Impasse Ronsin @ Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Impasse Ronsin
Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
October 28, 2016 - January 14, 2017

Paul Kasmin Gallery announces the forthcoming exhibition, Impasse Ronsin, which will be on view at 515 West 27th Street from October 28th – December 23rd, 2016.  Taking as its focus the historic Parisian alley once home to the studios of Constantin Brancusi, William N. Copley, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Les Lalanne, Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and numerous other seminal 20th-century artists, the exhibition will include work by these artists in an elaborate installation designed to embody the collaborative atmosphere of the Impasse Ronsin.

At the heart of the original Impasse Ronsin complex, as well as in this exhibition, stands Constantin Brancusi, who moved into the Impasse in 1916 and would remain there until his death in 1957. During those forty-one years, countless seminal artists made the pilgrimage to the Impasse Ronsin in hopes of meeting the artist, whom Marcel Duchamp famously referred to as “The Queen Mother of the Impasse Ronsin” .  The exhibition will feature a bronze edition of Princess X, one of Brancusi’s most iconic forms, as well as a selection of the artist’s vintage photographs depicting the studio and its contents.  Brancusi’s studio as it was arranged at the time of his death was later meticulously reconstructed opposite the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it has been open to the public since 1997.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, the Impasse Ronsin was an area closely associated with Dada and Surrealism.  While neither had permanent studios in the Impasse, both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp were fixtures at the complex.  Included in the exhibition is a vintage photograph of Brancusi and his dogs taken at the Impasse by Man Ray, as well as an original set of Duchamp’s “Rotoreliefs” and his film Anemic Cinema, 1926, in which they were used.

This Surrealist spirit would remain at Ronsin through the 1950s and 1960s, when artists such as William N. Copley, Max Ernst and Les Lalanne would inhabit studios.  Max Ernst’s Dancers Under the Starry Sky, 1951, a painting aptly characteristic of this spirit, will be on view for the first time in sixty-four years.  Also executed in 1951 is William N. Copley’s Steroptic Nude, one of the artist’s most important early paintings and last exhibited in the artist’s 1980 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern.  The renowned collaborative duo Francois-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude Lalanne first met at the Impasse Ronsin in 1952, where iconic works such as Mouton de Laine and Choupatte were initially conceived, and which will be included in the exhibition.

More than anything else, collaboration and perpetual dialogue defined the Impasse Ronsin. In 1961, it was the locale in which Niki de Saint Phalle famously staged her “Shooting Paintings” with the help of Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein and Pierre Restany.  On view in Impasse Ronsin will be Tir (Fragment de Dracula II), 1961 – one of the most substantial and important works from the series.  Also included is Turning Friendship Model from the same year – a kinetic sculpture made by Larry Rivers with the help of Jean Tinguely.

In the rear gallery The Noguchi Museum will create an installation that evokes the ‘Brancusi-like’ studio Isamu Noguchi established just south of Paris, in Gentily, in 1927, after serving as the Romanian’s assistant. As the only artist to have come out of Brancusi’s studio, Noguchi’s insights into that Modernist Eden of ambiguity- where traditional craft met the avant-garde, object became indistinguishable from base, and art was life-are of particular interest.

The cooperative, convivial environment of the Impasse Ronsin has never been adequately articulated in the history of 20th-century art, but today, with sprawling artist communities thriving in Beijing, Berlin, Brooklyn, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, etc., its story has never been more relevant.

A comprehensive monograph including an essay by Jerôme Neutres, extensive archival images and texts, and a selection of interviews conducted by independent curator and art historian Adrian Dannatt will accompany the exhibition.

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY
http://paulkasmingallery.com

Larry Rivers at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC

Larry Rivers [1923 - 2002]

Later works
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
April 26 - June 15, 2012

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents an exhibition of late paintings and works on paper by the celebrated artist Larry Rivers. It marks the second exhibition since the gallery started to represent his Estate in 2008.

The majority of the works assembled were done in the last two decades of the artist’s life, between the 1980s and late 1990s. They follow his ongoing exploration of a wide and disparate range of subject matter, including the legacy of the Holocaust and themes of remembrance. He completed a series of works on his family, and portraits of artists he admired, Balthus, Picasso, Mondrian, among them. He also paid homage to his heroes from the Golden Age of cinema in a group of affectionate portraits of Fred Astaire, Groucho Marx, and Charlie Chaplin.

Larry Rivers’s late works are highly personal and biographical and show an artist who explored new subject matter with energy and passion. Rivers, always a veracious reader, was something of an autodidact. His habit of steeping himself in whatever subject caught his interest only grew with age: history, the Russian Revolution, plight of the Jews in Europe, film, art history. He jumped headlong into a subject, learning as much as he could, and then set out to create a series about it. His interest in history and art history, as examples, allowed the artist to connect with his past. Increasingly present in the work are references to memory and mortality. John Yau writes in the catalogue essay:

"Rivers understood time’s devastations and in many of his late works he registered them with a firm but sensitive eye and hand. He explored the pleasure and sorrow of memory, even as he acknowledged time would eventually erase them. He understood that the present buried the past, and that it was up to us to remember the Holocaust for the next generation, however difficult and painful that might be. This is what we have to recognize about Rivers’s late work. He wasn’t thinking about his reputation, and whether or not he would be forgotten. He was chronicling what it meant to be an aged man living in time—both personal and historical—and all that it stirred up in him.

Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx as Yitzhok Loiza Grossberg. He changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940 as he worked as a jazz musician while studying music theory and composition at the Juilliard School of Music. He began painting in 1945, studying with Hans Hofmann, and at New York University. The artist’s work has been exhibited and collected widely throughout the United States. His paintings are included in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the de Young Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Within the last two years, seminal works of his were included in a major survey on Abstract Expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY
www.tibordenagy.com

Larry Rivers, Marlborough Gallery, New York - Fashion and The Birds

Larry Rivers: Fashion and The Birds

Marlborough Gallery, New York

October 29 - November 29, 1997

Marlborough Gallery presents an exciting exhibition of new work by the inimitable American painter, Larry Rivers. This is Larry Rivers' twelfth one-man show at Marlborough since his joining the gallery in 1964. Larry Rivers was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, in the Bronx, New York in 1923 to Russian Jewish immigrants. He began his career in music as a jazz saxophonist. In 1947, at the suggestion of a friend, he began to paint at Hans Hoffman's school in Provincetown, Mass. His success was such that two years later he was given his first New York show. In 1950, Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro selected him to be part of a New Talent show, and since that time he has become one of America's most important and innovative painters.

Larry Rivers' exhibition is comprised of approximately twenty-five paintings and ten drawings. Larry Rivers likes to work in a series using a central subject such as in his previous show called Art and the Artist. In this show, many of the works are based on a series derived from his recent interest in James Audubon and The Birds of America. (His first painting based on this subject was painted in 1985/86, entitled Twenty-five Birds of the Northeast, taken from a place mat at his table at his favorite diner). Among the new works are two brilliant portraits of Audubon as well as several works devoted to single bird studies such as a striking Great Blue Heron (50 x 48 inches), Black Neck Stilt (30 x 34 inches) and Comorant (48 x 40 inches). In other works, Larry Rivers has taken female models from the world of fashion and mixed them with bird images creating an intriguing visual Gestalt from separate elements of experience and emotion. This eclectic mixture is at once provocative, surprising, and enjoyably fresh. The medium for these works is based in some cases on the relief technique which Larry Rivers has developed into his own personal style. In some of these, he has deepened their relief increasing thereby the work's tactile exuberance. In other works, Larry Rivers has continued to use the flat canvas to magnificent expressive effect.

What stands out in all Larry Rivers' work is the superiority of his draughtsmanship, the lightness of his touch, the presence of his hand, and a unique color palette. It has been said that "Rivers' stubborn individualism has become his signature." He has been called a "maverick and innovative artist," "enterprising and mercurial," "a reactionary." Art International called him "contrariness incarnate." Rivers himself has said, "I have my own agenda," reflecting Arthur Jones' statement that "Rivers has constantly challenged the status quo." Rivers was painting figurative works when the tide was high on Abstract Expressionism. He was the first American artist to use commercial images in fine art which led the London Sunday Telegraph later to call him "the grand old man of Pop Art." In the same article, the Telegraph said Larry Rivers "has always stayed true to his talent as a figurative draughtsman and interested in relating the contemporary image to the tradition of western painting." In his brilliant new work, Rivers once again adds to the lexicon of stimulating contemporary images that one hasn't seen before. Rivers' style has always been hard to pin down. John Ashberry, who described Rivers' work as "handsome and dazzling original," summarized that "Rivers has always been out of sync" and Roberta Smith of the New York Times called him "a consummate synthesizer who seems to have considered any artist or art work fair game." But perhaps the wellspring for the strength, sensitivity and enormous individuality by which his work can be measured has been best sounded by John Gruen who wrote the following:

"Early on, Rivers had developed a painting style he could call his own. It might be categorized as being semi-abstract, semi-realistic, pop-artist, post-romantic, or neo-classic. But whatever the label, it reflected (and still does) an untrammeled imagination, an extraordinary draughtsmanship, a color sense that has no truck with garishness or vulgarity, and an innate vitality that springs from Rivers' own restlessness and reflects itself with charged-up spontaneity, into whatever he paints."

Larry Rivers is represented in numerous public collections in the United States. Among them are the following: The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; De Menil Foundation, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Minneapolis Institute of Art. In New York City, he is represented in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In Washington, D.C., he is represented at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden and the National Gallery of Art. He is also represented by the Tate Gallery, London, the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas.

An illustrated color catalogue of the Rivers Fashion and The Birds is available.

This exhibition is accompanied in the small gallery by a show of small sculptures by Arnaldo Pomodoro.

Following Larry Rivers' exhibition in December will be an exhibition of paintings by Vincent Desiderio.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019

www.marlboroughgallery.com