Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen @ Paula Cooper Gallery, Palm Beach - There is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

There is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop

Paula Cooper Gallery, Palm Beach

December 5, 2020 – January 9, 2021

An exhibition of work by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen titled “There is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop” marks the inauguration of Paula Cooper Gallery’s new seasonal pop-up at 243A Worth Avenue opened on December 5, 2020. The couple first began their working partnership in 1976 and, over the course of the next three decades, produced an extensive body of drawings, sculptures, and public commissions. The presentation at Paula Cooper Gallery includes examples from these important collaborative years, as well as works by Claes Oldenburg made before their meeting and after Coosje van Bruggen’s passing in 2009.

In celebration of the vibrant life of Palm Beach and the surrounding area, “There is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop”[1] presents a selection of drawings and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, with a focus on their representations of food, sport, music, and other articles of pleasure. These striking images reinvent quotidian objects, using line and form to playfully merge natural elements with the irreverent and the fantastical. In the duo’s 2007 pastel drawing, an anthropomorphized shuttlecock performs a feat of superhuman acrobatics across the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Elsewhere, Claes Oldenburg’s canvas-and-resin tomates farcies entice and charm viewers with their luscious hue and supple surfaces. In the catalogue for his 1969 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, art historian Barbara Rose wrote: “It is his execution, his ability to make form live and to imbue it with a palpable vitality and sense of movement, that distinguishes Oldenburg’s genius […] In his art, the distortion of form, its infinite metamorphoses, becomes a metaphor for the search for truth, an endless pursuit through the labyrinth of illusion. His prime values as an artist are elusiveness, mystery, ambiguity, and multivalence.”

Many of the works on view relate to realized monumental public sculptures by the artists, including the exhibition’s earliest pieces: studies of the mass-produced typewriter eraser. Claes Oldenburg considered the eraser to be a “fine anti-heroic object” and in 1970 he began to make sketches of its form, set in imagined landscapes or personified as ‘Medusa’ or as a ‘Big Guy.’ A large-scale version measuring over eighteen feet high is installed at the entrance of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Imbued with human-like qualities, the object tilts forward as if it were exuberantly speeding away—its bristles blown back like strands of hair. In another work, a drawing from 1988, the couple depicts a broken plate out of which orange slices and expressively cut peels appear to tumble and bounce off the ground, as if caught in stop-motion. This anti-hierarchical form was their proposal for a public commission in Metro-Dade Open Space Park in Miami—a response to the eclectic architecture of the site where the finished sculpture still stands today.

CLAES OLDENBURG was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1929. He attended Yale University (1946–1950) as well as The Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York City in 1956. The artist had his first one-person exhibition at the Judson Gallery, New York, in 1959 followed by shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1966) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969). “Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology” opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1995 and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; and the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2002 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a major exhibit of Oldenburg’s drawings; the same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featured a selection of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculptures on the roof of the museum. “Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties” opened at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in 2012 and traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Oldenburg has been honored with numerous awards including the Wolf Prize in Arts (1989) and the National Medal of Arts (2000). He lives and works in New York City.

COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN was born in Groningen, the Netherlands in 1942. She received a master’s degree in art history from the University of Groningen. From 1967 to 1971 she worked in the curatorial department of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was co-editor of the Sonsbeek 71 catalogue. Van Bruggen was a member of the selection committee for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany (1982), a contributor to Artforum (1983–88) and Senior Critic in the Department of Sculpture at Yale University School of Art (1996–97). She has also authored books on Claes Oldenburg’s early work as well as on John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Bruce Nauman and the architect Frank O. Gehry. Van Bruggen’s first collaboration with Claes Oldenburg was in 1976 on Trowel I located in the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. In 1978 Coosje van Bruggen moved to New York, where she continued to work with Oldenburg, creating large-scale, site-specific works in urban settings. Their collaboration has extended to include smaller-scale park and garden sculptures as well as indoor installations. Coosje van Bruggen passed away in Los Angeles in 2009.

