Penny Slinger "Exorcism: Inside Out" Exhibition @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London + Book "An Exorcism: A Photo Romance"

Penny Slinger

Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Through 7 September 2024

“We have many works that follow The Hero's Journey, but how many that track that of the Heroine? This journey of the embodied soul is not sexist; we all, male and female alike, need to discover who we are. It is like a detective story, in which we, both protagonists and victims, must follow the clues and unravel the plot. This psychological processing is something that I have not seen tackled in any other artwork like I have in ‘An Exorcism’. 

This is not a work that exists within a time capsule - it’s a subject that is timeless and universal. It is a blueprint for transformation and sets signposts in the sand for others who wish to know themselves.”

- Penny Slinger, 2024

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents Exorcism: Inside Out, a solo exhibition by pioneering LA-based, London-born Feminist Surrealist, PENNY SLINGER (b. 1947). Spanning original photo-collage, print and video work, the exhibition coincides with the publication of Penny Slinger's iconic book, An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 21 June 2024). After the original An Exorcism was published in 1977, the artist created this extended version, which was nonetheless withheld from being published in the UK after her other collage book, Mountain Ecstasy (Dragon’s Dream, March 1978, Holland), was seized and burned by British customs for being deemed pornographic.

After nearly 50 years, Penny Slinger’s groundbreaking project can finally be revealed to audiences in the UK and beyond. In celebration of this extraordinary moment, Exorcism: Inside Out is one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever realised at Richard Saltoun Gallery. Inspired by the artist’s project for Dior’s haute couture fashion show in Paris in 2019, it is designed as an all-immersive audio-visual environment, with the entire gallery wrapped in images from the original An Exorcism series and presenting a spectacular evolution of the artist’s vision.

Penny Slinger began her career as one of the few celebrated women artists in the late 1960s' "Swinging London." Graduating from Chelsea College of Art in 1969, she focused her thesis on Max Ernst and found her primary artistic influence in Surrealism. Best known for her photo-collages, Penny Slinger’s work foregrounds the female body and sexuality in a radical and unapologetic manner, aiming, in her own words, "to bring the inside out and the outside in" and to create "a new language for the feminine psyche to express itself." 

An Exorcism is often hailed as her magnum opus. It’s composed of a collection of erotic collages set against the backdrop of the empty mansion known to her then-partner, Peter Whitehead. Described by Penny Slinger as a "surreal romance in photo collage," this work represents the "deepest excavations" she has done as an artist, started in 1969 and completed over approximately 7 years. The narrative unfolds through biographical chapters, tracing a young woman's journey towards self-actualization; from oppressive spaces dominated by phallocentric symbolism, evident in works such as He Crows, He Crows, He Crows, with the oversized head of a cock poking out from the corner, and Tribunal, in which a naked female figure stands exposed, surrounded by an all-dressed, all-male jury, to a reality where the protagonist finally comes into her feminine power, evoked in works like A Rose By Any Other Name, with a bright red, gigantic rose spreading its petals between a woman’s naked thighs, and Through the Glass, a tender communion of entangled women. 

Through a blend of personal embodiment and imaginative transgression, Penny Slinger integrates her own body into archetypal landscapes, engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective. This autofictional journey is staged within the Gothic ambiance of Lilford Hall, merging the evocative allure of British neo-Romantic painting with the ominousness of horror cinema. 

From the original An Exorcism, Slinger created an extended version of the book, complete with her writings and a film script, which remain unpublished. The exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a selection of Penny Slinger’s original collages from An Exorcism alongside her recent animated film An Exorcism - The Works (2019), which is shown for the very first time in the UK, and reflects Slinger’s original, filmic approach to the project. The entire gallery is transformed into an immersive environment, covered with images that mirror the surreal, decaying grandeur of the mansion, completely enveloping viewers within Penny Slinger's multifaceted exploration of desire, identity, and the subconscious.

Premiering in the UK, Exorcism: Inside Out invites visitors to "walk into the Mansion of Dreams and feel themselves part of it, from the inside out".

