calendario eventi  :: 

X

6/5/2004

Three exhibitions

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Andreas Gursky
522 West 22nd Street
May 8 - June 27

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Andreas Gursky in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street.

The exhibition will include ten large-scale photographs made over the last three years. This will be the artist's first one-person exhibition in New York since his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2001.

Andreas Gursky's new work includes photographs of both landscapes and interior views, large-scale color images that employ subtle manipulations of perspective. The work explores relationships between the documentary and the personal, interior and exterior spaces, and the individual's link to his physical surroundings. The environments he studies are, for the most part, vast and international spaces constructed for the collective group. Gursky's new photographs were made in Brazil, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico, and throughout the United States and Europe.

In southern Brazil, Gursky made São Paulo, Sé, a picture of the city's main multi-level subterranean subway station, and Copan, a photograph of one of Oscar Niemeyer's famous modernist buildings. For one of his most spectacular new works, Gursky traveled to Stateville, Illinois, to photograph the interior of a state penitentiary, where one can see inmates staring out at the viewer from within the abstract grid of prison cells. In another work, Untitled XIII (Mexico), Gursky captured the technicolor landscape of an immense garbage dump outside Mexico City.

Greeley and Fukuyama are both images of cattle ranches, the former a sprawling farm complex in rural Colorado, the latter a cow high-rise outside Tokyo. The latest and most abstract in his soccer field series, Arena III is a bird's-eye view of grounds-keepers installing rolls of sod on a field in Amsterdam. The artist photographed the sea of fans at a Madonna concert in Los Angeles on September 12, 2001, and a mass of workers making chairs in a factory in Nha Trang, Vietnam.

Two entirely abstract photographs are also included in the exhibition: Düsselstrand and PCF, Paris. The former depicts the floor of a public bathhouse in Düsseldorf, while the latter is a view of the ceiling inside the French Communist Party Headquarters, also designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

Andreas Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf and first exhibited his photographs in 1985. The artist's mid-career retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in February, 2001, and subsequently traveled to the Centro de Arte Nacional de la Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Opening: Friday, May 7th, 6:00-8:00pm

Andreas Gursky will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) through Saturday, June 27th, 2004. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Image: Andreas Gursky, C-Print mounted on Plexiglas in Artist's frame

------

Tony Smith
523 West 24th Street
May 8 - June 27

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Tony Smith in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street.

This exhibition will consist of three sculptures—Black Box, The Elevens Are Up, and Wall—and one untitled painting, all made between 1960 and 1964.

After exploring painting in the 1930s, Smith supported himself as an architect for over twenty years, going back to painting in the 1950s. He did not dedicate himself to making sculpture until the following decade, producing his first mature sculptures, including Black Box and Die, in 1962. The artist's first one-person exhibition included both painting and sculpture and was held at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1966, in which all three sculptures in our show were first exhibited.

The sculptures included in our exhibition are among the most reduced forms in Smith's sculptural oeuvre. Black Box, inspired by a card file the artist saw resting on a desk, was the very first sculpture Smith ever fabricated. Sitting on the ground in the yard behind the artist's home, the sculpture initially recalled a child's tombstone, inspiring one of the artist's daughters to ask who was buried there. Black Box was followed by Die, a six-foot steel cube.

The Elevens Are Up, 1963, follows formally on Die. Inspired by the two muscles on the back of the neck which are accentuated when the head falls forward, the sculpture consists of two black steel masses installed face to face, four feet apart. When considering the sculpture and the void in-between the two masses, the work forms a perfect eight-foot cube, similar to Die but based on a measurement slightly larger than what Smith considered the ideal male height.

After creating a maquette for The Elevens Are Up but before fabricating the work in steel, the artist placed the two masses end-to-end, simulating one long, solid sculpture. This arrangement inspired Wall, 1964, measuring eight feet in height and eighteen feet in length.

This show will also mark the first public exhibition of Untitled, 1960, which is among the largest paintings Smith ever made, its fields and voids echoing the artist's sculptural forms.

A major exhibition of Tony Smith's sculpture was organized by IVAM in Valencia, Spain, in 2002, and the accompanying catalogue reproduces several works currently in our exhibition. Smith's work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998. Two of sculptures in our exhibition—The Elevens Are Up, 1963, and Wall, 1964—were recently permanently installed outside the Menil Collection in Houston, alongside New Piece, 1966.

Opening: Friday, May 7th, 6:00-8:00pm

Tony Smith will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) through Saturday, June 27th, 2004. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.

----

Brice Marden
529 West 21st Street
May 8 - June 27

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Brice Marden: Paintings on Marble, the next exhibition in his gallery at 529 West 21st Street.

This exhibition will consist of six small paintings made between 1981 and 1987. Executed in oil on marble fragments, the paintings were produced on the Greek island of Hydra, which the artist first started visiting in 1971.

Marden made a total of 31 paintings on marble. The six-year period in which he executed these works coincided with enormous changes in his more publicly-exhibited paintings: in 1981, before he began working on marble, Marden's paintings were principally geometric monochromes; 1987, the date of his last painting on marble, marks the first public exhibition of his calligraphic paintings. According to the artist, it was the introduction of the diagonal in the marble fragments that helped serve as a stepping stone from rectilinear to more organic form.

As Klaus Kertess notes, marble presented 'an ideal transitional material that was weighty as matter, porous and transparent as surface. Thinly painted straight lines soaked into and became part of the surface transparency. Simple, overlapping rectilinear configurations extended their man-made edges to the organic irregularities of the edges of the marble—edges often painted the colors of the interior configurations and concluding them.'

Last exhibited over two decades ago, the paintings on marble are the least well-known part of Marden's oeuvre. Now that we have a twenty-year perspective on them, perhaps we can better understand the principal role they played in Marden's transition from the more minimal work of the 1960s and 70s to the calligraphic work of the late 1980s through the present.

Opening: Friday, May 7th, 6:00-8:00pm

Brice Marden: Paintings on Marble will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 529 West 21st Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) through June 27th, 2004. Hours: Thursday and Friday, 1:00pm to 6:00pm; and Saturday, 11:00am to 6:00pm.

For further information or reproductions please contact Sabrina Buell at 212-243-0200.

Matthew Marks Gallery
522 West 22nd Street,
523 West 24th Street,
529 West 21st Street
New York

stampa

permanent link