[1] A statement by Claes Oldenburg from his interview with Barbara Rose in Interview Magazine (December 8, 2015)

Make an appointment to see this exhibition in person.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

243A Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, FL

www.paulacoopergallery.com

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Non-Vicious Circle @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Sam Durant, Liz Glynn, Walid Raad, Kelley Walker, Meg Webster

Sam Durant, Liz Glynn, Walid Raad, Kelley Walker, Meg Webster: Non-Vicious Circle
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Through August 16, 2019

“Non-Vicious Circle,” Paula Cooper Gallery’s summer show presents a selection of sculptures and installations by Sam Durant, Liz Glynn, Walid Raad, Kelley Walker, and Meg Webster. The exhibition takes its title from one of the works on view, a 2014 mobile by Sam Durant.

The works on view address the notion of recurrence, conceived as a catalyst to question the concepts of historical linearity, narrative or progression. Sam Durant’s sculptures use war-related paraphernalia (missile and bullet shells, in particular) to explore the relationship between Surrealism and World War I, as well as the echoing of the past in the present. Liz Glynn’s vibrant spiral, Eternal Return II, 2017, from her recent major exhibition at MASS MoCA, is made from contemporary materials and industrial detritus that translate theories of historical progression—often visualized as graphs or charts—into three-dimensional forms scaled to the human body. And with his “recycling sign” works, Kelley Walker alludes to the continual transformation and re-use of “raw” cultural matter.

In a separate room, illuminated by bold spotlights and casting long shadows, Walid Raad’s monumental work Section 88_Act XXXI: Views from outer to inner compartments, 2010, recreates existing museum architecture (in this case, doorways from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in a flattened and spectral fashion, as if the very architecture of the institution were suddenly emptied of volume and substance. With this and other works from his ongoing project, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, Walid Raad reflects on the current emergence of museums and other institutions for the arts in the Arab world – a development in many ways similar to the Gilded Age that saw the advent of the Met.

Comprised of five large glass orbs, Meg Webster’s Largest Blown Sphere, ostensibly the most devoid of historical content in the exhibition, seems aglow in a poetic glory of translucence and form. In a review for The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: “handsome spheres in clear handblown glass that crowd the floor here are attractive but inexplicable, although they suggest a sculptural fusion of the clear water of the falls and the massive stones.” Yet the work is rooted in the traditions of Land Art of the 1970s and influenced by Minimalist artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Robert Morris. Meg Webster creates works that directly engage the body and its senses, and often act as containers for living matter. Drawing from the rigorous formal vocabulary of her predecessors, she proposes a new way for sculpture, one that invites life and accident back in.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

524 W 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.paulacoopergallery.com

Sarah Charlesworth @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC

Sarah Charlesworth
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
February 23 - March 23, 2019

Paula Cooper Gallery announces a one-person exhibition of work by SARAH CHARLESWORTH (1947–2013) at 524 West 26th Street. The show focuses on Sarah Charlesworth’s rarely exhibited work from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, beginning with her series, Modern History, through her series, Red Collages. This presentation marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. There will be a panel discussion on Sarah Charlesworth’s work on Thursday, March 7 at 5pm with Jennifer Blessing (Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Margot Norton (Curator, New Museum), and artist James Welling.

Organizing her practice in distinct yet closely interconnected series, Sarah Charlesworth is known for her conceptually-driven and visually alluring photo-based works that subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. The exhibition focuses on a pivotal period in which she merged the photo-conceptual strategies of her early education with those of quotation, appropriation, and re-photography that would come to define the Pictures Generation. “I’m exploring a level of unconscious engagement in language, a covert symbology … a personal as well as a societal confrontation,” Sarah Charlesworth stated in an interview in 1990. “A symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it in form, and then rearranging it.”

In her earliest series, Modern History (1977-79), Sarah Charlesworth examined the contextual significance and complex structures that underlie images reproduced in the media. Comprised of twenty-six prints, the work Herald Tribune, November 1977 (1977) presents copies of the newspaper’s front page over the course of one month—each systematically excised of all text so that only the paper’s masthead and images remain. Emergent from the sequence of redacted pages are striking visual patterns, which reveal cultural hierarchies imbedded in the media. They implore viewers to consider what is deemed “news,” how this directly and indirectly affects one’s understanding of society, and what role images play in communicating these ideas.

