Peter and Sally Saul @ Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton

Through 13 November 2022

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton presents Peter and Sally Saul, an exhibition of works on paper by Peter Saul and ceramic works by Sally Saul. Both artists specifically created and selected the mostly new works for this joint exhibition, where their work is shown together for the first time in many years.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, PETER SAUL (b. 1934) has exhibited throughout the world. His paintings are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Recent important exhibitions include Peter Saul at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse and Le Delta in Namur, and his first retrospective in New York, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum. Paul Saul’s first extensive monograph was published by Rizzoli in Fall 2021.

SALLY SAUL (b. 1946) has shown her work extensively for over three decades in solo exhibitions and group shows throughout the United States and internationally. Her first survey Blue Hills, Yellow Tree, bringing together three decades of work, was held at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2019. Sally Saul is represented by Venus over Manhattan. Solo exhibitions include Sally Saul at Almine Rech, Paris in 2020, and at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York in 2020/21.  Her work has been shown at other venues including Jeffrey Deitch, New York; the Art Museum of West Virginia, Morgantown, WV; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; White Columns, New York; and Lumber Room, Portland, OR.

Both artists live and work in Germantown, New York.

MICHAEL WERNER EAST HAMPTON

50 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.michaelwerner.com

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner East Hampton

24 August - 13 November 2022

_____________________

David Hockney @ Pace Gallery, East Hampton - Ma Normandie

David Hockney: Ma Normandie 

Pace Gallery, East Hampton 

May 27 – June 6, 2021

DAVID HOCKNEY

Ruby Dreaming, 2019 

© 2021 David Hockney, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents a solo exhibition of work by DAVID HOCKNEY as its second show of the 2021 season in East Hampton. The 14 prints on display illustrate the artist’s home in Normandy and its surroundings as well as the interior of the artist’s studio. Exploring the artist’s recurring theme of the natural narrative of the changing seasons, this body of work is full of the vibrancy that has come to define much of David Hockney’s art. These works celebrate creativity and invite viewers to see the power of nature as the world outside continues to blossom and spring gives away to the summer.

On a visit to Normandy in the fall of 2018, the artist fell in love with its pastoral landscape, and in March 2019, he moved to a rural area in the region. As he immersed himself in his new house, a 17th-century half-timber cottage on 12 acres of verdant land, David Hockney committed to documenting the arrival of spring around him—the same subject that had occupied him in 2011 when he famously depicted the advent of spring in East Yorkshire. The resulting images show the Norman countryside waking up to a new season. Images like Study of “The Entrance” (2019) not only show the rich greens and blues of spring but also the joy inherent to that season. On view more broadly are the thoughtful and exploratory ways in which David Hockney engages with his surroundings. Whether walking viewers around his house, which he has captured from each cardinal direction, or imagining the inner workings of his dog’s mind, as in Ruby Dreaming (2019), each work is imbued with the pleasure of its own creation and celebrates with delicate, assured marks the beauty of everyday life.

Included in the show are three new iPad drawings printed on paper. These works capture the inside of David Hockney’s home; one, depicting a hearth with a crackling fire, was featured on the cover of the New Yorker in December 2020 accompanied by an interview with the artist. Hockney has been drawing regularly using the iPad since the device was introduced in 2010, having previously used the iPhone in a similar manner. Throughout his career, he has experimented with a wide variety of then-new technologies, including Polaroid cameras, fax machines, and video.

Concurrent with this exhibition, the artist’s new 2½ minute animated work, titled Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long, was broadcast on electronic billboards in Times Square in New York and prominent locations in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul during the month of May. In New York, Times Square Arts feature the work as part of its Midnight Moment series, playing it on 76 synchronized screens throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. The work depicts a sunrise, offering a powerful symbol of hope and collaboration, in keeping with themes explored in the artist’s exhibition at Pace in East Hampton.

Several museum exhibitions of the artist’s work in the United States and United Kingdom also coincide with the East Hampton presentation. At New York City’s Morgan Library, a show of Hockney’s portraits on paper, which opened in October, will run through May 30, 2021. An astute pairing of the joyful landscapes of Hockney and Vincent van Gogh is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston through June 20, 2021. Finally, an exhibition of 116 of Hockney’s iPad drawings of spring in Normandy opened at the Royal Academy in London on May 23, 2021.

DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom), one of the most influential artists of the late 20th and 21st century, has consistently explored the potential of perspective and pictorial space in his work. As a student, David Hockney studied traditions of British landscape painting. He broke from the then-reigning interest in abstract painting to pursue his own style, developing a brightly colored palette that burst forth in his paintings from the 1960s and 1970s in Los Angeles and continued into a distinctive, studied, and original approach to the problems and conventions of painting. Hockney works in a variety of media, including printmaking, painting, stage design, and photographic collage.

PACE GALLERY

68 Park Place, East Hampton, NY 11937 

www.pacegallery.com

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, East Hampton, New York

Elmgreen & Dragset 

Pace Gallery, East Hampton 

Through November 15, 2020 

Elmgreen & Dragset

Doubt, 2019 

© Elmgreen & Dragset, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery presents Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s first exhibition with the gallery since joining Pace in June 2020. On view at Pace’s location in East Hampton, the presentation features five recent and new works as well as an offsite outdoor sculptural installation. Viewers are invited to create their own narratives, responding to implied actions and emotions suggested in the selection of works, where traces of presence and absence are finely balanced and where gestures both bold and intimate are interwoven.

Among the most renowned and widely exhibited artists in Europe, Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) challenge and readdress how art is presented and experienced with an often playful and subversive approach. The artist duo pursues complex questions of identity, sexuality, and belonging in their work. Often radically re-contextualizing everyday objects or transforming exhibition spaces into unexpected new environments, Elmgreen & Dragset draw on both lived experience and the context in which their works are shown. 2020 marks the 25th year of their collaboration, which has continued to call into question established power structures in society and deal with fundamental, existential questions.

On view in the exhibition is Couple, Fig. 19 (2019), part of an ongoing series of paired diving boards, which exemplifies this play with perception—shifting the role of the object by removing it from its functional setting and calling into question the significance of environment. The materiality of the work also defies the immediate reading of it as readymades, as each element is crafted by hand. Since their first diving board sculpture in 1997, the motif of a swimming pool has frequently appeared in their work. One key example was their 2016 installation Van Gogh’s Ear at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center in New York, which featured a large ear-shaped pool structure with an iconic, cyan-blue interior, lights, a diving board, and a stainless-steel ladder. Similarly, the duo’s Bent Pool (2019)—the 20-foot-tall installation in Pride Park outside the Miami Beach Convention Center—takes the form of an oval pool, bent upright into an inverted U-shape.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Black Socks, 2019 

© Elmgreen & Dragset, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Black Socks (2019) subverts traditional notions of objectification and desire. The visual appearance of this sculpture responds to Peter Hujar’s black and white photograph Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs) (1976) in both form and color. The position of the crossed legs of the sculpture is drawn directly from the subject in Hujar’s iconic work, and the colors of the sculpture mimic the black-and-white tonality of the photographer’s image. Just as queer experiences play a profound role in the work of Elmgreen & Dragset, Hujar’s work frequently and powerfully captured queer life in New York City.

As part of the presentation Pace also shows Short Story (2020), a new outdoor installation situated on a tennis court incorporating two figurative bronze sculptures of young boys following the conclusion of a tennis match—one victorious, the other defeated. The expressions of the figures invite viewers to call into question the idea of competition and its reverberations in society, and more broadly the nuanced notion of situational fairness and outcomes. This installation is available for viewing by appointment only. Tied to the exhibition, Pace also debuts a conversation between Elmgreen & Dragset and friend, collaborator, and fellow Pace artist Fred Wilson as an introduction to the gallery’s global audience. 

Pace’s presentation coincides with Elmgreen & Dragset’s new solo exhibition, 2020, at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland. On view through January 17, 2021, the exhibition features a selection of site-specific, new, and familiar sculptures by the artists, presented together in a format that transforms Finland’s largest museum into a surreal car park, incorporating real cars, road markings, and a selection of Elmgreen & Dragset sculptures—several of which are seen for the first time. The melancholic, half abandoned parking lot that makes up the exhibition seems to beg the question: What will happen to intimacy after 2020, a year of social distancing and heightened fear of sharing physical space?

