Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
February 20 - May 9, 1999
Carnegie Museum of Art presents Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley, an exhibition of sculpture, photographs, and paintings organized by Contemporary Art Curatorial Assistant Alyson Baker. The works in this exhibition share a common visual language, one of human colonization from the fringes of the city to the furthest reaches of suburbia.
Artists Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, and John Wesley use a contemporary visual vocabulary that they set within a Minimalist framework that is concisely and meticulously constructed to describe the space, both physical and psychic, between the urban and rural landscapes. Unlike Minimalism, where art is reduced to its essentials, these artists bring psychological and social messages to their work, and inject their compositions with metaphorical meaning and implied narrative. They draw from the real material of the everyday world as the source for their objects and images, and their work feels immediately familiar. Robert Grosvenor’s Untitled (1997), a stone and concrete wall-like sculpture that is over 30 feet long supports two lawn balls and an arrangement in steel that appears to be a fallen television antenna. John Wesley’s painting New Work (1990) silhouettes, from a view out the window of a home too close to the airport, three jet planes looming large as they pass through the sky. Andreas Gursky’s crystalline photographs show us the worlds of recreational, residential, and industrial zones at the city’s edge.
Born in New York City in 1937, Robert Grosvenor studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Ecole Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in France and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. He began exhibiting his work in the early 1960s during the formative years of Minimalism and was included in exhibitions that defined the movement alongside artists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, whose works have come to exemplify that art style.
Robert Grosvenor evolved away from the ideologies of pure Minimalism towards a more expressive visual language that is grounded in the real world. His sculptures are often arranged as abstract, geometric compositions imbued with complex metaphorical content. John Wesley was born in Los Angeles in 1928. His paintings have been exhibited extensively since the early 1960s, when he was identified with the first group of Pop artists. Since then, his work has been included in many survey exhibitions of Pop Art, with important recent solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
Although John Wesley shares with Pop Art a flat, graphic presentation derived from commercial and mass market sources, his concerns have always been far more private and introspective, examining icons of middle-class America to find their emotional and psychological centers.
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1955 and was a student of the influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy. He had his first one-person show in 1987 and has since exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Andreas Gursky produces photographs that are fully conceived before the images are transcribed onto film. The subjects are not found, but are purposefully sought out. Although the photographs have the appearance, at times, of quickly executed snapshots, they are preceded by careful observation and are carefully composed and constructed. Viewed from a distance, they often have an overall form that appears minimal, monochromatic and simply structured. When viewed closely, however, the detail and sharpness of his images reveal a complex accumulation of individual parts.
CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART
4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
