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26/10/2007

Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas / Stanley Whitney

Esso Gallery, New York

Two pioneers of American sculpture / Works on paper 1999

Two pioneers of American sculpture

Jennifer and Filippo Fossati are honored to present a collaborative exhibition of two pioneers of American sculpture: Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas.

Beside the obvious coincidence of geographical and generational similarities, the association of these two very different personalities reveals more then a common approach to making sculpture and a strong idea about art that transcends the physicality and the shape of the object made. Art is crucial for both of these artists since the experience communicated doesn’t necessarily concur with the object made. The experience is not a mere autobiographical conjuncture and it does not identify with art itself.

The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti once wrote: “Je ne suis pas un poète, mais un homme” (I am not a poet, but a man). Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas are both of a very rare species of man. They are men who have devoted their lives to something bigger then man itself, that is to say, art. They both avoid the fashion of the moment, artifice, and when possible, everything predictable. They follow chance because it of its fundamental roll in life and in art and they have radically pursued their own ideas about it. This attitude has brought both more recognition in Europe possibly because of a perception of time that is different from the fast pace of the new continent where they live and work.

The subject which is of greatest interest to both Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas is the quality of the work and of its consequent behavior toward the world and the universe. It’s clear how much of their thinking and their operative formulas owe to the theories of form as psychological composition: the same contraposition between being in the world, physically feeling its presence, while simultaneously setting it aside to find a unity of measure derives from formulations like those of empathy and abstraction which spread with abundance in modernism and in the avant-garde at the beginning of the last century. These two sculptors appear from an organic unity and vitality of plastic art rather than visual thought, more from a constructive possibility then from a cognitive survey.

Gary Kuehn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1939. He received his MFA in 1964 from Rutgers University where he still teaches today. He studied with Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal and Robert Watts in the early sixties and worked on construction sites as a steel worker and a roofer. His works have been shown in several exhibitions since the sixties, including the groundbreaking and legendary exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in 1969 curated by Harald Szeeman in Bern, Switzerland. This year his work was shown at Galerie Michael Haas in Zurich, at the Museum for Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, and at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz.

Richard Nonas was born in New York City in 1936. He was trained as an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College and Columbia University, NY and University of North Carolina and spent ten years among the Canadian Inuit and tribes in the desert of Mexico. He has exhibited his sculpture nationally and internationally and has shown at the Musée d’art Modern et Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, and completed permanent installations of his sculpture in Austria, France and Sweden. His most recent exhibitions include “48th OCTOBER SALON: Micro-narratives”, at the Belgrade Cultural Centre curated by Lóránd Hegyi.

Both artists have been living and working in Manhattan since the mid 60s and have works included in the collections of museums and other public institutions throughout the world.
testoing:
Jennifer and Filippo Fossati are honored to present a collaborative exhibition of two pioneers of American sculpture: Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas.

Beside the obvious coincidence of geographical and generational similarities, the association of these two very different personalities reveals more then a common approach to making sculpture and a strong idea about art that transcends the physicality and the shape of the object made. Art is crucial for both of these artists since the experience communicated doesn’t necessarily concur with the object made. The experience is not a mere autobiographical conjuncture and it does not identify with art itself.

The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti once wrote: “Je ne suis pas un poète, mais un homme” (I am not a poet, but a man). Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas are both of a very rare species of man. They are men who have devoted their lives to something bigger then man itself, that is to say, art. They both avoid the fashion of the moment, artifice, and when possible, everything predictable. They follow chance because it of its fundamental roll in life and in art and they have radically pursued their own ideas about it. This attitude has brought both more recognition in Europe possibly because of a perception of time that is different from the fast pace of the new continent where they live and work.

The subject which is of greatest interest to both Gary Kuehn and Richard Nonas is the quality of the work and of its consequent behavior toward the world and the universe. It’s clear how much of their thinking and their operative formulas owe to the theories of form as psychological composition: the same contraposition between being in the world, physically feeling its presence, while simultaneously setting it aside to find a unity of measure derives from formulations like those of empathy and abstraction which spread with abundance in modernism and in the avant-garde at the beginning of the last century. These two sculptors appear from an organic unity and vitality of plastic art rather than visual thought, more from a constructive possibility then from a cognitive survey.

Gary Kuehn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1939. He received his MFA in 1964 from Rutgers University where he still teaches today. He studied with Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal and Robert Watts in the early sixties and worked on construction sites as a steel worker and a roofer. His works have been shown in several exhibitions since the sixties, including the groundbreaking and legendary exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in 1969 curated by Harald Szeeman in Bern, Switzerland. This year his work was shown at Galerie Michael Haas in Zurich, at the Museum for Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, and at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz.

Richard Nonas was born in New York City in 1936. He was trained as an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College and Columbia University, NY and University of North Carolina and spent ten years among the Canadian Inuit and tribes in the desert of Mexico. He has exhibited his sculpture nationally and internationally and has shown at the Musée d’art Modern et Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, and completed permanent installations of his sculpture in Austria, France and Sweden. His most recent exhibitions include “48th OCTOBER SALON: Micro-narratives”, at the Belgrade Cultural Centre curated by Lóránd Hegyi.

Both artists have been living and working in Manhattan since the mid 60s and have works included in the collections of museums and other public institutions throughout the world.

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Stanley Whitney, Works on paper 1999

Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati are pleased to present in the North Gallery for the first time an exhibition of works on paper by New York-based painter Stanley Whitney. This small selection of pastels and black and white drawings of superlative quality reveals an aspect of the process that lies behind the making of his colorful canvases and provides a wealth of cues for understanding his apparently “simple” paintings . Whitney creates paintings in which color, composition and chance are all constituent elements. The apparently random patterning of color in his canvases recall those patterns that can sometimes be seen in the cloth and quilt making of artists of the American south.

Though the subject matter, style, and impact of the works presented share the same modular pattern, an unaffected, hand-wrought beauty and a reverence for the expressive possibilities of the drawn line, it’s impressive to discover that they are greatly varied, that infinite possibilities can be played in a grid. Deconstruction of the grid may be suggested in the original planning, but the result is free gestural movement. While Whitney reduces the number of shapes to lines, he expands their chromatic relational possibilities. Some particular features characterize his style; by building his concept purely as form, he finds its integration with the concept, and by focusing on this integration as a whole, he finds them again separate and independent.

Stanley Whitney earned degrees from the Kansas City Art Institute and Yale University. His work has been shown in many exhibitions in galleries and museums in United States and abroad; among them the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum Harlem, Alternative Museum New York, Magazzino d’Arte Moderna Rome, Jack Tilton Gallery NY Christine König Gallery Vienna, radioartemobile, Utopia Station, created by Zerynthia Rome for Venice Biennial, Galleria Carlina, Torino. Upcoming shows include Galerie Ramis Barquet, Monterey Mexico, and Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy. His paintings are held in numerous private and public collections all over the world. He is represented by Esso Gallery.

Image: Stanley Whitney

Esso Gallery
531 West 26th Street 4th floor - New York

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