The first stain paintings of mine that had hard-edge bands on the bottom all generate from the late summer of 1969. The bands served three major purposes for the meaning and expression of my paintings at the time.

I was invited to have my first one-man show at the new David Whitney Gallery at 53 E. 19th Street in Manhattan in October 1969. The inaugural exhibition at the gallery in September 1969 was a group show and mine was to be the first one-man show.

In August 1969 after returning to New York City from a trip to California I painted ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’, 108 x 168 inches – a stained landscape with thick, and free-wheeling abstract pours of opaque, linear, colors, thrown across the main body of stained abstract landscape and a wide yellow band across the bottom of the painting. In the yellow band I splattered and splashed acrylic paint so as to create a kind of abstract calligraphy in the band. The painting in now in the permanent collection of the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie.

Prior to my trip to California that July I had made a major series of ‘’Pour’’ paintings and ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ was initially a continuation of that series. However as I contemplated the state of painting, the state of the world and my sense of what it was that I wanted to say as an artist; I saw ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ as the beginning of something radically new and in my own voice as an artist.
One of the paintings that immediately followed was ‘’Diamond Lake’’, 108 x 168 inches. ‘’Diamond Lake’’ redefined the art of painting.

That painting is a stained landscape with a hard-edge violet band across the bottom and soft and pale stained colors across the top. The top reads as sky, the stained mid-section in the body reads as landscape and the violet band at the bottom serves a threefold function.

In response to the criticism lodged by Donald Judd that painting was dead because it was illusionistic and was a lie because it didn’t own up to its objecthood; I decided to move the art of painting forward by re-defining it via its own past. By creating new paintings that were illusionistic, pictorial and anti-object. In response as well to the demand by Clement Greenberg that painting be unified, – one thing – one way – I was determined to create a new type of painting that was in keeping with my view of my generation incorporating several philosophies of art-making into my paintings at once. A simile in music might be folk-rock; or the separate sections in a song like ‘’Hey Jude’’.

Moving forward by looking backward. Consequently I distilled my new work beginning with ‘’Diamond Lake’’ into foreground – middle ground – and background sections. The hard-edge bands serving as foregrounds. Initially they were particularly high – almost taking up the bottom third of the picture. The purpose was to project out to the viewer, creating a literal foreground. While the main stained body drew the viewer in with multiple layers of thinned colors, and the sky at the top evoking infinite space.

By aggressively creating physically powerful, cutting edge, abstract paintings that evoked nature – landscape – and foreground, middle ground and background, I was sending a message to artists and art lovers alike in contradiction of Judd’s dictums.

By combining hard-edge areas with stained areas I was directly addressing Greenberg’s proscribed limitations by essentially changing the priorities of picture making to express and evoke the sometimes contradictory truths of modern life as I perceived it.

The second and perhaps more important underlying meaning of the hard-edge bands in my paintings was the necessity to express the truth of life. The landscape, stained sections of my paintings evoke nature, freedom, wilderness, and the bands include the man-made element that defines our lives in today’s world. Architecture, roads, buildings against nature, telephone lines, electric poles, set against the virtual lack of true wilderness in today’s world. Even as we drift from canyon to canyon as I used to do in the wilderness of Utah and other places we are proscribed in our lives with appointments and responsibilities, and limits – the bands are metaphors for that essential truth of our lives…

The final meaning of my use of the hard-edge bands was perhaps the most important, certainly one of the most important aspects of my work. I am an admirer of American abstract expressionism, characterized by large scale, aggressive, brash, and matter of fact, in your eye, surfaces and color. Perhaps those descriptive elements defined some of American culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. I am also an admirer of the history of art.

We were engaged in war in Southeast Asia, and I opposed that war. I was opposed to our aggression against a small, helpless country like Vietnam and throughout that region of the world. My stained landscapes have their roots in Song Dynasty Chinese Landscape painting, characterized by flatness and the depiction of a wide range of terrain at once. Song Dynasty Landscape painting is the beginning of all landscape painting pre-dating the art of the west by a couple of centuries. A visual characteristic of Chinese landscape is the presence of geometric chops, adding the calligraphic signature of the artist as well as calligraphic written poetry; often those paintings on silk were bordered on both sides. The colors and subtlety of those Chinese landscape paintings were stained into the silk fabric reminiscent of the subtlety and color of stain paintings.
My bands are my version of those artist chops. The size and scale of my paintings being aggressive, and evocative of abstract expressionism. Hofmann, Rothko, and Pollock (see ‘’Portrait and A Dream’’) being important inspirations, for duality and the psychological language of color and scale. In the first stain, band paintings that I made in the late summer of 1969 several including ‘’Rain Dance’’ I, II, III, and IV as well as ‘’Elijah’’ (108×55 inches, US State Department) , and ‘’Any Day Now’’, (108×93 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art), there are drawn and painterly lines – my version of calligraphy in the hard-edge bands, further identifying with Chinese landscape in my own terms. The size, brightness, and aggressive surfaces of my paintings are unmistakably western, but the format and iconography is unmistakably eastern. The reflection and respect for eastern philosophy being also a major inspiration for my work as an artist in the 1960s. My stain band paintings serve as a marriage between east and west. Creating a philosophical unity of east and west being an important aspect of one of the most important issues of our lives…