PENNY SLINGER

An Exorcism: A Photo Romance

Published by Fulgur Press, 2024

Hardback, Premium Italian 135gsm paper

192 pages, 188 colour printed images, with notes

12 x 9 inches / 30cm x 23cm 

© Penny Slinger / Fulgur Press

PENNY SLINGER

An Exorcism: A Photo Romance

Published by Fulgur Press, 2024

Deluxe, 49 copies only, signed by the artist - £460.00

© Penny Slinger / Fulgur Press

PENNY SLINGER

The provocative practice of London-born, LA-based artist Penny SLINGER (b. 1947) spans photography, collage, film and sculpture. Active from the late 1960s, Penny Slinger emerged into a maelstrom of political protest, social change and sexual freedom. She graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in 1969 having developed a visual language she described as 'feminist surrealism', influenced by her study of European Surrealism, her friendship with Roland Penrose and association with Max Ernst. Penny Slinger quickly began exploring and investigating the notion of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.

Penny Slinger’s work was recently included in Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 exhibition, currently touring at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2024/25), and The Horror Show! at Somerset House, London (2022), a landmark survey of provocative visionary British artists from the past 50 years. She featured in significant historical exhibitions such as The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art at Tate St. Ives (2009) and Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery (2009), alongside Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | LONDON

41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS 

www.richardsaltoun.com

Joan Thorne @ David Richard Gallery, NYC - "An Odyssey of Color" Exhibition

Joan Thorne: An Odyssey of Color

David Richard Gallery, New York

March 20 – April 18, 2024

JOAN THORNE 

Odyssey, 2024 

Oil on canvas, 66 x 56”

Copyright © Joan Thorne

Photographs by David Eichholtz

Courtesy David Richard Gallery

David Richard Gallery presents, An Odyssey of Color, a solo exhibition by New York artist, Joan Thorne, that includes eleven recent paintings from 2022 through 2024. This presentation, her first solo exhibition with the Gallery, focuses on her recent paintings but in the context of the colors, marks, and compositions as they organically evolved throughout her six-decade career. This curation is apropos given the artist’s painting retrospective in 2020 at the Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia and her inclusion during summer 2023 in, It Happened in SoHo, a  three-artist (Joan Thorne, Thornton Willis, and Dean Fleming) presentation of early paintings from the 1970s and 1980s at David Richard Gallery.

Joan Thorne has not used a grid nor any other all-over organizing structure to define and contain her compositions. Instead, she uses gestures combined with defined shapes or referential forms that emerge out of her long-standing ability to produce rhythmic strokes and marks that seem carefree yet effortlessly contained within imaginary or fixed boundaries. Thorne’s compositions are not templated nor purposely replicated. They are each organically derived from her thinking about the marks and colors combined with conveying space and depth within each composition while also unifying the emerging shapes that must be in dialog with one another.

The title of the exhibition highlights color, which is central to everything in Thorne’s studio practice, but probably no more so than mark making. Looking at Thorne’s compositions throughout her career, at first glance, one generally sees color and geometric shapes. Other than a few paintings in the early 1970s, rarely, if ever, are the geometric shapes filled in with flat, solid colors. Instead, Thorne’s geometric forms are either bounded by a solid or zig-zag line and interiors filled with marks, ranging from circular brush swirls, juicy lush swaths of vivid hues, or writhing, wiggling, and waving parallel marks of colorful pigment. Often and especially earlier in her career, the boundaries of the geometric shapes were loose and not always outlined with a single edge or border, instead they were bounded by the truncation of the individual linear marks at roughly the same length and location such that it looked like fringe. Thus, her mark making has spanned from lines, translucent swaths, and gestural textured strokes to jagged, solid, and soft imaginary borders.

Joan Thorne’s color palettes have ranged from dilute washes of translucent pigment early in the 1970s to fully saturated hues through most of her career that range from primary to secondary, tertiary, and dichroic color combinations. A student of color and understanding theory, she is mostly intuitive as to how the colors and compositions work together—the temperature and push/pull effects create vibrant, kinetic visual activity as well as dimensional space in combination with the geometric planar shapes. The tipping point and profound change in how Joan Thorne experiences and uses color occurred after a trip she made to Mexico in the early 1970s. She said the trip was “mystical” and “forever changed her life and painting”. One can argue that color and mark making are in Joan Thorne’s DNA, they are at the core of every series, the constant and hallmark in every decade, intertwined and being the double helical backbone of her genetic material.

