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3/4/2002

Milton Resnick - John Laughlin

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

The Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings from the 1950s and 1960s by Milton Resnick. The exhibition will open with a reception on April 4, from 6 to 8 pm.

Milton Resnick's early paintings are a challenge to our understanding of the development of American abstraction. Instead of arriving at abstraction through a logical series of experiments like many of his generation, Resnick made a more emotional "leap of faith" and ignored intellectual justification. In the late 1950s Resnick began to diverge from the reigning style of Abstract Expressionism toward a style characterized by gesture of a smaller scale. This reduced scale lent itself to an overall composition in which color and the effect of a "field" played a greater role than drawing as the dominant expressive element. Resnick was striving to make paintings which had no specific focus, where one part of the canvas was not more important than another. He eliminated line altogether, replacing it with an increased painterliness, and eschewed color theory for a direct confrontation with paint. With line no longer functioning as the boundary of structure, Resnick evolved forms which were vaporous and impressionistic. The paintings remained remarkably animated but achieved a greater subtlety. This stylistic shift evoked Monet and other painting legacies of the past and opened the way to Resnick's monochromatic field paintings of the 1980s.

Actuated by his indelible conviction that painting can exist without boundaries, Milton Resnick has continued to expand his exceptional body of work throughout a career spanning more than 60 years. This will be Milton Resnick's tenth exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery.

The Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985) exhibition of photographs

The exhibition will open with a reception on April 4, from 6 to 8 pm.

Photographer, writer, architectural historian, bibliophile, poet of the imagination, Clarence John Laughlin was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana and spent most of his life in and around New Orleans. Largely self-taught, influenced by Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Weston and others, Laughlin first began taking photographs in the early 1930s. During a working career spanning four decades, Laughlin created one of the largest and most original bodies of photographic art of the 20th Century. He continued to photograph actively until 1967 and lectured and wrote until his death in 1985.

Laughlin became best known for his collection of photographs and essays, "Ghosts Along the Mississippi." The book, published in 1948, centered on Louisiana manor houses evolving from the plantation culture which flourished along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. With unusual photographic effects and careful attention to light, Laughlin transmogrified the decaying houses according to his own surrealistic vision. While devoted to the documentation of historic structures, Laughlin had an equally passionate commitment to a highly personal application of photography to evoke the underlying mystery of the world. He freely used multiple exposures, theatrical stagings and lengthy captions to bridge the gap between the visible world and a metaphysical realm of fantasy and intuition. His synthesis of high and vernacular art, literature, mythology, psychology, and history represents a uniquely inclusive and stimulating artistic vision.

The work of Clarence John Laughlin has been the subject of exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world. His prints are in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the New Orleans Museum of Art and other museums worldwide.

Image: F.L.W., 1960 Oil on canvas

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street, NY 10001

stampa

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