Other recent solo exhibitions include Elmgreen & Dragset: Sculptures at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, which was presented from September 2019 – January 2020 and marked the artists’ first major museum presentation in the U.S. Installed throughout the interior and exterior spaces of the Nasher, the works on view exemplified the artists’ use of multiple aesthetics and working methods, and drew upon Minimalism, conceptual strategies, and the figurative sculpture tradition.

Elmgreen & Dragset have been described as subtly infiltrating art institutions from the inside with their critical gaze, frequently using museum and gallery architecture as both subject and material, laying bare the social and cultural systems that expose the fiction of neutrality trafficked by the white cube. “…But instead of using the traditional methods of institutional critique we rather change the identity and the actual physical appearance of the white cube” says Dragset. Elmgreen & Dragset have used such a strategy on numerous occasions. At UCCA in Beijing they turned the vast exhibition hall into a whole art fair mimicking a conventional fair layout with gallery booths in a fishbone grid, a café, a bookstore and an information desk, but only displaying works by themselves which were not for sale. In Seoul, Elmgreen & Dragset turned Samsung Museum of Art’s venue Plateau into a dysfunctional airport, and outside Marfa, Texas, they erected perhaps their most well-known project: Prada Marfa, a forever closed luxury boutique in the middle of the Texan desert.

Elmgreen & Dragset have produced several public sculptures, often addressing tensions between public and private, intimacy and alienation, power and powerlessness. Such projects include The Mayor of London’s Commission for the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2012, a temporary installation for which they created a bronze figure of a boy on a toy rocking horse. The infantilized figure offered a humorous counterpoint to the militarized masculinity of equestrian statuary, epitomized by the sculpture of King George IV that famously sits on the plinth opposite. Their Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime was commissioned by the German federal Government in 2008 and is permanently located in Berlin’s Tiergarten next to the Holocaust Memorial.

In 2017, Elmgreen & Dragset curated the Istanbul Biennial. In 2015, they received an honorary doctorate from NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. For the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the artists curated and staged The Collectors, an exhibition in the Danish and Nordic Pavilions that transformed the pavilions into a domestic living space inhabited by an art collector and featured works by 24 artists. In 2002 the duo won the German art prize Preis der Nationalgalerie and in 2000 they were shortlisted for Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s most recent monographic publications include: Elmgreen & Dragset published by Phaidon, 2019; Sculptures published by Hatje Cantz and Nasher Sculpture Center, 2019; and This Is How We Bite our Tongue published by The Whitechapel Gallery, 2018.

Visitors are required to schedule their visit in advance. To schedule your visit, go to Pace's website.

PACE GALLERY

68 Park Place, East Hampton, New York

pacegallery.com

Yoshitomo Nara @ Pace Gallery, New York - After all I’m cosmic dust

Yoshitomo Nara
After all I’m cosmic dust
Pace Gallery, New York
Through July 19, 2020
68 Park Place, East Hampton, New York
September 17 – October 17, 2020
540 West 25th Street, New York

YOSHITOMO NARA

Play the thinker, 2020 

© Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace Gallery inaugurates its temporary gallery space in East Hampton with After all I’m cosmic dust, a solo exhibition of never-before-seen drawings by internationally renowned, Japanese artist YOSHITOMO NARA presented alongside personal items related to the artist’s process and inspiration. Following the exhibition at the East Hampton location (July 3 – 19, 2020), the show will travel to Pace’s library space at 540 West 25th Street from September 17 – October 17, 2020, allowing audiences to view the intimate presentation in New York City this fall. This exhibition coincides with the release of the artist’s first substantial monograph, written by Yeewan Koon (Phaidon Press, 2020.)

Yoshitomo Nara rose to prominence in the late 1990s, becoming internationally known for his emotionally complex paintings of children set against monochromatic backgrounds. His signature style is expressed in many other mediums, including sculpture, photography, ceramics and installation, but it is his drawings that form the foundation for his practice.