Besides color and mark making, the other elements incorporated in Joan Thorne’s paintings become picturing elements and compositional devices that vary between series and over time. The residue or hint of many of these elements and formal operations from the past still show up in her most recent paintings, which is the curatorial focus of this exhibition. One can readily map in Thorne’s recent artworks her ever evolving compositional trends since the 1970s, including: geometric shapes, as noted above; her compositions in terms of more or less “open space” (more comments on Thorne’s handling this “maximal minimal” concept later); the layering of jagged, open perimeters functioning as framing devices and overlapping patterns to provide spatial depth and define pictorial space; and detailed, complex grounds. As the compositions evolved with every series since the early 1970s, so have her marks and motifs, making each painting and series fresh, dynamic, and forever challenging the viewer’s visual perception.

Looking at the detail of Joan Thorne’s mark making is noteworthy in two ways. First, zeroing in on a small section of her paintings and isolating a particular square or rectangular area reads like an impasto, action painting right out of Abstract Expressionism. As such, Thorne’s gestures and compositions have been noted by Barbara Rose in a studio visit with Joan Thorne in 1979 as she was curating the exhibition, American Paintings: The Eighties. Rose told Joan Thorne that she ”understood Jackson Pollock . . . [and] used what he did to make it [her] own” [1]. Kay Larson, a critic for the Village Voice, also referenced the same Abstract Expressionist icon in 1981 regarding Thorne having “a bright overallness that synthesiz[es] Pollock’s arm with postconceptual brashness and an iconoclast’s attention to her forbears.”[2]

Second, and on the opposite end of the scale (literally) from micro to macro and aesthetically from gesture to optics, Joan Thorne’s frequent use of all-over brush motifs across the canvas as the last addition of marks and color to her paintings (specifically referencing, Oseah, 1981, oil on canvas, 64 x 67 in), also function as activation elements, a method used by Op Artists such as Julian Stanczak. The small, repetitive shape across the canvas activates the viewer’s eye, challenging visual perception. Thus, the viewer is more susceptible to suggestion so that the push and pull of colors combined with color interactions and planes of geometric shapes suggest spatial depth and illusory dimensional volume on a two-dimensional canvas. This is an example of how Joan Thorne knows art history, but more important, how to take that knowledge, expand and deploy it in her own aesthetic way.

Joan Thorne is an expressionistic painter all the way through, exuding passion with each gesture and layering intense emotions with every color choice. She was influenced by late Abstract Expressionism in the late 1960s and 70s during her studies and early career as well as the influences of many other overlapping forms of expressionism from Art Informel, Art Brut, and German Expressionism. It is also interesting to note that shapes in Joan Thorne’s paintings are not grounded, they float and are independent structures. There are no horizon lines or landscape references. Her interest in mysticism is probably more at play than any strong reference to Surrealism or geometry and Modernism. The point in noting the ungrounding of the shapes and forms is that Joan Thorne’s paintings are pure abstractions, emerging out of her interpretation of art historical movements as well as her memories, dreams, travels, and life experiences including psychological and transcendent experiences inspired by movies, poetry and synesthesia.

Vittorio Colaizzi has written extensively about Thorne’s artwork. In 2016 he noted she had a “career-long engagement with the problems of mark, composition, and pictorial space”. Further, he commented that the artist is comfortable straddling the “divide that pits expression against analysis.”[3] These are keen observations about the history and continued trajectory of Thorne’s work which allowed her to remain focused solely on painting the past six decades and never being at a loss for something new to paint. Her paintings continue to present viewers with such exuberance and a conundrum at the same time. Clearly, Thorne sees no need to decide one over the other and as much as possible serves both up in a single serving. Her paintings are maximal and high impact, highly reflective of Thorne’s personality and presence. 

JOAN THORNE

Joan Thorne received a B.S. degree from New York University with a major in painting in 1965. Then earned an M.A. degree in 1968 from Hunter College, completing her thesis with Tony Smith which was a series of paintings.

In 1972 her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial Exhibition. Several solo exhibitions followed: 1973 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; 1974 the Fischbach Gallery in New York City; 1977 the Art Fair in Cologne, Germany; 1979 The Clocktower in New York City in May. In 1979 she received a National Endowment Grant and invited to join the Willard Gallery in New York City with a debut exhibition in 1980. Barbara Rose included Thorne in the exhibition American Paintings: The Eighties, at the Grey Art Gallery in New York University, which was reviewed by Hilton Kramer for the Sunday Edition of the New York Times. A solo exhibition with the Dart Gallery in Chicago followed and paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris in a group exhibition organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants.

