Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Prima Materia: 

The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art 

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

Through August 27, 2023 

Matthew Barney 

Bayhorse, 2018 

Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition presenting significant and diverse works of art, which incorporate or reference thirty-five of the 118 elements on the periodic table by artists Matthew Barney, Edward Burtynsky, Rachel Berwick, Dove Bradshaw, Julian Charrière,Compound Interest, The Dufala Brothers, Ashley Epps*, Philp Grausman, Tom Lehrer, Bryan McGovern Wilson, Jeffrey Meris, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Cornelia Parker, Katie Paterson, Simon Patterson, Beverly Pepper, Winston Roeth*, Peter Selgin, Sunny A. Smith*, Edward Steed, Carlos Vega, Eleanor White*, and Robert Williams.

*Artists commissioned by The Aldrich to make new works for the exhibition.

While the basis of the exhibition is science, through expansive curatorial choices, the project will reveal the material basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Artists use specific materials for a reason, quite often for their metaphorical potential, and Prima Materia will explore hard facts as well as alchemical conjecture. A subtext that will be explored in the project is resource extraction, which will be incorporated through works that speak about the mining and refining industry and its legacy. As a society we are woefully unaware of the trail followed by common materials as they go from the earth into our hands, and the exhibition will give the viewer a greater appreciation of the material world, reveling in both the beauty and convoluted history of our understanding and manipulation of physical matter.

All art forms, even music and literature, are partially dependent on the material world. The visual arts, however, are more linked to materialism, as the field is primarily defined by objects. Even digital media is contingent on physical matter, whether it is the silicon that makes the microprocessor, or the lithium that is contained within a cell phone battery. Humans have speculated for thousands of years on how the world is comprised. “Prima materia” was a concept first put forth by Aristotle to describe the primitive, formless base for all matter. Plato later expanded on this in his treatise Timaeus, writing: “The body of the world is composed of four elementary constituents, earth, air, fire, and water, the whole available amount of which is used up in its composition.” The alchemists of both medieval Europe and those of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa were the first who began to doubt the primacy of the ancient four elements. Beginning in the Renaissance, their speculation led to the transition of the practice of Alchemy to Chemistry. Included in the “origins” section of the exhibition is Robert Williams’ installation Theatrum Chemicum Britannium – The Alchemist’s Shack. Based on the life of Eirenaeus Philalethes (Geroge Starkey), a practicing Colonial American alchemist who attended Harvard College in 1643, Philalethes’ work went on to influence European scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. The names given to the eras in human history—stone, bronze, iron, and now silicon—are indicative of how our understanding of matter has transformed culture.

Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art is curated by independent curator and artist Richard Klein, The Aldrich’s former Exhibitions Director, and will be accompanied by a softcover catalogue featuring an essay by Klein.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

05-02 / 27-08-2023

Frank Stella @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Through May 9, 2021

Spanning more than sixty years, Frank Stella’s studio practice has pushed abstraction to the limits, investigating every category from painting and printmaking to sculpture and public art. Among the myriad of forms found in Stella’s work, one element continuously reappears, a motif that is simultaneously abstract and figurative: the star. Immediately identifiable, the star stands out amidst the tangle of abstract, invented forms the artist has explored over his long career. Under the spotlight for the first time, this exhibition surveys Frank Stella’s use of the star, ranging from two-dimensional works of the 1960s to its most recent incarnation in sculptures, wall reliefs, and painted objects from the 2010s.

Frank Stella’s use of the star form emerged during his first decade in New York as he was exhibiting his groundbreaking striped and shaped paintings. It then vanished and resurfaced many decades later at a moment when he committed himself to three-dimensional abstraction. Today, the star is the lead in scores of works from small objects to towering sculptures. Scaled to the table or the open air, Frank Stella’s star works transport us—we imagine how disparate elements shift, how parts are assembled, how paint is applied. The works parade an outsized material resourcefulness that collapses analogue and twenty-first century fabrication techniques: RPT (rapid prototype technology) plastics, teak, aluminum, stainless steel, birch plywood, fiberglass, carbon fiber, and more. With their automotive neon hues, shimmering and natural finishes, the stars, big and small, flex and project a spatial dynamism that intimates a potential maneuverability—as if they were built to perform.

At The Aldrich, Frank Stella’s star works are on view outdoors throughout the Museum’s grounds and inside the galleries. Outside, large-scale sculptures are sited from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, the Museum’s semi-enclosed interior courtyard, and two-acre Sculpture Garden. Inside, the exhibition occupy the entire ground floor including the Museum’s Project Space where the largest sculpture in the exhibition, Fat 12 Point Carbon Fiber Star (2016), challenges the room’s perimeter with its twelve puffed up rays stretching twenty-one feet in all directions. The star is characterized in this survey as a breakthrough element. From a simple, planar shape to an ornamented spatial object, its manifestation reveals stylistic continuity amidst decisive variation.

The Museum’s founder Larry Aldrich showed early interest in Frank Stella’s work and exhibited Tetuan (1963) one year after he founded The Aldrich. Additionally, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, established in 1959, supported the Museum of Modern Art in purchasing Stella’s painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II—the first work by the artist to enter their collection. Since the Museum’s founding in 1964, Frank Stella’s work has been included in fifteen group exhibitions.

Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA) has created an exceptional body of work over his six-decade career. Spanning painting, sculpture, and printmaking, his work is held in more than fifty public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Frank Stella currently lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color 200-page hardbound catalogue, featuring essays by the exhibition’s curators Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart.

FRANK STELLA'S STARS, A SURVEY

200 Pages, fully-illustrated

Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-941366-29-5

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

and Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Essays by Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart 

Design: Gretchen Kraus

Production Coordinator: Caitlin Monachino

Copy Editor: Mary Cason

Curated by Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director, and Amy Smith-Stewart, Senior Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.aldrichart.org