“Looking back to when I was little. . . I was able to draw whatever I wanted with a pencil. . . For me, this turned out to be the point of origin for all my work, and it is a practice that I continue to this day. . . I have been drawing as though I were breathing. Or taking notes. Or thinking. That’s been my past thirty years.”—Yoshitomo Nara

After all I’m cosmic dust provides insight into drawing as the center of Nara’s creative world. Combining colored pencil with acrylic paint, his spontaneous drawings—whether diaristic doodles, random lines of thoughts or bold sketch lines—portray children in a range of moods and capture the instinctive energy crucial to Yoshitomo Nara’s expression of his thoughts, emotions and dreams. Yoshitomo Nara makes his drawings anywhere and at any time and as a result they embody a freedom that is vital to him. He pins these works on his studio walls, places them in drawers or piles them high on his desk. Often much later, he returns to them to tap into memories that he will then channel into new paintings and sculptures. The personal nature of Yoshitomo Nara’s art distances it from the sleek, technophilic and mass-produced aesthetics of Superflat, a Japanese style that emerged in the early 2000s.

Yoshitomo Nara’s more recent works suggest a return to his childhood. Although he has gained international acclaim and is involved in projects with global reach, he maintains strong ties to his home in the north of Japan. In addition to presenting approximately twenty works, the exhibition features two large-scale drawings that Yoshitomo Nara made while attending Tobiu Camp, an annual music and arts festival in Hokkaido that celebrates the onset of autumn as well as the camp’s environmental work protecting this remote region. Here, artists and musicians join together, regardless of their status, to share their different projects or simply play. Yoshitomo Nara’s drawings are inspired by the spirit of community and he channels a connective empathy that is at the heart of his art.

YOSHITOMO NARA (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan) is a pioneering figure in contemporary art whose signature style—which expresses children in a range of emotional complexities from resistance and rebellion to quietude and contemplation—celebrates the introspective freedom of the imagination and the individual.

Yoshitomo Nara’s work spans painting, drawing, photography, large-scale installations, and sculpture in ceramic, bronze, and fiber-reinforced plastic. Influenced by popular music, memories of childhood, and current events, he filters these references through an exploratory realm of feelings, loneliness and rebelliousness especially, which span autobiographical as well as broader cultural sensibilities.

PACE GALLERY
68 Park Place, East Hampton, New York
540 West 25th Street, New York
pacegallery.com

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody @ Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
May 25 – June 22, 2019

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Go Figure!, a group exhibition about an ongoing dialogue between contemporary figurative artists and figuration of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and includes works by the following artists: 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones • Emma Amos • Will Barnet • Diedrick Brackens • Katherine Bradford • Delia Brown • Joan Brown • Alex Bradley Cohen • Lucille Corcos • Mira Dancy • Elaine de Kooning • Charles DuBack • Angela Dufresne • Martha Edelheit • Eric Fischl • Natalie Frank • Barnaby Furnas • Shirley Gorelick Mimi Gross • Ridley Howard • Konstantin Kakanias • Sam Kalda • Maira Kalman • Howard Kanovitz • Alex Katz • Bill King • Marcia Marcus • Liz Markus • Jan Müller • Joe Overstreet • Philip Pearlstein  Vanessa Prager • Eleanor Ray • Walter Robinson • Mira Schor • Joan Semmel • Jansson Stegner • Ruby Sky Stiler • Billy Sullivan • Nick Weber • Tom Wesselmann • Jane Wilson • Jason Yarmosky • Hartwell Yeargans • Yelena Yemchuk

Curator Beth Rudin DeWoody says:

I’ve always been attracted to figurative painting and drawing even though I love abstract and minimalist art. I also love the in-between when figure melds into the abstract.  There are many young artists who are looking back to some of the great figurative artists of the mid 20th-Century, putting their own 21st-Century influences and viewpoints onto the works.  