In 1981 Joan Thorne’s works were included in another edition of the Whitney Museum’s Biennial Exhibition. In 1982, a solo show at the Willard Gallery and a drawing show at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo, New York. In 1983 she had a solo show at the Dart Gallery in Chicago; John, Yau wrote an article that was published in Arts Magazine; and received a National Endowment Grant in Painting. In 1985 she had a one-person exhibition at the Graham Modern Gallery in New York with a catalog and essay by John Yau. Stephen Westfall wrote about her work in Art in America Magazine in December 1985.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Joan Thorne to participate in the “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” in 2020. In 2021 she had a four-decade retrospective at the Barry Art Museum in Norfolk VA with a 54-page catalog and essay by Richard Vine the Managing Editor of Art In America Magazine. Another essay was written by Vittorio Colaizzi, art historian.

Joan Thorne was a recipient of the Prix de Rome Fellowship to paint at the American Academy in Rome, the Pollock Krasner Grant for painting (twice) and the Gottlieb Grant among others.

Joan Thorne’s artworks are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Albright Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati, Ohio, Barry Art Museum, Norfolk, VA among others.

[1] Vittorio Colaizzi, Joan Thorne and the Mirror of Modern Painting, in Barry Art Museum, Light, Layers, Insight, 2019. p. 12.

[2] Vittorio Colaizzi, Joan Thorne, Analytic Ecstasy, in Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2016, p. 40.

[3] Vittorio Colaizzi, Joan Thorne, Analytic Ecstasy, in Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2016, p. 38.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

508 West 26 ST, Suite 9F, New York, NY 10001

davidrichardgallery.com

Laura Watt @ David Richard Gallery, NYC - "Time Lapse" Exhibition

Laura Watt: Time Lapse

David Richard Gallery, New York

February 14 – March 14, 2024

LAURA WATT

Announcement, 2023

Acrylic and oil on canvas  

44 x 48 in / 112 x 122 cm

© Laura Watt

Photograph by David Eichholtz

Courtesy David Richard Gallery

David Richard Gallery presents Laura Watt, Time Lapse, all new paintings created mostly in 2023 and her third solo exhibition with the gallery. There are several new and important aspects in this newest body of work that sets the mood and underlying thesis at this point in her career. Some aspects were process driven and others conscious decisions regarding the formal properties and resulting compositions. The combinations culminated in a subconscious and conceptual underpinning that evolved in Laura Watt’s thinking as the work unfolded over the course of the prior 18 to 24 months. The presentation includes 8 of the dozen or so paintings in the series at this point.

Patterning and layering patterns one on top of the other has been an important aspect of Laura Watt’s painting process and compositions. Such patterns, until now, provided both the forms in and subjects of Laura Watt’s compositions as well as the grounds. However, in this new body of work, Watt has disrupted that approach by focusing on one pattern at a time, confined within a single passage of the composition, thereby fragmenting the patterns. The artist states, “Pattern has become patches of nets and multi-colored rays announcing nothing.” Yet, the new approach yields 2 significant results.

First, Laura Watt has altered her process and the starting point for this body of work which is staining the canvas with mostly dark moody hues. This crucial first step provides both the grounds and suggests the placement of the patterns, which become the focal points and vessels for most of the vivid colors in the paintings. Thus, the paintings have a more organic approach and quality as the artist responds to each prior mark before laying down the next.

Second, by moving away from the canvas filling and overlapping patterns, several things now happen simultaneously. The patterning becomes fragmented as dictated by the initial staining and opens the paintings, providing spatial depth and multiple points of entry into the compositions. The initial staining frequently becomes a prominent feature in the final compositions. In fact, the staining often creates a horizon line suggesting a landscape reference, which later becomes important from a conceptual standpoint. The other important result is the patterns are not tethered to a singular perspectival point nor the entirety of the canvas. The patterns are ungrounded and floating. This last effect is what creates the conceptual underpinning and interpretation of this body of work, particularly in the context of her last painting series and solo exhibition at the gallery, Horizon Event.

