Suzanne McClelland @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen - MUTE Paintings

Suzanne McClelland: MUTE

Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Through April 18, 2021

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a selection of paintings from SUZANNE MCCLELLAND’s MUTE series.

Systems of communication and exchange are at the center of Suzanne McClelland’s practice. The artist explores the inherent interdependence between abstraction and representation as it appears in painting and the printed, written and spoken word. In large-scale canvases as well as collaborative books and prints, Suzanne McClelland has opened new avenues for painting, investigating its linguistic and acoustic dimensions and reflecting our broader cultural and political concerns. Built from visual as well as auditory observations of this world, her works underscore the ways in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its context and therefore naturally infused with social commentary.

Suzanne McClelland’s MUTE paintings disassemble language. The series comprises 26 paintings, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet. Rather than representing the letters as we see them, each painting in its own way mutes the elemental components of language, so much so that these letters dissolve or melt into the unutterable. McClelland liberates language from an existential bind: severing symbols from their function, she prevents their vocalization and articulation. They exist now as solitary devices, allowing them to return to their potentiality. The MUTE series deconstructs symbols and structures into abstractions that manifest an alternate alphabet, which in turn demands a new context to acquire legible meaning. The result is an expression of language that cannot be spoken or read, yet demands to be seen, felt, and understood as present.

In the process of painting this work, Suzanne McClelland engages with notions of control and doubt. The artist seizes on intuition as well as chance as powerful means of responding to systems of describing and naming, quantifying and predicting, categorizing and identifying. While their verticality is suggestive of portraiture, the abstracted compositions are formed by viscous spills: records of the pouring, staining, and hardening of pigments. The surfaces of these paintings – simultaneously sparkly, dusty, and inky – are encrusted with frozen sprays of glitter, charcoal, and dry pigments.

SUZANNE MCCLELLAND (b. Jacksonville, FL) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. The artist has had solo presentations at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (Philip Morris), the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others. Suzanne McClelland participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and her work has been presented in group exhibitions, such as those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Nancy Graves Foundation Grant; and she has participated in international residencies, including most recently the Troedsson Villa Residency in Nikko, Japan and the Skowhegan School. Her work is held in numerous public collections including that of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The artist will have her first solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2021. Suzanne McClelland lives and works between New York and the tip of Long Island, NY.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611

marianneboeskygallery.com

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Anthony Pearson @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Anthony Pearson
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen
June 28 - July 20, 2019

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Los Angeles-based artist ANTHONY PEARSON’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, at its location in Aspen, Colorado. The exhibition features works from Anthony Pearson’s Embedments, Etched Plasters, and Tablets series, each of which capture his sensitivity to the experience of light, texture, and color. Pearson’s work is powerful in its quietude, revealing layers of complexity as one explores the surface, patterning, and material closely and from a range of perspectives and environments. Pearson’s work feels particularly at home in Aspen, where set against the rugged landscape and open expanses, his evocations of light and materiality are further amplified and affecting. 

The exhibition coincides with the release of the Anthony Pearson’s new monograph, featuring a substantive essay on the artist’s vision and approach, written by Alex Klein, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia’s Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Curator, as well as a wide selection of images highlighting the range of his practice.

Anthony Pearson’s practice is fueled by a longstanding engagement with the dichotomies of lightness and darkness—first sparked by his early work as a photographer. His explorations manifest through a spectrum of processes with materials such as clay, bronze, and gypsum cement, which he develops methodically and contemplatively through time to yield a wide range of visual effects. His innate ability to capture the sensation of light emanating from deep within his materials positions him within the trajectory of California’s Light and Space Movement, which has concerned itself with the effects of form and light on viewer perception and experience.

Further underlying Anthony Pearson’s practice is an experimentation with physicality, which results in works that behave in instances as both sculpture and painting as well as both object and image. This interplay between formal vocabularies is particularly felt as one experiences and considers the progression of his distinct series, starting with the Tablets, which Anthony Pearson produced between 2010 and 2014. Abstract sculptural works that are affixed to the wall, the Tablets appear as soft organic forms folding onto themselves or as small bundles of volumetric cylinders. Handcrafted in clay, cast in bronze, and coated with cobalt and silver nitrate patina, the Tablets actively respond to their environment, absorbing and reflecting the light within the space. While their physicality positions them clearly within the trajectory of sculpture, their placement on the wall retains some suggestion of the experience of painting.

