill Dogg-Hampton (2003), a bulldog head atop a King-like torso. Early on, in 1955, Fox drew Self-Portrait as Flower, the seed of a “self-as” theme that culminated in her 2007 series of drawings of herself as Colette and Max Beckmann (exhibited earlier this year at the Parrish Art Museum). Though these specific works are not in this exhibit, Levin discusses them alongside King’s alter-ego portraits of himself as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Hepworth, Nefertiti and a Degas ballerina.

But it is romance — soaring on art historical wings — that drives this exhibition. While androgynous themes tease conflicting layers of each artist’s self-identity, they also — as they converse across the gallery space — merge the personae of these artistic soul mates. Romance gives lift-off to Bill on his knees embracing a Connie-headed airplane in Marry Me (2010), a sculpture he made after they’d been together for twenty-seven years! Photographs of the couple at Sammy’s Beach — one of them a study for King’s double portrait, Jolies Fleurs (2007) — capture this romance in more ways than one. Bill hated the beach. He went there because Connie loved to swim in this tranquil place. It churned over her imagination for decades, ultimately inspiring the daunting series of large Sammy’s Beach paintings, two spectacular examples of which are included in this exhibition.

Music also kept this relationship humming. King fiddles away in Talent (1994), and a dancing dog gyrates to a rapping cluster of jazz musicians in Fox’s Fox Dog/Jazz (1985). Both works undoubtedly relate to the artists’ membership in a band, The Art Attacks, organized by Audrey Flack.

We would feel magic in any exhibition devoted separately to Bill King or Connie Fox. But here sparks palpably fly between the two. In life they spoke little about their works but affirmed them –or not- with the kind of glance long-married people know well. Fox recently mentioned how King once summed up their influences on one another by saying, “I learned from her and her feet grew bigger.”

The post Your Feet’s Too Big: Connie Fox and William King at the Guild Hall, East Hampton appeared first on artcritical.

Bill King was the gentle giant of postwar American sculpture.  So gentle, indeed, that his name and achievement remain chronically under-acknowledged, considering the power, virtuosity and humanity of his work.  He was a self-effacing man whose work tapped a light, comic vein, but given the proper attention it deserves, his work could change the way sculpture is thought about and made.

William King was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1925, and grew up in Coconut Grove, Miami.  He was a near contemporary, at the Cooper Union, of Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, his first wife, and remained close in many ways to their common aesthetic grounding, shared also with younger sculptors such as Red Grooms and Marisol Escobar.

The hallmark of King’s early work was radical experiment keeping company with social connection and hedonism.  The mix of big, important, innovative ideas and immediate, sensory, in-the-moment experience was a kind of visual jazz.  For this was not just the time of Franz Kline’s big open defiant brushstrokes and Jackson Pollock’s all-over mists of intricately drooling line, but of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.  If we look at the works that King made in the early 1950s when he got back from his Fulbright to Italy we see free, experimental, open forms that take their cue from jazz as much as art in their fusion of virtuosity and cool.  King had a reputation from the get go for being able to make anything, a magical touch with materials.  This comes across in an exquisite ten inch high by seven by three and a half inch sculpture in metal and wood, Sonny Greer and Jimmy Archie, 1953.  It almost looks like one piece of flimsy, slightly rusty, found metal has been twisted and bent this way and that to describe – in a quick, effortless, yet somehow accurate sketch – one guy on drums, another crouched over his trumpet.  There is a naïve, childish quality to the piece until you look closely, and feel your way into the piece, and you realize how astoundingly astute every line and dent is to conveying the sense of movement and sound.

As befits a man whose handling of materials is so effortless and whose aesthetic is cool, casual, in the moment, King was disarmingly dismissive about his early efforts, especially when he moved on to something new.  He was, clearly, deeply appreciative of the work of Elie Nadelman with his highly stylized, folk-inspired, doll-like figures.  Seeing Nadelman’s memorial retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, the year King finished Cooper, was instrumental in shaping his outlook.  But when he called his own early works in wood “watered-down Nadelman” he was being overly self-deprecatory.  As Sanford Schwartz has written, King’s wooden sculptures are “relations of Nadelman’s people, but with innards.” But Nadelman was liberating for King because he showed that satire and streamlining could go together. King’s sculpture managed to really expose an individual’s flaws while also bringing us close to his or her humanity.  As Hilton Kramer wisely observed, King’s humor is essentially Chaplinesque: “a mockery that remains sweet to the taste, a satirical vision that does not exempt the artist himself from the reach of its criticism.”

His social portraits were at their most acute in the ceramic medium. Bob and Terry, 1954, is a tour de force of economy: it seems the more he leaves out the more he gets across.  In such simply shaped forms he captures the togetherness of the couple, the support relationship between them, their social aspirations.  You feel you know all about these people.

The ambition to test the limits of what can be left out while getting across real sensations of movement and feeling led King, in the 1960s, into radical new territory. Magic, 1970 is aptly named because it is a sculpture in which so little conveys so much.  It is simply two sheets of shaped aluminum that slot into each other with the planes at a 90 degree angle, in which one half denotes a leg, from thigh to foot, the other upper body, from torso via head to outstretched arm.  There is no color, no joinery, no facial feature or expressive excrescence of any sort.  But where you would expect this little information to at best be like a traffic sign or scarecrow of a figure, a mere schemata or signifier of a figure, this, on the contrary, is a portrait of a very knowable figure—one that certain lusty viewers, indeed, would want to know better!  Magic conveys the sensual, curvaceous form of a young woman absorbed in some activity of her own – yoga stretching, perhaps, or tending a flower.  The shape of the metal gets across lithe limbs without resorting to erotic stereotypes.  The simple angling of one plane to another creates enough shadow to give the figure voluptuous volume.