Laura Watt conceived of and painted the works in Horizon Event during the latter half of the pandemic while spending a great deal of her time outdoors enjoying nature in upstate New York. She viewed the paintings as “optimistic” and “exuberant”, stating, “they [were] paintings about orientation and becoming, of things coalescing and forming.” By contrast, in a post-pandemic world, that positivity from finally emerging out of the pandemic has been traded for a country and world more divided than ever politically with two tragic international wars and an environmental situation that often feels apocalyptic. Watt said, “[she feels] the paintings that make up Time Lapse speak to disorientation, of things falling apart, moving away.”

A couple of paintings in particular reference the political, cultural, and ecological dismays noted above. Announcement, 2023 is comprised of hot colored rays of red and yellow situated in the upper and lower halves of the nearly square painting, splitting the canvas roughly in half and speaking to binaries and polarization. The composition, Foreign Shores, 2023, is subversive with the engaging warm colorful palette as it creates a powerful divide with red hues on the top and greens on the bottom. The dense swath of yellow in the center with lozenge-shaped patterns within patterns evokes minions doing as instructed, following orders and not one's heart or conscience. Weather Report, 2023 and the pair of smaller 18 x 24-inch related canvases, Weather Pattern #2 and #4, were inspired by weather maps on her phone's watch app. These paintings comment on the abundance of data that is used to explain the current extreme weather events on one hand, while on the other hand and conversely, selectively using the data to discount the global situation by distorting the same data for the purpose of disinformation.

Laura Watt wrote in a statement, “Initially I was interested in making a group of paintings in which poured and stained grounds dictated how the pattern behaved, where it could go. So, in a sense, the resulting paintings are a time lapse of that original intent. How that intent survives over a year of being looked at and periodically acted upon. By early summer it was becoming clear that the paintings might be about orientation and disorientation; about spaces that speak to a world getting stranger, an alien [and] less hospitable world than what we have known. An ambiguous world that pattern attempts to make sense of.”

Aside from the conceptual under currents and news-induced disappointments with mankind and sadness as noted above, these paintings are wild based solely on the formal properties! The vibrantly colored vector rays, the contrast of soft matte-stained canvases and overlays of lush, seductive colors, with bubble clouds and optical patterns, one (at least of a certain age) cannot help but be reminded of psychedelia, optical rock posters, and liquid light shows at the Fillmore East and Winterland Arena concert halls in New York and San Francisco, respectively. Psychedelia and the 1960s rock posters often brought together seeming disparate images and references such as Surrealism, Art Nouveau, paisley patterns, and Op Art. Maybe the disaggregation that Laura Watt experiences and portrays in her paintings as well as her tilt toward psychedelia are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the formal approaches for picturing turbulent times and a fractured populous, whether in the 1960s or today in our media laden, image saturated, and pluralistic world.

LAURA WATT was born in Lancaster PA and currently lives and works in Garrison, NY. She studied at Bennington College and earned her MFA from Yale University. Laura Watt”s paintings and drawings have been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at: MACA, Philadelphia; St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia; Phillips Museum at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster; State Museum of Pennsylvania; and Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster all in Pennsylvania; and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield; New Haven Museum, New Haven; and Stamford Museum, Stamford all in Connecticut. Watt has also exhibited at McKenzie Fine Art, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Lesley Heller Workshop, Locks Gallery and numerous other galleries and institutions. Her artworks are in the collections of Lancaster Museum of Art and many private collections. Watt taught at Tyler School of Art for 5 years and presently sits on the board of the Vermont Studio Center.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

davidrichardgallery.com

Sanford Wurmfeld @ David Richard Gallery, NYC - "Corona Variations" Exhibition

Sanford Wurmfeld: Corona Variations

David Richard Gallery, New York

February 14 - March 14, 2024

SANFORD WURMFELD 

II-51 B/2 (V-Y) - (12), 2021 

Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 144.75 inches 

Artworks Copyright © Sanford Wurmfeld 

Images by Yao Zu Lu 

Courtesy David Richard Gallery 

David Richard Gallery debuts Sanford Wurmfeld’s newest compositions and color palette in his newest series of 25 canvases, Corona Variations, conceived and created during the pandemic from 2020 through 2023. The new paintings, all acrylic on canvas, range in size from 18 x 36 inches up to the panoramic full spectrum centerpiece of the series measuring 72 x 144 inches. This is Sanford Wurmfeld’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in the gallery’s New York location.

