calendario eventi  :: 

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18/2/2009

Two exhibitions

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Kenneth Snelson
Selected Work: 1948 - 2009

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that a major exhibition of works by Kenneth Snelson will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on February 19 and continue through March 21, 2009. This will be Snelson’s third exhibition with Marlborough in New York.
The show will feature fourteen selected sculptures that span the length of Snelson’s career to date and will include such seminal works as Moving Column 1st study, 1948-1981, Wood X-Piece, 1948-1981 and Bead Chain X-Column, 1959, plus important works from the Minimalist period including Three Reds, 1966; Sun Run, 1967 and Six #2, 1968. Additionally, the complex and imposing 72-foot-long Sleeping Dragon from 2003 will be shown. Sleeping Dragon was last exhibited at the exhibition George Rickey, Kenneth Snelson: Two Americans in Paris held at the Jardins de Palais Royal, Paris, France in 2006.

Through Sleeping Dragon’s undulating aluminum and stainless steel tubes, cables and fittings, Snelson pushes the aesthetic and structural possibilities of tensegrity to an extreme of size and complexity. In her forthcoming essay on Snelson, Eleanor Heartney remarks that the artist’s sculptures often “... thrust upward in a series of diminishing modules as if straining towards infinity and they meander horizontally above the ground in defiance of gravity. Sometimes they suggest collections of pick-up sticks thrown up into the air and suspended there.”

If Max Bill, the artist and Bauhaus teacher, was right when he claimed that art can greatly evolve from the basis of mathematical thought, then one could assert that the theory and practice by which Snelson has developed his art is the ideal amalgam of science and art, of breathtaking engineering and visionary structural purity. The art critic Richard Huntington said, “In Snelson’s hands tensegrity ... gives his sculpture a characteristic look that reflects both scientific pragmatism and high art refinement... Snelson’s particular method and material choice has spawned a sustained and wondrous dialogue between the nature of physics and the nature of vision. How a sculpture appears to the eye and how it manages to stand up are inextricably mixed.” Fundamental to Snelson’s work is his idea of structure; he has said, “Structure to me is involved with forces, the stressing of pieces together, the kind of thing you find in a suspension bridge, for example. It is a definition of what is going on to cause that space to exist.”

When one looks at a Snelson sculpture, one can’t help but wonder at the elegance of the work’s design. It is at the same time both complex and simple, and the power of this duality lends to his sculpture the intellectual tension of rational thought and the poetic imagination of an art distilled through intuition. In an essay A Perspective on the Science and Art of Modeling Atoms the physiologist, Robert Root-Bernstein wrote, “It seems a mistake to me to categorize Snelson’s work as one thing or another—as art or science, truth or imagination. Snelson’s work is a new perspective on structures in nature and the nature of structure. This perspective, in turn, makes new things imaginable and therefore new things possible. Few are those who have made such a contribution or done it so beautifully. In consequence, we may be assured, the truth will out.”

The exhibition’s concentration of seminal early works outlines Snelson’s artistic evolution from his invention of tensegrity through the art historical eras of Minimalism and Primary Structure to his current and ongoing investigations into rendering atom structure three-dimensionally. Snelson’s sculptural explorations with tensegrity structures, a word created by the philosopher Buckminster Fuller to describe Snelson’s structural innovation by combining the words tension and integrity, manifests itself in webs of stainless steel tubes and cables that are held in highly stressed, configured structural arrangements through the push-pull balance of compressive forces in the tubes and tension forces in the cables. As Snelson comments, “The sculpture could be put into orbit in outer space and it would maintain its form. Its forces are internally locked. These mechanical forces, compression and tension or push and pull are invisible—just pure energy—in the same way that magnetic or electric fields are invisible.” Significantly, Snelson is not working with someone else’s invented structural system, such as the post and lintel, arch or dome – Snelson invented tensegrity, and has spent sixty years composing brilliant, wholly new sculptural propositions through this physical system. Snelson’s accomplishments in this regard are historically unique.

Born in Pendleton, Oregon in 1927, Snelson graduated from the University of Oregon and served in the US Navy in World War II. After the war he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied with Josef Albers and encountered Buckminster Fuller. In 1951 Snelson studied with Léger at the Academie Montmartre in Paris and by 1960 created his first large-scale works whereby he entered a new, innovative artistic territory. He lives and works in New York. Snelson has received numerous honors and awards among which are the following: New York State Council on the Arts Sculpture, 1971; American Institutes of Architects’ Medal, 1981; Honorary Doctorate, Arts and Humane Letters, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 1985; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Art Award, 1987; Membership, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1994; Lifetime Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, NJ, 1999; The Elizabeth N. Watrous Prize, National Academy of Design, New York, NY, 2002.