The exhibition is about pairing contemporary artists with artists of the mid-20th Century to shed new light on the strength of their voices, and continued relevance today. Despite the dominance of Minimalist and Conceptual art, a surprising number of artists in the 1960s and 70s were using figuration to pioneer aesthetic and political ideas that we often take for granted today. 

In the historic work, we see explorations of personal identity and societal roles within a range of portraiture. Artists look at the domestic and the family, the fictional studio space, and the world outside.  In many works, an intimate space collides with a broader popular culture image bank.  Traditional images of the nude are undone, appropriated by a female gaze or a deconstruction of formal conventions. The exhibition displays a massive range of material approaches, from a finely rendered touch, to collage and impasto surfaces, to work that exists in the space between painting and object. 

The pairings that guided curatorial selections are often playful visual connections, but can also reflect more literal mentorship or inter-generational connections between the artists.

Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, is President of The Rudin Family Foundations and Executive Vice President of Rudin Management. The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection has over 10,000 works in various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, works on paper, video, and installation, by leading and emerging contemporary artists. It also includes significant holdings of iconic furniture, design, objects, ephemera, and artist’s books. The Collection has been the subject of exhibitions featured at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach and the Parrish Museum, Water Mill, among other institutions. In December 2017, Beth Rudin DeWoody opened The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Florida to present viewable storage of her collection, as well as exhibitions. 

Beth Rudin DeWoody has curated numerous exhibitions, including “I Won’t Grow Up” at Cheim & Read, New York; “Think Pink” at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; “Bad For You” at Shizaru Gallery, London; “Please Enter” at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, and “Really” at Wilding Cran, Los Angeles.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Michael Boyd @ Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Michael Boyd: 1969
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton
June 28 - July 29, 2018

Michael Boyd: 1969 brings together a major series of paintings made by the artist in the late 1960s in response to a new environment. The work has not been presented as a group since the year they were made, when they were exhibited at the former art gallery of Cornell University. They are both pristinely abstract and profoundly associative of landscape, space, and light. They are paintings with gradient fields of blue, and ribbons of other colors, as punctuation.

MICHAEL BOYD (b. Waterloo, Iowa, 1936 - d. Ithaca, New York, 2015) began his career as an Abstract Expressionist in New York City and gradually moved toward hardedged abstraction. His paintings of the 1960s utilize broad fields and blocks of color. However, in 1969, his work shifted dramatically. Michael Boyd had been working as a graphic designer and, in that year, accepted a job at Cornell University to teach design. In response to the landscape and sky of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, he began to explore gradient fields of blue. Michael Boyd’s use of gradients and nuanced chromatic shifts would become further developed in his early 1970s work. Although his are pristine paintings, Michael Boyd was more interested in the experiential, rather than color theory. The exhibition highlights this transitional period of Michael Boyd’s work, when his move to Ithaca predicated a personal vision, apart from the hierarchies from the New York art world.

Prior to 1969, Michael Boyd was making shaped canvases; however he never fully embraced 1960s theoretical ideas of painting as an anti-illusionistic object. Instead — as these paintings make clear — he was interested in expanding the expressive and associative possibilities of painting. Despite his meticulous craftsmanship, the work always includes painterly, handmade elements, and he rooted himself within the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. The paintings reference places or themes with titles like “Airport,” “Scarab,” “Lakeside.” Michael Boyd wrote, in 1991, “What matters is how one can use the resources of the medium to explore the mystery.”

Following Michael Boyd’s studies at the University of Northern Iowa and a stint in Ajijic, Mexico, Michael Boyd split his time between Ithaca and New York City, where he maintained a studio in his Soho loft. Michael Boyd had several solo exhibitions at Max Hutchinson Gallery in the 1970s, and was the subject of museum exhibitions at the Fine Arts Gallery of the State University of New York at Oneonta (1972); and a traveling exhibition originating at the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa (1989), among others. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA,; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. 

Eric Firestone Gallery represents the estate of Michael Boyd, and this is the gallery’s second solo exhibition of his work. 

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937
www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Martha Diamond Exhibition @ Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY - Broad Strokes

Martha Diamond: Broad Strokes 

Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY 

July 22 - August 15, 2017 

Harper’s presents Broad Strokes, an exhibition of work by New York-based painter MARTHA DIAMOND. Comprised of both historic and more recent paintings on linen.

