Herbert Ferber, Knoedler & Company, NYC - Grounded / Suspended, Sculpture From The 1970s

Grounded / Suspended: Herbert Ferber
Sculpture From The 1970s
Knoedler & Company, New York
March 24 – May 7, 2005

Knoedler & Company presents an exhibition focused on thirteen sculptures by Herbert Ferber (1906-1991) from the decade of the 1970s – including two large-scale outdoor works and five suspended wall reliefs.

A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Herbert Ferber was also highly regarded by his artist-colleagues as an intellect, and he was often a spokesperson for New York School ideas. He was one of Betty Parsons' artists, first showing with her in 1947. At her gallery, and later at Samuel Kootz's, he formed relationships with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Tony Smith, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and others. The Museum of Modern Art made its first purchase of a sculpture by Ferber in 1949.

Herbert Ferber's sculpture of the 1970s evolved from an earlier Abstract Expressionist idiom shared by his sculptor contemporaries Theodore J. Roszak, David Hare, David Smith, Ibram Lassaw, and Seymour Lipton (who showed with Herbert Ferber at Betty Parsons Gallery and whose career is currently the subject of an exhibition on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York). By the early 1960s, Herbert Ferber's work had become especially distinctive in its concern for and engagement with the spectator, manifested in the Whitney's 1961 exhibition of his installation piece, Sculpture as Environment, Interior.

Another focus of Herbert Ferber's work during the 1970s was his Cages – in which forms are suspended within slight, linear three-dimensional frameworks, as in Homage to Piranesi XI (Sens), 1978. Herbert Ferber's Homage to Piranesi series alludes to the baroque fantasies of the Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778), particularly his Imaginary Prisons etchings. Among Herbert Ferber's signature works, sculptures from the Piranesi series are in the collections of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

In 1979, Herbert Ferber also began a series of floating wall reliefs that Eugene Goossen has described "as spatially full as the best of modern openwork, free-standing sculpture... Close study of any of the wall pieces reveals an exercise of choice as deliberate and delicate as the metaphors in a Shakespearean sonnet."

Gounded / Suspended: Herbert Ferber – Sculpture from the 1970s is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essay by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Suand and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum, New York. 

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.knoedlergallery.com