Anthony Pearson’s development of the Tablets series gave way to an extensive exploration of the formal possibilities of hydrocal, a gypsum cement, which continues to today. To create the Etched Plasters—the second of his hydrocal series—Anthony Pearson pours the material, mixed with colored pigment, into a frame and then uses a carbide knife and custom-made wood guides to make incisions into the surface. The finished pieces are distinguished by the intricate interplay of line and density, as the subtle and precise cuts stand in dynamic contrast to the solidity of the hyrocal. Here, Anthony Pearson’s work on the surface replicates the expression of paint on canvas or pencil on paper, while the material itself provides the dimensionality of sculpture—fusing the two media into a new kind of object. The incisions, which actively read as line drawings, are executed in rich, arabesque-ing patterns that evoke vibrant energy and fluid movement. As the mica-based pigments in the hydrocal catch the light, this sensation is heightened, and the lines take on the quality of rays of light or wisps of sand flowing through one’s fingers.                                                   

With his Embedments series, Anthony Pearson more fully embraces the language of free-form gesture, most often associated with painting. In this most recent series, Pearson pours the differently colored hydrocal in layers, into a mold backed by a stretched canvas. In instances, Pearson shifts the mold, while in others he allows the cement to settle organically. This action results in the creation of rich color fields that weave together to suggest abstract landscapes. In this way, the painterly gesture is inextricably tied to the physicality of the work itself, which is also emphasized by the textural impressions and traces of fiber filament left on the surface from the stretched canvas that is removed upon the material’s hardening. These actions shift Anthony Pearson’s work more directly into the space between object and image, with the formal qualities of painting and sculpture coalescing into a new whole. At the same time, these newest works retain their sense of light, as they allude to the setting sun and the desert and ocean views of California.

Anthony Pearson (b. 1969, Los Angeles) is well-known for his highly formalized and sensitive use of both process and materials. By experimenting with the formal limits of photography, where his practice originated, he found a visual vocabulary rooted in abstraction that explores the balances between positive and negative, lightness and darkness. He continues to investigate these dichotomies across a range of media. Anthony Pearson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2018), David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017), the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN (2008), among numerous others. Group exhibitions include Tantric drawings: sites of transformation, Drawing Room, London, UK, and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK (2016-17); L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016-17); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2016); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); second nature: abstract photography then and now, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2012); and The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX (2011). Anthony Pearson lives and works in Los Angeles.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY - ASPEN
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Maria Lai @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, Colorado - Invito a Tavola

Maria Lai: Invito a Tavola 
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, Colorado
February 23 - April 8, 2018

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Invito a Tavola, an exhibition dedicated to the work of artist MARIA LAI (1919–2013). The exhibition highlights Lai’s career-long commitment to community, from her early drawings depicting the women of her hometown in Sardinia to a major late-career installation that invokes ideas of communion and for which the exhibition is titled. Invito a Tavola marks Maria Lai’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. since 1956, and provides an intimate portrait of the late artist through one of the most enduring themes from her illustrious sixty-year practice. The exhibition is the first organized by the gallery since it commenced representation of the artist’s archive in November 2017.

The exhibition is anchored by the installation Invito a Tavola (The Invitation Table), which is comprised of a large-scale table, measuring approximately nine feet in length and three feet in width, set with terracotta-cast breads and books. The work, created in 2004, expresses Lai’s deeply felt belief that art provides essential nourishment for the soul, and at the same time suggests the importance of breaking bread as a means of binding communities together and healing discord. The installation also underscores Lai’s experimentation, play, and mastery of materials, which can also be seen in her extensive work with textiles. Invito a Tavola has not previously been displayed in the U.S., and is one of only two such installations produced by the artist. The second is on display in Lai’s birthplace, Ulassai, at the Stazione Dell’Arte, a museum dedicated to Maria Lai’s work.