On display on the first floor are two distinct bodies of work that Martha Diamond produced during the 1980s and the mid-2000s. In a series of large paintings on linen, Diamond loosely renders tall buildings and complex cityscapes. Her painterly vocabulary is assembled from saturated skeins of color, and thick, gestural brushwork that reveal the effect of light on the urban environment, including early morning fog, and the shadows of twilight. In her essay for Diamond’s 1990 show at Robert Miller Gallery, the poet Eileen Myles noted: “Martha Diamond seems to be painting ‘the present,’ whether it’s big or little parts of buildings, specks of dust or paint strokes floating in a raspberry sky...”

Martha Diamond relies as much on personal history as she does on direct observation to assemble her paintings, and her style is marked by the way in which she takes liberties with her subject matter. Façades and shadows function as generative material for Diamond’s expressionistic gestures, in a way that moves her paintings beyond more faithful forms of representation. Her pictures skirt the edge of legibility, and while certain works might telegraph the silhouette of a skyline, others disassemble into complex patterns of faceted planes. 

In another series of vertically oriented canvases, Martha Diamond abandons any pretense toward representation and works instead within a rigorous syntax of horizontal bands in black and white. Her reduced palette and rhythmic fields of parallel bars trade-in questions of surface and depth as they shuttle between flatness and deep space. Though radically different in their painterly strategies, both bodies of work exploit a particular brand of wet-on-wet painting, which has come to define Diamond’s mature style. Heavy impasto registered with wide brushes lends her work a chunky heft that compliments both her abstract and more representational compositions.

Martha Diamond is a longtime veteran of the downtown New York art world, and she’s maintained a studio practice in the same Bowery loft since she took up residence in 1969. Her signature approach to representational painting was forged in a crucible of artists and poets who championed the centrality of personal experience in creative production, paying particular attention to the ways in which one’s perceptions of New York City could be translated into art. Alongside painters like Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers, as well as poets like Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Peter Schjeldahl, Diamond worked at the margins of the city at a time when light and space were in ample supply. In a manner that differentiates her from her counterparts, however, Diamond has continually chronicled the changing character of New York’s urban environment, recalling the city’s most celebrated documentarians, including photographers like Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand. From her Bowery loft, Diamond makes images of the built environment that teeter on the verge of dissolution, in the foggy glow of an early morning sunrise, or the incandescent pattern thrown from the windows of a residential high rise.

MARTHA DIAMOND (b. 1944, New York, NY) lives and works in New York City. Diamond received a BA from Carleton College, Northfield, MN and an MA from New York University. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including Alexandre Gallery, New York; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; Robert Miller Gallery, New York; and Sue Scott Gallery, New York. Diamond’s work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions both stateside and abroad, including shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Nagoya Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan; and the Whitney Museum, New York, among other institutions.

Martha Diamond’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Staatliche Museum, Berlin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

HARPER'S EAST HAMPTON

87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.harpersgallery.com

Conrad Marca-Relli at Knoedler & Company, NYC and Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton

Conrad Marca-Relli 

City to Town 

Knoedler & Company, New York  

May 5 - July 29, 2011 

Conrad Marca-Relli 

The Springs Years, 1953-1956 

Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton 

May 5 - July 30, 2011 

In assocation with Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma

CONRAD MARCA-RELLI 

Cityscape, ca. 1952

Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 61 1/2 inches 

Courtesy Knoedler & Company, NYC 

and Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma

A wonderful, mysterious city has been discovered by Marca-Relli. Its exact location is never revealed, yet clues place it somewhere between Hopper’s New York and de Chirico’s dream city. — Paul Brach, 1953

CONRAD MARCA-RELLI’s life and career were restlessly peripatetic—he moved back and forth between Europe and the United States, with homes at various times in New York City, East Hampton, Rome, Paris, Ibiza, and Parma—even for a time living on a houseboat on the Seine. In addition, his frequent travels included two trips to Mexico (in 1940 and 1952), where the geometric abstract quality of the white adobe architecture, seen in intensely contrasting light and shadow, proved extremely influential on his cityscapes, as well as his evolving work in collage.

