Jacob Kassay
Robert Morris
Virginia Overton
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
December 17, 2010 - January 29, 2011
“I believe there are ‘forms’ to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products.”
--Robert Morris
Mitchell-Innes & Nash will exhibited a three-person show of new work by New York artists Jacob Kassay and Virginia Overton, and felt sculptures from the 1970s by Robert Morris. This exhibition juxtaposes works by each artist that explore the interplay between material, process, and form. Together the works are related in their physicality and empirical nature: the record of the artists’ actions is an intrinsic part of the work itself. The work of Overton and Kassay represent a new generation’s engagement with the phenomenological and materially-based practices that Morris pioneered in the late 1960s.
JACOB KASSAY’s electroplated canvases operate as both object and image, as their surfaces reflect the exhibition site and the viewer. In this sense they are both completely literal and endlessly referential. His new works made with burlap and mirrors extend this interest in working with light and a continually changing surface. A new series of white and dark canvases engage the history of the monochrome, and continue his exploration of the specific object.
For VIRGINIA OVERTON, exhibition situations give rise to sculptural and spatial solutions. She explores the generative possibilities of spaces and the visual power of ad hoc solutions. For Overton, the sculptural possibilities of everyday objects are enormous; she has used extension ladders and planks covered in construction “mud” to activate spaces. For this exhibition, she will utilize the gallery architecture in a new site-specific work.
In ROBERT MORRIS’s felt pieces from the early 1970s, the artist performed basic operations on the fabric – cutting, piling, hanging – and allowed the reactions of the material to determine the form of the work. In his seminal 1968 essay, “Anti-form,” Morris said: “Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.”
JACOB KASSAY was born in Buffalo and lives and works in New York. He has exhibited at galleries and institutions in the U.S. and internationally, including Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and the Kitchen, New York.
VIRGINIA OVERTON was born in Nashville, Tennessee and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited at SculptureCenter, New York, the Greater New York exhibition at PS1, and Le Magasin in Grenoble, France, among other museums and galleries in the U.S. and Europe. She will be included in the White Columns Annual in New York this month.
ROBERT MORRIS is an influential American artist who has made important contributions in sculpture, installation, process and performance art. His work has moved frequently among genres, defying categorization. He has shown a consistent interest in the dematerialization of the art object and site specificity, while using a variety of ephemeral materials including textile, dirt, and mirrors. Also known for his criticism, Morris is considered one of the crucial theorists of Minimalism. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Tate Modern in London, among many other institutions.
MITCHELL-INNES & NASH
534 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
Previous exhibition: Anthony Caro: Upright Sculptures, November 4 - December 11, 2010
Upcoming exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Martin Kersels, February - March, 2011
Kenneth Noland, March - April, 2011
Leon Kossof, May - June, 2011