King’s genius has been to fuse formal innovation and humorous observation.  The outstanding American sculptor in both these camps, of course, was Alexander Calder, with his circus of wire figures and his joyous, purely abstract stabiles and mobiles.  But in his interlocking metal pieces King made a sculptural move as bold as Calder’s mobiles with an earthy wit comparable to Calder’s Circus: a marriage of modes.

In his work of the last decades, King found a synthesis of the satirical explorations of his early period and the formal freedoms of his interlocking pieces in often monumentally scaled stick figures in multi-figured narrative compositions.  As was his wont, these mature works have it both ways: they embody all the virtues of speed of execution and lack of preciousness – perfunctory, streamlined, economical, sketchy, unpretentious – while resolutely standing their ground as effective figurative sculpture, simultaneously conveying individuality and type.

One of King’s earliest champions, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, marveled in 1960 at the young sculptor’s ability to fashion single sculptures of multiple figures, to “create a three dimensional whole out of more than one figure in the round,” a feat he compared to playing three-dimensional chess.  In Power Tennis, 1990, he bonds players and their equipment, literally and metaphorically, as arms and rackets are rendered in much the same way in flat shapes of aluminum such that sportsmen and women become like machines as surely as their equipment becomes quasi organic extensions of the limbs to which they are attached. King’s use of reductive and technological language escapes the literalism of traditional figuration in order to enhance the humorous and universal aspects of people’s foibles rather than to convey any notion of standardization.

In a career that ran in tandem with the hegemony of formal abstraction in sculpture, Bill King inevitably struggled with the prejudice that sculpture full of humanity and humor can’t be quite as serious as sculpture devoid of them.  But the tide has clearly turned in ways that ought to work in King’s favor, with an increasing number of sculptors, fêted internationally, who are producing work that looks remarkably close in spirit, if not quite as regal in sheer mastery of form, as his own. When art historians of the future connect the dots of modern sculpture then artists like Franz West, Stephan Balkenhol, Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, Julian Opie and Rebecca Warren will force recognition of the achievement of King the way King in turn has had us rethink Nadelman and Calder.

The post The Gentle Giant: William King, 1925-2015 appeared first on artcritical.

March 21 to April 19, 2014
511 West 22 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 223 2227

The ocean and bay beaches of the South Fork of Long Island (the Hamptons) are prized, respectively, for their surfing and swimming, but one East Hampton public beach ought some day be a place of pilgrimage for art lovers too thanks to the four decades of aesthetic communing with its genius loci of the painter Connie Fox.  Sammy’s Beach (previously known as Sammi’s Beach) is her Mont Sainte Victoire.

Far from local children throwing pebbles at this American Cézanne, however, Fox is a highly respected member of the artistic community of East Hampton.  Married to sculptor William King and living in the area since 1980, she first discovered the Hamptons at a guest of Elaine de Kooning, her teacher at the University of New Mexico and a lifelong friend.

Her current in-depth show at Danese/Corey, mostly of works from the last few years and the near-nonagenarian painter’s first with this gallery, unites three distinct groups of work extrapolated from this motif: rich, painterly, complexly lyrical and compositionally meandering canvases; austere yet robust black and white striped constructions in acrylic on paper; and dense, detailed, scatological yet calligraphic drawings in ink and charcoal (her Weeds series).  These highly distinct bodies of work, bouncing from observation to constructivism to automatism, are united not so much in sensibility as intensity of engagement with a sense of place. The search feels less for form than for association.

Fox is a sophisticated, intellectually fearless artist whose aesthetics and career are disconcertingly disparate, for she brings a postmodern sense of disruption and questioning to what remains essentially an abstract expressionist vocabulary of gesture and touch. In the vaguely gridular Sammy’s Beach XIV, 2014, for instance, a painting that is at once fleshy and atmospheric she confounds expectations of balance and scale in the treatment of localness and all-overness, in speed and detail, in gestalt and deviation.  While there are passages in her works that can recall Philip Guston (SB, XIV), Charles Burchfield  (SB, III), or Cy Twombly (the Weeds series), her touch, very much  her own,  feels somehow rooted in – or perhaps just more relevant to – a  more recent painting mindset.

Flesh and atmospherics in Sammy’s Beach XIV could signify bathers, perhaps, but her responses to the beach where she swims and walks every day nonetheless remain the opposite of topographical.  Instead, her environment is a trigger for complex reveries taking the artist back to her childhood in Colorado on the edge of the dustbowl.  As her biographer Joyce Beckenstein has written, “She remembers the warm sun turning that dust into a magical orange glow. She remembers the land, the river, the distant Rocky mountains, not as landscape, but as the bony structure, the architecture of the place.” As Fox has indeed devoted another memorable and extended series of paintings to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one could describe Sammy’s Beach not just as her Sainte Victoire but her madeleine.

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