While firmly rooted in Conceptualism, Sarah Charlesworth’s exacting forms, assiduous process and subjective interventions mark her divergence from a purely ideational approach to art-making. As her work progressed into the 1980s, she experimented further with the physicality of the photographic object, creating mesmeric images printed in sublimely monumental scales. Conceived as a pictorial response to Susan Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays, Charlesworth’s series In-Photography (1981-82) treats the photograph as a “strange but powerful thing” unto itself—rather than simply a referential symbol. Meticulously arranged compositions of found images involved cutting, collaging, rephotographing and selectively colorizing. For each print, the work’s unique schematic fragmentation is reflexively informed by its own subject—thus the torn edges of Explosionecho the violent eruption found within the image, while the acute slices of Samurai echo the warrior’s sword. Sarah Charlesworth explained: “Sometimes I open an image to make room for myself, to disrupt the closure of an intensified known. The entry into an image, the rupture and reintegration of its coherent form, exposes that which lies between meaning, the reciprocal meaning of an object and its apprehension.”

Sarah Charlesworth’s latest group of works on view in the exhibition, titled Red Collages (1983-84), are her first prints associated with her celebrated Objects of Desire series. Produced in a smaller scale and completed with lacquered frames, these high-gloss Cibachromes present as exquisite three-dimensional objects. In Satah Charlesworth’s Rider (1983-84), a cropped black and white photograph of Natalie Wood contained within the silhouette of a cowboy on a rearing horse punctuates a vibrant vermillion background. Isolated and centralized, the superimposed archetypal images generate a visual narrative whereby one is read through another, probing visual strategies of commodification, alienation and desire.

SARAH CHARLESWORTH was born in 1947 in New Jersey, lived and worked in New York, and died in 2013 in Connecticut. She earned an associate degree from Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts (1965-67), where she studied with artist Douglas Huebler, and a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in Manhattan (1967-69). Sarah Charlesworth’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at a number of institutions including a major survey exhibition, “Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld,” at the New Museum, New York (2015), which travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1998), and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). In 2014, Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills series was presented for the first time in its entirety at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). Her work was recently included in “Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s” at The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington (2018). Other past group exhibitions include: the 77th Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); “Shock of the News,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2012); “Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism,” the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); “September 11,” the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); “The Last Newspaper,” the New Museum, New York (2010); “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and “The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982,” the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004). Sarah Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design; and Princeton University.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
524 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Mark di Suvero: Hugs
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
October 6, 2018 - February 28, 2019

Paula Cooper Gallery presents the installation of Mark di Suvero’s monumental steel sculpture Hugs at 220 11th Avenue, New York. Organized on the occasion of the gallery’s fiftieth anniversary, the installation is located down the street from its new primary space at 524 W 26th Street. The presentation honors Mark di Suvero’s long history with the gallery, having first collaborated with Cooper at Park Place Gallery (1965-67) and later at the Paula Cooper Gallery—including the second exhibition in 1968, and most recently in a one-person show in 2018. The sculpture is presented in collaboration with the Moinian Group and Alex Brotmann Art Advisory.

Throughout his sixty-year career, Mark di Suvero has created vibrant and dynamic works, which fuse vitality and improvisation with complex construction. Standing over fifty feet high, the pyramidal structure Hugs, is composed of steel I-beams whose three legs intersect in a central, curved form. Its expansive scale allows viewers to engage physically with the work, inducing a kinesthetic response as one walks under and around to perceive it from shifting vantages. Democratic accessibility and viewer participation have long been driving principles in Mark di Suvero’s artistic practice:

“When one is an artist, one wants to do art that is meaningful to a lot of people. Most art is shown in museums and galleries, which eliminates a whole population. By putting it out on the streets, you open it up to the world … there’s a great thing that happens when you have outdoor works where people are interacting and searching … I like to do interactive work. I really believe that the piece needs to be all the way around you. We see in about 210 degrees, but you feel what there is at the very edge of vision. With sculpture, you can get inside of it. It gives you a different kind of a feeling.” (Mark di Suvero, interviewed by Brienne Walsh: “Orgasmic Space: Q+A With Mark di Suvero,” Art in America, July 1, 2011)