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Stephen Haller Gallery
542 26th Street
New York 10001
212-741-7777

February 26 to April 5, 2005

One of the down sides of the Greenbergian formalism in the 1960s was its insufficient appreciation of how the energy and aggression, first of the Civil Rights movement and then the anti-Vietnam War protests, may have infiltrated the art of the period. While this synthesis of reductive art and aggressive energy is perhaps more apparent in non-painterly pursuits such as the complex, geometric sculpture of Barry Le Va (good examples of which can be found in the current survey of his work at the ICA in Philadelphia through April 3. 2005), I would like to argue that a similar, if more low key, synthesis can be found in a range of Larry Zox’s works currently on view at the Stephen Haller Gallery in Chelsea. There is perhaps a rough correspondence between Le Va’s broken plates of glass and Zox’s broken planes of color. Each artist creates a broken geometry that releases an energy that encourages the viewer to do more than meditate as his or her responsive eye becomes embodied. It is this energy that I propose gives the edge to the dynamic, hard-edge paintings of Larry Zox. This edgy energy manifests itself in the way the color field is split into angular color areas separated by canvas channels, the earliest example in this exhibition being the splendid “Diagonal I” (1965). Despite this separation, the colors interact dynamically as they try to complete the broken geometries; triangles and polygons trying to reconstitute themselves create a color field under tension. Further tension is created by Zox’s ability to juggle both sour and sweet colors–orange, red, yellow, green, purple and unnamable blues vie for attention. These spatial and color dynamics are jointly present in “Green Diamond Drill: Keokuk” (1968), perhaps the most realized single work in this survey. And then there are the wonderful blacks. It is black that I propose that enables Zox to orchestrate color combinations that, in the best works, are simultaneously hot and cool as in jazz. Indeed, these interlocking units of color achieve the kind of shared rhythm we experience with a good dance partner. But this is no waltz; it is the era’s twist in all its funky joy.

More generally, Zox’s “tough love” color-field formats whether they be in the Diamond Drill, Rotation, Scissors Jack, or Diamond Cut series, more than hold there own with competing color field painters, be they Stella, Olitski, Frankenthaler, Noland or Dzubas. These so-called Post-Painterly Abstraction painters look soft and “pretty” compared to Zox’s best work such as “Green Diamond Drill: Keokuk” (1968), Diamond Cut series (1966) or “Scissor Jack for Jean” (1965). Indeed, looking a fresh at these works and seeing the “Protractor” paintings of Frank Stella from the same general mid-to-late 60’s period (currently at Jacobson-Howard (March/April, 2005) and Kasmin (through March 26, 2005), Zox’s paintings hold up better. They are less decorative and hermetic; they are more dynamic both pictorially and in terms of being better attuned to the energy of the period. As, however, Zox becomes interested in seeing color in more puristic terms, the energy literally flags. First, slowly in the Gemini series, then more quickly in the static but coloristically beautiful color-field works of the early 70s (not included in this show). Zox temporarily appears to lose his color compass in works such as Weshcubb (1993). Here the drawing elements interfere with the color field interactions. The good news, however, is that in the most recent Zox painting in the exhibition, “Algonkin I” (2004), color and line have begun once more to work well together.

Whether the new work can match the best of Zox’s work from the mid-to-late 60s may, however, be besides the point. In the sixties, Zox achieved a brilliant synthesis of form, line and color that transcended the softness of Greenbergian Post-Painterly Abstraction. In effect, Zox reached back to the rhythmic geometrics of Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, adding to Mondrian a dazzling array of color pyrotechnics.

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“Nobu Fukui” at Stephen Haller Gallery through May 18 (542 W26 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 741 7777)

“Alexander Liberman: No Regrets” at Ameringer Yohe, through April 24 (20 W 57th Street, bewteen fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212 445 0051)

“Fred Sandback” through end May at Lawrence Markey Gallery 42 East 76th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212 517 9892, and at Zwirner and Wirth, through May 1, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-86

Minimalism was so strenously and self-consciously iconoclastic, with its prim reductions, its insistently banal primary structures, and its chromophobia, that there is an almost equally iconoclastic pleasure to be had in work that takes up some aspect of this movement but recklessly adds whimsy or gaiety.

