Ron Nagle @ Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC - Necessary Obstacles

Ron Nagle: Necessary Obstacles

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

September 11 – October 23, 2021

The exhibition Ron Nagle: Necessary Obstacles at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York features eighteen new sculptures and six related drawings. Each sculpture is meticulously crafted by hand in the artist’s San Francisco studio in a variety of materials including clay, catalyzed polyurethane, epoxy resin, and wood. Despite their intimate scale, Ron Nagle’s works have an outsized visual presence. Evoking otherworldly landscapes or surreal architectural arrangements, Ron Nagle’s diminutive sculptures are “invested with the grandeur of the Taj Mahal” as the critic Dave Hickey has written. With their unexpected combinations and forms, Ron Nagle’s inventive works elicit a vast range of associations. “The thing you want people to feel,” Ron Nagle has said, “is something they haven’t felt before.”

RON NAGLE (b. 1939) began working with ceramics in the 1950s, while still in high school. His first oneperson exhibition took place in 1968, and since then his work has been shown at numerous museums around the world, including most recently “Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter” at the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as one-person exhibitions at the Vienna Secession, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Perimeter in London.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

523 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

matthewmarks.com

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Ron Nagle @ Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC - Getting to No

Ron Nagle: Getting to No

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

May 2 – June 15, 2019

The exhibition Ron Nagle: Getting to No at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York features twenty-six new sculptures and fifteen related drawings. Most are no larger than six inches in any dimension, but at this scale, Ron Nagle says, an object “can allude to a much bigger place, because it’s so small your imagination has to fill in all that space that’s not there.” Ron Nagle makes his exquisitely crafted, jewel-like sculptures by hand, and although he works in traditional mediums like ceramic and porcelain, he combines them with other materials, including epoxy resin and catalyzed polyurethane, to create forms that cannot be achieved in clay alone. This merging of incongruous elements also extends to his titles, which are loaded with puns and wordplay: Egregious Philbin (2017), for example, or Quartersan (2018). “I’m trying to create a hybrid,” he explains. “You can’t quite put your finger on it.”

Inspiration for Ron Nagle’s work often comes from unusual sources, like the roadside tombstones of Hawaii, the custom paint jobs of 1960s hot-rod cars, or the stucco houses of the San Francisco neighborhood where he grew up. Even a deformed tree or a stain on the sidewalk can spark an idea. But his work is also grounded in tradition. He frequently cites the influence of shibui, an aesthetic of contrast and balance that is highly prized in Japan. When Ron Nagle makes a sculpture, the proportion of each color is essential; the most vibrant hue might be confined to a thin stripe along its base. “That’s the zinger,” he says. “In music they’d call it a hook. Your eye will go there in reference to the other colors.”

RON NAGLE (b. 1939) lives and works in San Francisco and began working with ceramics in the 1950s, while still in high school. He apprenticed to Peter Voulkos in 1961 and later exhibited alongside Voulkos, Ken Price, and other innovative West Coast artists working in clay. His first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then his work has been shown at numerous museums, including one-person exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Later this year the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, and the Secession in Vienna will open exhibitions of Ron Nagle’s work. Early next year the Berkeley Art Museum will present a survey of his work.

RON NAGLE Getting to No

Exhibition catalogue, Matthew Marks Gallery, 2019

With an interview by Vincent Fecteau

Clothbound with jacket, 64 pages, 27 images, 11 × 10½ inches; 28 × 27 cm

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

522 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

matthewmarks.com

Jasper Johns @ Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Jasper Johns: Recent Paintings & Works on Paper
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
February 9 - April 6, 2019 

Matthew Marks presents Jasper Johns: Recent Paintings & Works on Paper in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes fifteen paintings and forty works on paper made since 2012.

Two 2018 paintings, as well as a group of new drawings, are based on a photograph of a soldier, Lance Corporal James Farley, taken during the Vietnam War by LIFE magazine photographer Larry Burrows. The soldier is seen at the end of a long day, head in his hands after a failed mission. Stenciled at the top and bottom of both canvases are the words “FARLEY BREAKS DOWN / AFTER LARRY BURROWS.”

Also on view are four paintings and three works on paper from the Regrets series, all completed after the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2014. Like the Farley series, they are based on an image of a man covering his face, in this case a photograph of Lucian Freud seated on a bed. In the catalogue that accompanies the current exhibition, Alexi Worth writes that these series both “show Johns breaking what seemed like foundational prohibitions against outright depiction and unguarded emotion.” The artist’s willingness to contradict himself may account for the perpetual surprises in his long career. “I think you can be more than one person,” Jasper Johns has said. “I think I am more than one person. Unfortunately.”

In two other new paintings, Jasper Johns revisits his Seasons paintings of the mid-1980s. Like them, the new canvases feature the artist’s shadow flanked by motifs from his earlier work. In the 2018 paintings, however, the shadow is overlaid with a skeleton wearing a hat. Accompanying these paintings are two dozen related works on paper, including drawings in ink and charcoal on paper or ink on plastic, as well as several prints.

In October 2020, Jasper Johns’s work will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shown at both institutions simultaneously, it will be the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
www.matthewmarks.com

Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC

Peter Cain: New Paintings ans Drawings
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
February 1 - March 15, 1997

Matthew Marks presents Peter Cain: New Paintings and Drawings. This exhibition includes the artist's final completed works. Peter Cain died suddenly and tragically of a cerebral hemorrhage, age 37, on Sunday, January 5th, 1997.

The exhibition, which open as originally scheduled, consists of new paintings and drawings, made by the artist over the past two years. In a radical departure from his earlier work in which cars were the exclusive subject matter, Cain spent the last two years working with the traditional themes of landscape and portraiture.

This exhibition includes three large-scale paintings of a man's head and six smaller canvases of Los Angeles industrial landscapes. A range of related graphite drawings are also be included.

Peter Cain was included in both the 1993 and 1995 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Milan in the past year.

Matthew Marks Gallery
523 W 24th Street
New York, NY 10011