The exhibition also features a selection of Maria Lai’s early drawings, which depict the women of Ulassai in their daily routines. Inspired by the poetry and teachings of her close friend and mentor Salvatore Cambosu, and concerned in particular with the female voice, Lai developed a rhythmic visual language that interpreted the domestic and social lives of these women. Her drawings and watercolors, produced between 1958 and 1965, gave way to a deep and long-lasting engagement with the loom and textiles—one that would shift her focus from realistic representation to an interrogation of gesture and the collective experience. Indeed, the large-scale tapestry included in Invito a Tavola includes the line, “Every work of art must become bread to be shared at a common table.”

Perhaps even more than her object-based practice, performance and community-activated engagement were at the core of Maria Lai’s career. Her most famous of these works is Legarsi alla Montagne (To Bind to the Mountain), which she created in 1981 as a “monument to the living” in response to a request to make a war memorial in Ulassai. In this social action, inspired by a local legend, neighbors tied blue fabric together, creating a single ribbon that wove around homes and other structures until it encircled a peak that overlooked the town. The performative work served to physically and metaphorically bind the town, mountain, and people, establishing a sense of community and bringing the individual into a bigger whole. This work led to the development of other social actions initiated by Maria Lai in cities across Italy and Europe.

MARIA LAI was born in Ulassai, Sardinia in 1919. Though her early artistic endeavors took her to Rome and Venice, she was often drawn back to the customs and histories of the island, and in particular to the lives and voices of the women who lived there. Over the course of her illustrious sixty-year career, her work was shown extensively in solo exhibitions throughout Italy and Europe, and she was invited to participate in group shows across the globe, including at the Venice Biennale of 1978. In addition to her visual and social arts practice, which encompassed works on paper, sculpture, textiles, performances, and community actions, Maria Lai collaborated with several theater companies, including Fueddu and Gestu. She received a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 1943, and in 2004, she was awarded an honorary degree in Literature from the University of Cagliari. Following her death in 2013 in Cardedu, institutions in the towns of Cagilari, Nuoro, and Ulassai came together to present a major, joint retrospective of Maria Lai’s work. Most recently, her work was included in documenta14 in Athens and the Venice Biennale, both in 2017, and in March of 2018, the Uffizi Gallery Museum in Florence, Italy will open a retrospective of her practice.

BOESKY WEST
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Mark Grotjahn, Aspen Art Museum - A survey of paintings and drawings from the 1990s to now

Mark Grotjahn

A survey from the 1990s to now 

Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO 

February 17 - April 29, 2012 

MARK GROTJAHN, Untitled (Red Face 773), 2007-08. 

Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

A comprehensive survey of paintings and drawings by artist Mark Grotjahn dating from the late1990s to the present will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum (AAM). Mark Grotjahn makes conceptually grounded works that collide abstract and figurative elements to unsettle the conventions of each medium. By continuously combining these seemingly incompatible poles, as well as those of mimesis and expressionism, rational logic and intuitive process, Grotjahn stakes a claim for the continued vitality of abstraction and of painting itself. 

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring texts by Aspen Art Museum CEO, Director, and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and distinguished critic Barry Schwabsky. 

AAM and Aspen Skiing Company Lift Ticket Project

For the 2011-2012 ski season in Aspen, Mark Grotjahn has also designed five limited-edition lift tickets that feature images of his exuberant mask sculptures. Four of the sculptures are on public display at the peaks of each of the Aspen Skiing Company’s four mountains, allowing skiers to make the connection between the images on their lift tickets and the actual artworks. The fifth sculpture will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition. 

 MARK GROTJAHN 

2011-2012 Aspen Skiing Company Lift Ticket (1 of 5), 2011. 

Image courtesy of the artist and the Aspen Skiing Company 

MARK GROTJAHN was born in 1968 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon.  

Aspen Art Museum admission is free courtesy of John and Amy Phelan 

AAM online: www.aspenartmuseum.org