The exhibition includes paintings, adhesive wall works and a selection of the artist's celebrated neon works. Discovering neon in the early '60, Morellet has been drawn time and again to its quantifiable physical properties, as well as to its cool, mechanized luminescence.
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of work by seminal French
abstractionist François Morellet. The exhibition will include paintings, adhesive wall works
and a selection of the artist's celebrated neon works.
Over the course of five decades, François Morellet has sought to subvert conventional
narratives of artistic construction as a pioneer of geometric abstraction, and as a founding
member of GRAV, France’s influential Kinetic collective. In applying a set of self-imposed
mathematical constraints to simple lines and geometric shapes, the artist has emerged as
what critic Thomas McEvilley termed a "postmodern Pythagorean." Blending this
dispassionate, codified process with a sly humor immediately apparent in his titles, Morellet
mounts a progressive and insistent inquiry into the behavior of continually expanding systems.
Morellet's neon installation NoendneoN will be on view in the main gallery. Discovering neon
in the early nineteen-sixties, Morellet has been drawn time and again to its quantifiable
physical properties, as well as to its cool, mechanized luminescence. The central palindrome
of NoendneoN addresses the artist's enduring interest in wordplay. A series of slender argon
tubes, intersecting the gallery wall at slanted angles, explores the concept of the infinite
canvas. Although the perimeters of the installation are necessarily defined by physical
restrictions, NoendneoN is governed by a continuous system, and in the mind's eye it is easy
to conceive of the work extending, indefinitely, into space.
In the adhesive installations Tamponades, also in the main gallery, Morellet refers to his
signature grid works composed of parallel lines. Using an ink pad and stamp the artist
composes a template which is magnified and transposed during installation, substituting the
titular stamp for strips of black adhesive applied directly to the gallery wall.
The artist further attests to the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of neon in the south
gallery, where he works on a more intimate scale. In a series of white canvas paintings, neon
light illuminates the stark beauty of a precise right angle or hypotenuse, while in the sculpture
Lamentable, fragile neon tubes form a deconstructed loop suspended from the ceiling. As he
deftly manipulates the material properties of neon, Morellet challenges the rigid notions that
govern our perception of the medium's boundaries.
François Morellet's work can be found in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where Morellet is one of three contemporary
artists to contribute a permanent work to the museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, which recently acquired his renowned painting Random distribution of 40,000 squares
according to the odd and even numbers of a telephone directory. He has been the subject of
career retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum in New York,
and has exhibited at such institutions as the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, and the Grand Palais and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Born in 1926, Morellet lives in
Cholet, France.
Opening: Thursday, September 19, 7–9pm
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles
Hours: tuesday - saturday 10am - 6pm