The new formal element introduced by Sanford Wurmfeld in the Corona Variations series is dividing the composition into two halves, either vertically or horizontally. This allows the artist to explore simultaneously the interaction of two different aspects of the color spectrum using a range of hues and values. The palette for the new series includes 61 colors utilizing gray to mute and desaturate the hues. Juxtaposing in a single canvas distinct ranges of the spectrum creates a dramatic contrast between the two halves of the canvas rather than focusing only on the subtle transition from one color to the next across a single surface.

Always using a complex layering of grid structures as his compositional architecture of choice, Sanford Wurmfeld focuses on color and its impact in a space and on the viewer. The new Corona Variationsseries is comprised of the large centerpiece (noted above) and a corresponding smaller 21 x 42-inch version. It is further anchored with four subseries comprised of 4 paintings each that explore two different compositional formats in two different sizes: the smaller series of each measure 30 x 22 and 42 x 22 inches while the larger series are 61 x 42 and 90 x 46 inches. Within each subseries Sanford Wurmfeld systematically expands on specific segments of the color spectrum with gradations of values of each hue that maps the gradual transition from one color to the next, including: red to orange, blue to green, Light yellow, and dark violet.

Further exploring the new divided compositions, the artist has created a large horizontal canvas measuring 31 x 90 inches, splitting the canvas into two equal sized horizontal bands that explores simultaneously the spectral transitions from blue-green to red-orange and contrasting valuations, one above the other.

Similarly, a new smaller scaled variation measuring 42 x 21 inches looks at a vertical variation where the composition is divided into 2 square blocks where the transitions of dark violet and light yellow are one above the other.

Another dramatic variation introduces a pair of triptych compositions, each 42 x 64 inches in size, where three vertical bands explore transitions of colors from blue to orange or red to green with side-by-side value shifts from dark to light in each.

These paintings have another interesting feature that is somewhat conceptual and is manifest chromatically. In particular, these paintings have a visual rhythm and nod to musical influences. The opposing grid structures and layered subtle variations of values become gradients of color ranging vertically or horizontally from desaturated to fully saturated hues. Such value transitions and chromatic intensities are evocative of volume in music with passages containing crescendos. Maybe a form of synesthesia, but given the similarity between the mathematical structure of music and Sanford Wurmfeld’s grids, it is not surprising. Looking at the new large 72 x 144-inch canvas it looks like a musical score. In many ways the painting also could be a visualization of an orchestra or choir, so a visualization of a musical composition is not really a stretch.

SANFORD WURMFELD - SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sanford Wurmfeld (b. 1942 in Bronx, NY) has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960s. His work is included in collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Sprengel Museum, and Espace de l’Art Concret, and the City of Hannover Germany.

In 2013, he was the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions, 1966-2013 curated by William C. Agee at Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, NYC. He has also presented solo exhibitions at Neuberger Museum of Art, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Galerie Denise Rene, Susan Caldwell Gallery, David Richards Gallery, Minus Space, Bard College, Maxwell Davidson Gallery, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Germany), Mucsarnok Kunsthalle (Hungary), Talbot-Rice Gallery (Scotland), and Ewing Museum Gallery (Knoxville, TN).

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1964 with a BA in Art History, Wurmfeld moved to Rome and spent two years painting before returning to New York where he has lived and worked ever since. In 1968, he was the youngest artist included in the landmark exhibition Art of the Real 1948-68 curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais (France), Kunsthaus (Switzerland), and The Tate Gallery (London, England). Wurmfeld’s other museum group exhibitions include the Carnegie International, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy Museum, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Dayton Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, New Bedford Art Museum, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Germany), and Espace de l’Art Concret (France), and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Complementing his studio practice, Sanford Wurmfeld has lectured and written extensively on the history of color, painting, and abstraction. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, City University of New York, and Dartmouth College.

In addition to his artistic work, Sanford Wurmfeld taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College from 1967-2012, where he educated and mentored countless generations of artists. Originally invited to join the faculty by artists Tony Smith, Ray Parker and critic Eugene Goossen, Sanford Wurmfeld was Chairman of the department from 1978-2006 and founded the renowned Hunter MFA program in 1981.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY, 10001

davidrichardgallery.com