Icon / Iconoclast
Marlborough Chelsea, New York
November 8 - December 27, 1997
An Exhibition of Works by:
Francis Bacon
Francesco Clemente
David Hockney
Robin Kahn
Alex Katz
R.B. Kitaj
Ouattara
Ad Reinhardt
Philip Taaffe
Fred Tomaselli
Terry Winters
Curated by Raymond Foye
Marlborough Chelsea presents an exhibition of paintings, Icon/Iconoclast. The exhibition, consisting of one work each by eleven artists, is about the persistent power of images in modern life. Even though creative strategies in the arts have varied widely in the past three decades, challenges to pictorialism seem only to strengthen the hold that certain images possess over us. Attempting to break or destroy imagery, artists have, in fact, created entirely new pictorial conceptions expanding our definition of what constitutes a picture. This paradox is expressed by the title of the exhibition.
Beginning with Ad Reinhardt's black painting as an ultimate statement of both the iconic and the iconoclastic impulses in art, the exhibition explores the many ways in which contemporary painters have sought to re-define the image within the formal traditions of Western art.
Like Ad Reinhardt, Francis Bacon has served as a touchstone for subsequent generations of artists: in this case, painters who have sought to pursue aspects of figuration, portraiture, and the passions of the flesh. Yet, the attempt to instill in modern painting the secular equivalence of the experience of ecstasis - so integral to the art of the Renaissance - was a lifelong preoccupation with both these artists, each in their own way.
The iconic image stands as an object of mediation and contemplation and embodies a system of belief which may be communicated through narrative, metaphor, or allegory. The painters chosen in this exhibition may all be characterized by their commitment to expanding conceptions of picture-making by means of investigating the image itself. The mistrust for iconoclastic images, which persists to this day, springs from similar origins: that artists are conjurers of illusions, and may propagate false beliefs. Recently, similar criticism has been most sharply directed at artists employing figuration and representation such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, and Francesco Clemente.
In the work of Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli, figurative elements are deployed in the service of abstraction while preserving the flatness and frontality of the icon. Both artists explore a diagrammatic language akin to the mandala or symbolon: ritual configurations that speak to the inner working of an image and its correspondence to archaic forms. The wider perspective of the primacy of the aesthetic experience itself is the basis of the work of Terry Winters whose imagery finds its analogy in the complex nexus of biology and cognitive science.
Conceptualizations of the female body and aspects of women's roles in society have been the subject of recent work by Robin Kahn who draws on sources as diverse as history, alchemy and anthropology. The legacy of symbols which is the inheritance of iconography from Medieval and Renaissance times have functioned as source material for many of her works. In the work of Ouattara, an African artist from the Ivory Coast, the icon comes closest to its animist origins as mediator between the worlds of the human and the divine.
All of the living artists in Icon/Iconoclast are represented by new work. A centerpiece of the exhibition is a major ensemble of paintings and drawings by R.B. Kitaj constituting a single work, The Killer Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even, (1997). The subject of a controversial exhibition earlier this year at London's Royal Academy, the work is a visual rebuttal to the critical malign following Kitaj's retrospective and the subsequent death of his wife, Sandra, events which the artist relates in the work itself. It is Kitaj's farewell address to London, a final salvo launched at the same philistine cultural establishment that Ezra Pound once lampooned in his famous suite of poems, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Icon/Iconoclast has been organized by Raymond Foye. Along with Francesco Clemente he is co-publisher of Hanuman Books, a press devoted to poetry, Hinduism, and writings by artists (a list that include William Burroughs, Rene Ricard, Francis Picabia, Willem deKooning, Cookie Mueller, René Daumal, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank, Max Beckmann, Patti Smith and others). He has curated (with Ann Percy) a full scale retrospective of the works of Francesco Clemente, Three Worlds (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and over the past twenty years has edited books, catalogues and livres d'artiste by numerous artists in the exhibition, including David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Philip Taaffe, Terry Winters and Francesco Clemente. His published works on poets and poetry include James Schuyler (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), John Wieners (Black Sparrow Press), Bob Kaufman (New Directions) and Edgar Allan Poe (City Lights Books). He presently lives and works in New York City.
MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA
211 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.malgoroughgallery.com