Several shows up right now that fit this bill. None of the artists set out to debunk minimalism: one historically precedes it, others dutifully pay homage to the movement. But it doesn’t require a radical misreading of these artists to see an implicit critique of puritanism in their catholic displays of gesture or color.

The small painted boxes of Stuart Arends know how to behave in polite company: They have been collected assidiously by the Panza di Buomo Collection in Italy, which specializes in minimal and monochromatic art. But they are touched by a delicacy and personal, even poetic quality that belies any sense of severity.

The artist has insisted on their status as paintings rather than sculptures, suggesting in a statement that accompanies the show that he arrived at the box as his preferred support out of a desire to deal with a painting as an object “rather than just a format for illusions”. The box isn’t suggestive of a receptical; rather it is just a canvas whose wrap around edges happen to have equal weight to its frontage.

The painting is made up of neatly delineated, irregularly overlapping rectangles. There is a specificness to his touch, which is restrained but personal, sealed-in (with much use of wax) and at the same time differentiated, with a different kind of brushstroke for each rectangle. As if to emphasize the personality of these charmingly particular objects, Mr. Arends has called his show “Friends,” giving each piece a person’s name. His show is a party where you want to linger and meet everyone.

In 1965 Nobu Fukui elicited a cryptic description from Donald Judd, the high priest of minimalism, in a brief notice in Arts Magazine: “The paintings are well done; there isn’t anything wrong with them-they aren’t elegant, bland or affected-but they are like other paintings.” While Mr. Fukui’s work has changed radically in the intervening decades-his aesthetic is now exuberant and layered to the point of being baroque-Judd’s enigmatic categorizations hold true with remarkable alacrity.

Mr. Fukui is an artist who, literally, juggles many balls: a typical work lays upon a ground of richly detailed, dense gestural and/or collaged texture a rigid grid structure populated at the intersections of its ruled lines with irregular clusters of colored uniformly sized dots and, less frequently, actual balls (they could be beads or marbles) dipped in paints of the same primary and nursery colors.

The viewer soon gets used to these grids and balls so that they shimmer on the retina like a layer of pointillism. There is, however, an insistent democracy between the layers, and within each layer, despite the irregularity, an all-overness that achieves order without symmetry or ubiquity. The collage materials, where he uses them, hover ingeniously between interestingness and gratuity. In fact, his whole project seems to be a bravura balancing act of meaning and decoration, as if these aesthetic categories themselves are willed equivalents of order and chaos.

Dots and balls of a sparer nature but no less whimsy and charm filled the works of Alexander Liberman between 1950-1960, an elegant selection of which, installed in direct emulation of a show staged by the artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960, closes at Ameringer Yohe this weekend. Reviewing the Parsons show in Arts magazine, Judd noted that “the economy is admirable.”

These works are, indeed, about economy for the sake of vigor and dynamism rather than reduction for its own, cerebral or theoretical sake. They look to Russian Constructivism, (the “Yellow Continuum” series directly recalling Rodchenko and El Lissitsky) but despite their precionism and hard-edged clarity they equally bring to mind the pulsating, wobbly disks of Miró or the child-like joie de vivre of Calder, especially Liberman’s last disk painting in this show, an untitled work from 1960 that pits a hand-drawn larger yellow and smaller red ball against a dazzle of ultramarine.

Liberman was the legendary art editor at Condé Nast who managed to maintain a serious practice as a fine artist despite the pressures of his job and the snobbish distance, before the era of Andy Warhol, between the worlds of art and fashion. He was a great collector and patron of artists, but there is plenty of positive evidence in these joyful, bracing works to overcome any suspicion of the depth of admiration felt for this artist by such peers as de Kooning, Newman, and later, of course, Judd.

On the face of it, the late Fred Sandback-the subject of a two-part exhibition at Lawrence Markey and the uptown premises of David Zwirner-was as minimal as they come.
His trademark material was store-purchased brightly colored acrylic yarn, stretched taut between floor and ceiling, or forming right angles to a wall. These lines of string inevitably force awareness of their environment in a way that displaces attention from the object itself to its impact, a classic hallmark of minimalism.

And yet, severe, pristine, reductive as Sandback first appears, the effect of his string pieces is strangely sculptural. You become aware not so much of the room itself, although that is a factor, as of planes defined in space. And the sense of implied continuation, the thought that the lines must continue through to other rooms and spaces, adds a poetic element alien to hard core minimal art. Despite his drastic means, Sandback was ultimately more of a connector to artistic traditions than a disruptor of them. His professed preference for the expressive figuration of Giacometti over the presumed affinity between his own work and the Russian contructivists is richly suggestive and rings true.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

The post Stuart Arends at Gallery Schlesinger, Nobu Fukui at Stephen Haller Gallery, Alexander Liberman at Ameringer Yohe, Fred Sandback at Lawrence Markey Gallery appeared first on artcritical.