Born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, Mark di Suvero first came to public prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris—the first for any living artist—and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This exhibition featured his large-scale sculpture in public sites throughout all five boroughs of the city. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, on the occasion of the 46th Venice Biennale) and Paris (1997), among others. In 2011, eleven monumental works were installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Organized by Storm King Art Center, this marked the largest outdoor exhibition of work in New York City since the 1970s. That same yearMark  di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor given to artists. In May 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented eight monumental sculptures in the city’s historic Crissy Field for a yearlong outdoor exhibition. In September 2016, two monumental works were installed on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive through a partnership between the Chicago Park District and EXPO CHICAGO; they will remain on view through September 2019. One can also see a number of permanently installed Mark di Suvero sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. The artist currently lives and works in Petaluma, CA.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
524 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC

Mark di Suvero
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
November 3 - December 10, 2016

Paula Cooper Gallery announces an exhibition of work by Mark di Suvero. The exhibit highlights the artist’s continued preeminence in abstract sculpture throughout his near-sixty-year career. The show, on view at 534 West 21st Street, will be up from November 3rd through December 10th, 2016. The opening reception is on Friday, November 4th from 6 to 8pm.

As art historian Barbara Rose stated, “[Mark di Suvero’s] genius lies in his unique ability to fuse the excitement of the momentary … with the gravity of a timeless geometry and the engineered ability and intuitive equilibrium that his hard-won mastery of structural balances makes possible.” His works thrive on the collision of geometric and organic forms through spontaneous experimentation. “I don’t draw detailed plans,” he said. “I start with a vision … and see where it goes.” Di Suvero executes and installs his sculptures himself. Designing and revising throughout every step of construction, he welds, bends, cuts and bolts with illimitable buoyancy. The vast metal sheet plate becomes a blank piece of paper on top of which he crawls to sketch freehand forms with chalk. The industrial crane becomes an extension of the artist’s arm, handled as if he were painting with a massive brush. Activated by this spirited process, the final structures assert a dynamic and irrefutable presence.

Ranging from three to thirteen feet in height, the midsize scale of the works on view accommodates an especially wide range of formal improvisation that highlights the artist’s constructivist foundation and expansive manipulation of line and space. Composed of beams of wood and painted steel, the manifold planes of Untitled (hungblock), 1962, extend with a kinetic yet delicate thrust, while Nextro, 2003, offers an enigmatic staccato of linear and spherical elements. A recent work from 2015 entitled Post-Matisse Pullout draws inspiration from the cut-outs of the French artist, Henri Matisse. The playful potential for imminent change contained in its bowing curvilinear form recalls the mutable paper and thumbtacks used by Matisse for continuous alterations.

Mark di Suvero currently lives and works in New York. His first retrospective was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975 and was accompanied by a citywide exhibition of large-scale works. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, on the occasion of the 46th Venice Biennale) and Paris (1997), among others. In 2011, eleven monumental works were installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Organized by Storm King Art Center this marked the largest outdoor exhibition of work in New York since the 1970s. That same year di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor given to artists. From May 2013-2014, SFMOMA presented eight monumental sculptures in the city’s historic Crissy Field for a yearlong outdoor exhibition. In September 2016, two monumental works were installed on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive through a partnership between the Chicago Park District and EXPO CHICAGO. These works will be on view through 2017. One can also see a number of Mark di Suvero sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, permanently installed.

Paula Cooper Gallery
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Paul Pfeiffer @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC

Paul Pfeiffer
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Through November 12, 2016

Paula Cooper Gallery presents Paul Pfeiffer’s second one-person exhibition, which includes a selection of recent video work.

Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of spectacle to uncover its psychological, cultural and racial underpinnings. For this exhibition, the gallery presents Paul Pfeiffer’s forty-eight minute multi-channel audio and video installation, Three Figures In A Room (2015-2016), which features televised footage of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao’s highly publicized boxing match at the MGM Grand, Las Vegas, in May 2015. The original audio has been replaced by an eerily quiet Foley soundtrack, which isolates the physical exertion of the boxers and movement among the stadium audience—a rhythmic thud of footsteps; an acute smack of leather on flesh; a hissing snarl of exhausted breath. A second video channel shows the sound technicians as they distill and recreate the sound effects. Mirroring the boxers’ athleticism and focus, the Foley channel plays in sync with the fight channel, each placed against opposing walls in the main space of the gallery. Audio playback alternates from one channel to the other, sparring across the room and enveloping the viewer in the meticulous process of sound production.

