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29/7/2012

Robert Ryman / Bruce Nauman

Gagosian Gallery - Madison Ave, New York

Robert Ryman
Untitled: A Painting in Four Parts, 1963–1964

"…there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image—the end product".
Robert Ryman

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present four paintings by Robert Ryman.

Ryman’s principal concern over the decades has been the ontology of painted surface in relation to its underlying support. He considers this relation to be highly performative in nature, often referring to the support as the “stage.” This ongoing investigation has yielded infinite visual possibilities without resort to images, implied spaces or manipulations of framing. In all his paintings the outer edges of the support are left bare and unpainted, so there is no doubt as to its equal importance. His works are typically square in format, and use white paint laid over partially visible, darker colored grounds.

Ryman has used a wide variety of paints since the 1950s, from gloss and semi-gloss to matte, from thin to viscous, and he handles them in many different ways to subtly nuanced effect. His supports range similarly, from industrial metal to linen to canvas, and finally to the wall itself. The wall, the light quality and the overall spatial confines each play an active role in the experience and meaning of Ryman's works, whatever their size and no matter what the interaction between paint and support.

In this group of four untitled paintings from 1963–1964, Ryman explores the nuanced effects of acrylic paint on aluminum. Textural variations serve as a map of the tools and gestures used in their making—crisscrossed grey patches of thick impasto contrast with silky, opaque squares and swathes of primary blue, yellow and teal. Sheer grey paint partially covers the aluminum surface, where muted fluctuations in saturation and shimmering glimpses of the raw support alter tone and texture. Looking at the surface of these paintings is to become totally immersed in their compositions, interplay of gestures, and improvisations. It is the existential physicality of Ryman’s paintings that impresses—their simple insistence on being.

Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1930. He studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville. He began to paint while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953. Solo exhibitions include the Dia Art Foundation (1988); “Robert Ryman,” The Tate Gallery, London (1993, traveled to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis through 1994); and “Robert Ryman at Inverleith House,” Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh Scotland (2006). His work has been included in Documenta (1972, 1977 and 1982); the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980); the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995); and the Carnegie International (1985, 1988). A permanent installation of Ryman’s paintings opened at Dia: Beacon in 2003. Ryman lives and works in New York and Pennsylvania.

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Bruce Nauman
One Hundred Fish Fountain

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present One Hundred Fish Fountain by Bruce Nauman.

Since the 1960s, Nauman's radical interdisciplinary approach has challenged conventions while producing new methodologies for making art and meaning. Body and selfhood, the role of language, the phenomena of spatial awareness, and the relationship between artistic process and viewer participation are recurring themes in his art. His rigorous and spare approach to existential questions of life and death, love and hate, pleasure and pain, has embraced many mediums including performance, video, holography, installation, neon, sculpture, and drawing. From the forms and attitudes that he invented in Post-Minimalism and Conceptual art to his most recent sound installations, a series of themes and ideas consistently appear: the use of the human body as material; the relationship between art and language; and such dichotomies as concealment and revelation via the exploration of positive and negative space.

As the title states, One Hundred Fish Fountain (2005) comprises nearly as many hollow bronze fish, cast from nature and suspended in the air on wires, as if swimming in deep water. Below them is a shallow basin, deftly cobbled together from rubber sheeting, which measures 25 feet by 28 feet. The environmentally scaled sculpture all but fills the room, allowing just a narrow track for the viewer to edge around the perimeter, in much the same way as Nauman's early corridor works first invited then restricted movement.

Some of the fish are set just a foot or two above the basin while others hang as high as ten feet, creating a loose topological structure. Water is pumped intermittently into each of them via snaking intravenous tubes. Once the fish fill up with water, they spurt energetically via random perforations. The thousand or so rivulets of water thus produced create an effusive aural and visual din that imparts to the work the humid force of a natural waterfall. The fountain runs like this for fifteen minutes, shuts down for two, and then the cycle begins anew. As the pumping ceases, the water slows to a drip until it ceases altogether. The draining water is caught in the basin beneath, where it is reticulated so that the process can resume. During the passive period, the noise and activity all but cease; what had been an exuberant spurt slows to a deathly drip until the pump kicks back in and life returns.

A native of the American heartland, Nauman has rarely cited it as an overt influence, however, he has acknowledged that One Hundred Fish Fountain is rooted in his memories of boyhood fishing expeditions with his father. The fish that make up this extraordinary ensemble are the kinds that he used to catch all those years ago—catfish, bass, whitefish and so on. All those employed in the casting of this remarkable nature morte were caught in the Great Lakes by Nauman and his friend and dealer, the late Donald Young, thus anchoring this unique and poignant work even more firmly to the locus of autobiography.

One Hundred Fish Fountain also recalls the exhilarative air of Nauman's seminal Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966–67), his corporeal riposte to Marcel's Duchamp's game-changing readymade. But by re-visiting the prank of his artistic youth and transferring the irreverent gesture into the terms of monumental sculpture and ecological metaphor, he also grants the viewer a visceral immersion in the systole and diastole of time and memory.

Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied mathematics, physics and studio at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and then pursued an MFA at the University of California, Davis. Recent solo exhibitions include “Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage),” the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2002); “Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio,” Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Basel, Switzerland (2002); “Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience,” Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany (2003); “Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me,” Tate Liverpool, England (2006); “A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s,” UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (2007); “Bruce Nauman: Dead Shot Dan,” Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2009); and “Notations/Bruce Nauman: Days and Giorni,” Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009). His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1985, 1987, 1991, and 1997) and the Venice Biennale (1978, 1980, 1999, 2005, and 2007).

Nauman lives and works in Northern New Mexico.

Opening reception for the artist: Monday, July 30th, from 6 to 8 pm

Gagosian Gallery - Madison Ave
980 Madison Ave New York
Tue–Sat 10:00am–6:00pm
Admission free

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