As a condition of duality characterized his pattern of residency throughout his life, so too, in his art, Marca-Relli kept a foothold both in abstraction and figuration. He never gave himself over entirely to pure abstraction, but found he was either inclined to abstract a figurative reference or to travel back and forth in his work between figuration and total abstraction. In his catalogue essay, Senso Architettonico, Carter Ratcliff identifies the “architecture” of art-making as a unifying and core principle in Marca-Relli’s work, one which led him ultimately away from painting per se, to the “construction” of collages. As early as 1951, in an ongoing series of town- and cityscapes, the artist began exploring a theme that brought together his attention to structure in his work; his literal engagement with architecture; his response to the history and specificity of the locales he visited; and the metaphorical underpinning the theme allowed for. Metaphorical depictions of towns and cities recur throughout Western art history—from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 14th century allegorical murals in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, to the urban world of Edward Hopper, to the metaphysical cityscapes of Mario Sironi and Giorgio de Chirico. Indeed Marca-Relli’s stacked dwellings and perforated façades, as well as his desolate, depopulated views, have much in common with these artists. Carter Ratcliff has written:

Seen in isolation the Cityscapes of 1951–52 are astonishing. Rendered in a palette of grays at once gloomy and luminous, they are filled with a melancholy that is not mere sadness but, rather, an exalted awareness of the humanity we have shared in the cities we began to build more than five millennia ago. Charging ordinary buildings with the weight of history, these paintings are all the more remarkable when we see them against the backdrop of the New York art world in the early 1950s.

Despite the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in postwar American art, Marca-Relli’s cityscapes had relevance and resonance for his contemporaries. In 1976, Harold Rosenberg recalled of Marca-Relli that the first strong impression made on me by his canvases was a show of his “cityscapes.” The U.S. Pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale was an exhibition entitled, American Artists Paint the City, curated by Katharine Kuh of The Art Institute of Chicago. Included was Marca-Relli’s 1951 New York cityscape, La Città. The series continued to evolve in Marca-Relli’s work, and we find him passing through widely diverging treatments and variations on the subject through the late 1990s.

CONRAD MARCA-RELLI: CITY TO TOWN, spans the years 1942 to 1996, and includes over twenty paintings and collages. The exhibition remains on view at Knoedler & Company through July 29. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 5, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Concurrently on view at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton is CONRAD MARCA-RELLI: THE SPRINGS YEARS, 1953-1956, May 5-July 30. This exhibition focuses on works created during the period of Marca-Relli’s four-year residence in East Hampton, at 852 Fireplace Road, which was also the period of his warm and respectful friendship with his neighbors, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Marca- Relli later wrote, I felt that moving away from the city would give me the peace necessary to pursue my work. The move had a favorable, even decisive influence on his art, as it had for Jackson Pollock, who moved to Springs in 1945. In Marca-Relli’s case, this period saw the full emergence of his engagement with collage; indeed, in his catalogue essay, Carter Ratcliff sees the artist as redefining the premises of collage, literally reinventing it. A reception will be held at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Sunday, June 26, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, with a gallery talk by Magdalena Dabrowski, Special Consultant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art.

The exhibitions, both organized in cooperation with the Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma, Italy, are accompanied by a dual publication with essays by Carter Ratcliff.

CARTER RATCLIFF is a poet and art critic. A contributing editor of Art in America, he has received several awards for his work, including the College Art Association’s 1987 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Critics Grants, and a Poets Foundation Grant. His writings have appeared in American and European journals and in the publications of museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim in New York, and the Royal Academy in London. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College and has lectured at a variety of institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among his books are monographs on Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, and Georgia O’Keeffe. He is the author of The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, The Figure of the Artist (2000), and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art: 1965-1975 (2000).

The upcoming exhibition in the Knoedler Project Space will be KEITH MAYERSON: Iconscapes, 1995-1999, May 12 - July 29, 2011

KNOEDLER & COMPANY

19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.knoedlergallery.com