His work can be found in public and corporate collections all over the world, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Fine Art, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo, Holland; Rijksmuseum Staedelijk, Amsterdam, Holland; Shiga Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A monograph on Kenneth Snelson’s work by Eleanor Heartney entitled Kenneth Snelson: Forces Made Visible, published by Hard Press Editions, Lenox, MA in association with Hudson Hills Press, Manchester, VT will be available in April 2009. Advance copies will be available at a book signing hosted by Marlborough Chelsea on March 19th, 6:00 to 8:00 pm. An illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Eleanor Heartney, will accompany this exhibition.

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Juan Genovés
Recent Paintings

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that an exhibition of new paintings by Spanish artist Juan Genovés will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on February 19 and continue through March 21, 2009. This exhibition continues Genovés’ exploration of people in groups, depicted through bird’s-eye views of crowds where the absence of buildings, roads, trees or clues to a common landscape create a dynamic of intensity and dislocation. The motiva- tion for the groups’ activities are never clear, as Genovés’ allows the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The artist’s forceful use of line and perspective, aligned with an exacting eye for the modulation and use of color, are as physically engaging as they are aesthetically compelling. Born in Valencia in 1930, Genovés has been exhibiting with Marlborough since 1964. This will be his first exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea.

Genovés’ body of work is devoted to the subject of political engagement. His artistic development occurred in the iso- lated world of Franco’s Spain, where he was influenced by modern photography and cinema, especially the work of Sergei Eisenstein, and where he developed an extraordinary vocabulary of expression despite the odds. Genovés’ highly painterly style, though seemingly contradictory, worked well to depict the anxiety, fear and desperation that people in society experi- enced during the Fascist regime. His painting El Abrazo, created near the end of Franco’s regime, just before his death, came to symbolize the desire of most Spaniards for a reconciliation of people in society and the end of the fight between democ- racy and totalitarianism. When images of this work circulated as a protest poster, Genovés was detained and held in solitary confinement for seven days. Since Franco’s death, Genovés’ work is still engaged with the movement and action of crowds; though while one has the feeling that the subjects in his paintings experience great anxiety, the threat of imminent violence has been removed.

This exhibition will feature approximately fifteen new paintings, all acrylic on canvas on wood board, painted in 2008. In Redondel II, 2008 (59 x 47 1⁄4 in., 150 x 120 cm.), Genovés depicts an aerial view of a group of people rushing towards and into a circular area of light, away from a dark ellipse. The “people” themselves are no more than thickly applied acrylic paint, the impasto suggesting torsos and thin black strokes suggesting legs. The painting clearly alludes to figures in a society, perhaps uniting for something or even against something, in which a palpable sense of urgency is transmitted.

Redondel II and many of the other works in the show, among them Huellas I, 2008 (110 1⁄4 x 59 in., 280 x 150 cm) and Ambos lados I, 2008 (47 1⁄4 x 47 1⁄4 in., 120 x 120 cm), relate to Genovés’ exploration of the multitude, where the collective body of humanity is pulled toward something greater than the individual, either along a wall that divides the picture plane in Ambos lados I, or into figural groups seemingly surrounding a series of brown pools in Huellas I. Perturbación, 2008 (31 1⁄2 x 42 1⁄2 in., 80 x 108 cm), depicts figures moving among and about one another without connection - a sense of disorder and disruption underscored by the thickly textured vermillion of the background.

Genovés heightens the anxiety in a number of the paintings by adding either vertical or horizontal stripes that reinforce the picture plane and that can be read variously as breaks in the image or as bar codes superimposed on the field of action below. Lineal, 2008 (59 x 70 7/8 in., 150 x 180 cm), Lineal I, 2008 (59 x 110 in., 150 x 280 cm), and Lineal III, 2008 (70 7/8 x 59 in., 180 x 150 cm) all follow in this mode, with tan canvas as background for thickly impastoed figures and smooth, brightly colored bands that stripe the surface.

Genovés is the recipient of a number of important prizes, including the Mention of Honor at the XXXIII Venice Bien- nale, 1966; the Gold Medal at the VI Biennale Internazionale de San Marino, 1967; the Marzotto Internazional Prize, 1968; the Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Spain, 1984; and the Premio de las Artes Plásticas de Generalitat Valenciana, Spain, 2002.
Genovés’ work is found in many of the most important public collections in the United States and Europe, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum, both in New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Israel Museum, Jerusalem and IVAM, Valencia, Spain, among others.

An illustrated catalogue will be available during the exhibition.

Image: Juan Genovés, Lineal I / Linear I, 2008, acrylic on canvas on board 59 x 110 in., 150 x 280 cm

For press inquiries please contact Janis Gardner Cecil at Marlborough Gallery at 212.541.4900 or jcecil@marlboroughgallery.com

Marlborough Gallery, Inc.
40 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019
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