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14/3/2014

Two exhibitions

Kayne Griffin Corcoran (new venues), Los Angeles

John Tweddle

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition of work by John Tweddle. The exhibition, curated by Alanna Heiss, will consist of paintings drawn from the Scull Collection, one of America’s most historically significant collections of 20th century art. Tweddle, born in Pinckneyville, Kentucky in 1938, moved to New York City as the nineteen-sixties drew to a close. His first exhibition at Green Gallery with legendary Richard Bellamy, who remained a staunch supporter the rest of his life caught the attention of Robert Scull, an early champion of Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol.
Informed by his Southern childhood, Tweddle drew liberally from the “low art” traditions of cartoons and comic books while mounting an intellectually rigorous exploration of capitalism, iconography and the counterculture revolution. The resultant work bold, primal, deliberately naive drew upon an authentic American experience far removed from the cultural loci of New York. However, as the decade wore on and Tweddle found himself more deeply entrenched in the artistic establishment, his canvases evinced a growing concern with the interplay of art and commerce. By 1980, Tweddle had retreated from New York’s cultural milieu, preferring instead to work in relative isolation.
The paintings on display, completed between 1968 and 1986, capture a particularly fertile period in the artist’s career. In Grace Glueck’s review of his 1983 exhibition at the Blum Helman Gallery, she notes that Tweddle’s “structure is iconic, usually consisting of a vignette with a narrative subject, ringed by formal borders that incorporate a ll manner of signs and symbols.” Central among his recurring motifs is the dollar sign, which serves as a visual shorthand for Tweddle’s own discomfort with the commodification of art. Tweddle arranges these symbols of contemporary culture into intricate and meticulously plotted patterns reminiscent of patchwork quilting, Navajo tapestry and aboriginal bark painting. Thus rooted in folk art tradition, Tweddle’s rough edged brushwork and dusty palette of ochre and green render icons of the American landscape with a dark and chaotic complexity.
John Tweddle has exhibited at such institutions as MOMA P.S.1 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht and his work can be found in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Tweddle, who has twice received grants from National Endowment for the Arts, lives and works in New Mexico. Alanna Heiss, Director of Clocktower Productions, is a leader of the groundbreaking early 1970’s alternative spaces movement in New York City, which radically changed the way large scale art projects were produced, shown, and seen. In 1972 she founded the legendary Clocktower Gallery, and in 1976 she founded P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) which she directed for 32 years, and transformed into an internationally renowned non collecting center for the production and presentation of contemporary art. Heiss has organized over 700 exhibitions at P.S.1 and in art spaces around the world. In 2003 founded Art Radio WPS1.org, the Internet radio station of P.S.1 and first ever all art museum station. Among her numerous publications are catalogues of the work of Janet Cardiff, Alex Katz, Den nis Oppenheim, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Katharina Sieverding, and John Wesley. Heiss was Commissioner of the 1985 Paris Biennial, and Commissioner of the 1986 American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She served as Chief Curator of the Tribute for John Cage, organized for the 1993 Venice Biennial, and as the Curatorial Director of the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, and she was a panelist for the 2005 Yokohama Triennial. She is the recipient of the Mayor’s Award for Contributions to the Artistic Viability of New York City, France’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in the Légion d’Honneur, the Royal Swedish Order of the Polar Star, the Skowhegan Award for outstanding work in the arts, and the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1943, Ms. Heiss resides in New York City with her husband, Fredrick Sher.

Image by John Tweddle

------- Ken Price

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present the gallery’s second exhibition of work by the sculptor Ken Price (1935-2012). This exhibition will consist of one work Unit 6 first exhibited as part of Happy’s Curios, Price’s 1978 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Over the course of his career, Ken Price crafted a body of revolutionary sculpture that challenged the conventional perception of ceramics, formerly dismissed as a primarily functional or commercial medium. Price’s work harken s back to the German Bauhaus movement, which sought to transcend rigid boundaries of artistic expression by marrying fine art with craft. Although best known for his late career series of organically shaped sculptures, it was his collection of Happy’s Curios, a tender and slyly humorous homage to the ceramics of the Southwest, that served as the subject of Price’s first major museum retrospective. In 1970, having achieved some critical success in Los Angeles, Price settled in Taos, New Mexico with his wife Happy. Shortly thereafter, Price found himself drawn to the Mexican and Pre-Columbian ceramics sold in roadside stalls and local markets. Moved by the tradition’s rich trove of history and vitality, Price set to work on an homage to Mexican folk art th at would eventually encompass cabinets of functional pottery, paintings, textiles, and a number of multimedia “Death Shrines.” Upon completion, the artist planned to open a storefront to house the mixed media installation, fondly named Happy's Curios.
In his recent eulogy for Price in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl attests that Happy’s Curios “revolutionized my views of ceramic art...though suggesting crude manufacture, they are paper-thin and feather light material reveries. They aren’t about skill but about how skill can serve intelligence and imagination.” Indeed, in his ceramic cups and compact“bombs,” housed in domestic cabinets built of white-washed wood, the artist stresses the intimacy of the object as well as its cultural precedent and the elegance of its functional design. Price’s concern with the holistic integrity of a work, so apparent in the layered colours and deliberate hollows of his later sculpture, can be traced to Happy’s Curios. In the meticulous application of traditional Oaxa can glazes to a jar’s sheltered lip, or in the expressive void traced by the handle of a mug, it is possible to see Price’s practiced and hidden hand.
Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Price took a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California before receiving an M.F.A. from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred in 1959. Since his first solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’ influential Ferus Gallery in the 1960s, Price has shown at such institutions as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Drawing Center in N ew York, the Getty Centre in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Tate Museum in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His work can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Following Price’s death in 2012, LACMA staged a major retrospective of his work, which subsequently travelled to the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Opening Saturday MArch 15th 2014 at 6p.m.

Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles
Opening hours: Tuesday -Saturday 10 - 18
Free admission

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