Also on view are three new works from Paul Pfeiffer’s ongoing Caryatid series, begun in 2004. Screened on lustrous chrome television sets of varying sizes, the HD videos show slow-motion excerpts of boxing matches in which the attacking opponents have been digitally removed. Cast into a torpid yet tense solo performance, the remaining boxer invites close scrutiny. Obscure corporeal details are brought to the fore, highlighting the brutality of impact from an invisible assault, while the work’s presentation as sculptural object serves to prompt further meditative viewing.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2010). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum. Pfeiffer was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany in 2011. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Paula Cooper Gallery
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Carl Andre at Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Lament for the Children

Carl Andre
Lament for the Children
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
February 20 - April 3, 2004

Lament for the Children consists of one hundred concrete blocks standing vertically in rows of ten at the intersections of a grid. The sculpture was originally created and exhibited in the abandoned playground at P.S.1 in 1976, for the Contemporary Art Center’s inaugural show, ‘Rooms’. The grid formation of the piece was derived from the interval between the joints in the paving of the playground. Lament for the Children was subsequently destroyed and remade in 1996 for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. This exhibition marks the first time the piece has been shown in New York since its creation in 1976.

Possessing a somber presence, the piece bears a visual resemblance to a field of gravestones, or an army of sentinels in grid formation. Besides relating to the piece’s original location in a children’s playground, the title Lament for the Children refers to a seventeenth-century Scottish dirge about the death of five children by fire. The tune, composed for the bagpipe by Patrick Mor MacCrimmon, has been described as the greatest single line melody in European music, and Andre’s reference to it suggests his admiration for traditional and classical culture. This is Carl Andre’s second use of the title: in 1965, he composed the three-page poem 144 Times, which bore the parenthetical title Lament for the Children.

Carl Andre was born September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, with Frank Stella and Hollis Frampton (with whom he shared a lasting interest in poetry). In 1957, he settled in New York and shortly thereafter began to create wood sculptures influenced by Brancusi. He progressively moved on to the use of sets of identical elements, and to materials such as granite, limestone, steel, lead and copper. His sculptures, often floor pieces, tend to depart from the traditional principles of sculpture such as verticality and monumentality.

Carl Andre’s first one-person show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the following year his work was included in Kynaston McShine’s and Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. He was, with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, one of the leading artists of the 1960s, often associated with Minimalism. In the 1970s, the artist created large installations, such as 144 Blocks and Stones (1973) for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, and outdoor works such as Stone Field Sculpture (1977) in downtown Hartford, Conn.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. He lives in New York.

Paula Cooper Gallery

534 West 21st Street, New York
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Adrian Piper, Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Work From The Color Wheel Series

Adrian Piper

Work From The Color Wheel Series

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

November 30, 2000 – January 6, 2001

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Adrian Piper. This work is on view at 521 West 21st Street.

Entitled The Color Wheel Series, First Adhyasa: Annomayakosha, this exhibition is the first segment in a series of five installments. The color wheel refers to a device by the same name used for the display of the Pantone Matching System®, an international “color language” employed in printing and publishing. Upon completion of the project, all 1,010 Pantone Colors will be distributed among a total of 335 images in print, reproduction, or website form.

Adrian Piper integrates the spectrum of the Pantone System with tenets of Hindu Vedantic philosophy in order to examine color as an “illusory superimposition,” or adhyasa. According to Vedanta, ultimate reality is concealed beneath five koshas, layers of illusion which must be peeled away in order to attain self-knowledge.

The show consists of 24 light-jet photographic prints measuring approximately 56 by 36 inches each. Arced at their tops, these prints resemble Eastern mandalas, featuring the Hindu god Shiva inside a Fire Wheel, an excerpt of a Vedantic text in Sanskrit, and three human figures, or “Acting Heads” who “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” (a recurring motif in Piper’s work). Directly below Shiva’s wheel is a Target Wheel aimed at the central figure of the “Acting Head” paradigm.

In a systematic fashion, the skin color of each Acting Head varies throughout the series, following a procedure whereby each of the three Heads is assigned one specific Pantone Color. As a result, each print is unique, with no Pantone Color repeated more than once.

Adrian Piper thus establishes a specific methodology through which the viewer can investigate the subjective, constructed nature of color. The imagery of Eastern philosophy and religion operates not only on a formal level but also as a conceptual device to reveal the superimposition on the self of illusions such as caste, color, and status.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

521 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10001

www.paulacoopergallery.com