William N. Copley @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - The New York Years

William N. Copley: The New York Years
Kasmin, New York
March 11 — April 22, 2020

Kasmin presents William N. Copley The New York Years, a comprehensive look at the evolution of the artist’s painting during three pivotal decades in New York City. The exhibition, on view at 509 West 27th Street, traces this central period through key paintings from multiple series and a corresponding presentation of photographic, publishing, and research materials drawn from the archives of the William N. Copley Estate. This is Kasmin’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2010.

“I’d been born in that town but didn’t remember it,” William N. Copley said of New York in his memoir Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer. Copley’s decision to move to the city—when the artist was 44—marked a return to the American scene after twelve years living in France. Copley’s early career had been one of a self-taught outsider working in Paris, where, under the influence of Surrealism, Copley developed a unique personal iconography. This “private mythology,” as he would call it, explored sexual politics and his culturally repressive upbringing. Copley’s eccentric style and his humorous, amatory themes led to commercial success and exhibitions throughout Europe in the 1950s. William N. Copley returned to the US in 1963, at a time when the Paris scene had grown quiet and New York was enjoying a period of explosive artistic activity.

Included in the exhibition are major works originally exhibited at William N. Copley’s first shows as an artist based in New York. These works, such as Tomb of the Unknown Whore (1965) and What’s Your Hurry (1965), reveal Copley’s shift to working at a larger scale and utilizing line drawing as a technique in his paintings. Copley’s switch from oil paints to acrylics, which allowed him to work faster and gave him new freedoms, coincided with a prolific series of colorful, narrative paintings adapted from the works Robert W. Service and other folk balladeers popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. These paintings are represented in The New York Years with Then In Meandered Deep-Hole Dan Once Comrade of the Cup (1967). Of special note in the exhibition is the large painting I Am Awarded My Handbag and Declared a Professional (1986), which was displayed in the artist’s immersive New Museum installation Tomb of the Unknown Whore in 1986. It is exhibited here for the first time in New York since the original exhibition.

Beginning in 1970, William N. Copley started rendering items from old Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs in a loose, suggestive manner. Dubbed the Nouns, these everyday items were paired with geometric background patterns in a style similar to, or quietly critical of, Hard-edge and Op-style painting. William Copley at once further developed this painterly language and consummated his interest in erotic subject matter with the X-Rated series, which he began two years later in 1972. Indebted to the adult magazines sold along 42nd street and Times Square, the works feature figures in various stages of sexual congress and are marked by bold contour lines and lyrical color palettes. Speaking of the X-Rated exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center William Copley remarked, “I am attempting to break through the barrier of pornography into the area of joy.” Works from the Nouns and X-Rated series are presented in dialogue in William N. Copley The New York Years.

New York also provided William N. Copley an ideal setting for his non-painting activities. In 1967, Copley founded The Letter Edged In Black Press, Inc., which published the groundbreaking art periodical S.M.S. for six issues in 1968. S.M.S. featured facsimile multiples from an intergenerational group of artists, many of whom Copley met in New York and who would congregate at the artist’s publishing office on the Upper West Side. (Among the friends and contributors were Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Christo, Lee Lozano, John Cage, and Copley’s close friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp.) S.M.S. publications will be on view in the exhibition along with associated artworks and ephemera.

In the 1980s, William N. Copley began dividing time between New York and homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Key West, Florida. Though he began to withdraw from New York’s art world, he maintained a prolific focus on painting and his work grew in complexity and ambiguity. The late gallerist Phyllis Kind—known for her patronage of outsider art and directive support of the Chicago Imagists—became Copley’s primary New York dealer, staging five solo exhibitions at her Greene Street space in Soho between 1982 and 1991. Untitled (Apples & Oranges) (1986) dates from this period and is exemplary of Copley’s late style, employing multilayered compositions and collaged textiles such as lace fabric.

In addition to the key works on view, William N. Copley The New York Years presents a timeline of the artist’s numerous activities during his tenure in New York. Visitors will encounter an in-depth picture of his consequential return to the New York scene, where Copley forged his mature identity as an artist and painter.

William N. Copley, (1919–1996), known by his signature name CPLY, (pronounced 'see-ply'), was a painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur. In his lifetime, Copley was the subject of multiple European retrospectives, including Stedlijk Museum (1966), Kunsthalle Bern (1980), and Kestner-Gessellschaft (1995). Recent major institutional exhibitions have been held at The Menil Collection, Houston, and Fondazione Prada, Italy. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Stedelijk Museum and many more.

The New York Years completes a trio of coordinated international exhibitions that presents major series of works by William N. Copley in the first part of 2020. See The Ballad of William N. Copley at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, William N. Copley: The Temptation of St. Anthony (Revisited) at Nino Mier, Los Angeles, and The New York Years at Kasmin, New York.

KASMIN 
509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
kasmingallery.com

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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