Displaying items by tag: conceptual art

The Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City is currently presenting the exhibition “Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls.” The show includes paintings, drawings, and collages dating from the early 1970s to the 1990s, some of which have never been exhibited before.

All of the works on view feature walls as the main subject matter. The exhibition illustrates how Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein both explored space and the notion of reality versus illusion in their work. Pieces such as Johns’ “Untitled,” which features a well-known Picasso image hanging on a wooden wall, and Lichtenstein’s “Trompe L’oeil with Léger Head and Paintbrush,” which includes an image from Fernand Léger, show how both artists also played with appropriation and referentiality in their wall works.

The Castelli Gallery was founded by the pioneering art dealer Leo Castelli in 1957. The gallery quickly became the international epicenter for Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art and exhibited works by Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Lichtenstein, and Johns. Castelli passed away in 1999 and the gallery is now directed by his wife, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli. The Castelli Gallery maintains a commitment to exhibiting the best of postwar American art.

“Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls” will be on view at the Leo Castelli Gallery through June 27. 

On July 27, 2013, the exhibition The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will open at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The show will present a portion of the couples incendiary collection, which they gifted to the museum in 2008. The works include examples of Minimal and Conceptual art as well as figurative and neo-expressionist pieces.

The late Herb Vogel, a postal clerk, and his librarian wife Dorothy, began collecting art in New York in 1962, the height of the minimal, conceptual and post-minimal movements. They eventually amassed over 4,000 works, primarily drawings, in a tiny Manhattan apartment on a shoestring budget. Five years ago, the Vogels partnered with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and began a unique donation strategy. With the museum’s support, the couple distributed 2,500 works from their collection between every state in the country, with 50 works going to each one.

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will be on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through October 20, 2013.

On July 2, 2013, a U.S. District judge decided the fate of 15 contemporary artworks once belonging to the disgraced financier and attorney, Marc S. Dreier. Dreier was convicted of fraud in 2009 for selling hundreds of millions of dollars in fake promissory notes to hedge funders and a section of his collection has remained in limbo ever since.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled that the art holdings, worth $33 million, will be turned over to New York’s Heathfield Capital Limited, the company that suffered the greatest from Dreier’s scam. The works going to Heathfield Capital include a piece by the conceptual artist John Baldessari (b. 1931), an untitled work by Keith Haring (1958-1990), one work by Alex Katz (b. 1927), three by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), an untitled work by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and three pieces by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) including the iconic Jackie portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The bulk of Dreier’s collection was sold in 2010 at Phillips and the profits were reserved for creditors of Dreier’s law firm.

Drier is currently service a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Minnesota.

A mural by the Conceptual art pioneer, Sol Lewitt, will head to the lobby of the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Wall Drawing #599; Circles 18 (1989) will be installed at the end of July, making it the 20^th Lewitt work in a public space in New York City.

The drawing, which features a bull’s eye comprised of yellow, blue, red and white concentric circles, is on long-term loan from Lewitt’s estate and measures 36 by 11 feet. Scaffolding has been delivered to the site and workers have begun mapping out Lewitt’s design. Laborers will use sandpaper, cotton rags, acrylic paint, plastic buckets and water to properly install the work.

A complementary exhibition, Sol Lewitt Shaping Ideas, will be on view at the Jewish Community Center’s Laurie M. Tisch Gallery starting August 15, 2013. The show will include works on paper and time-lapse videos of installations of Lewitt’s various wall drawings. An interactive map will indicate where all of the artist’s public works are located throughout New York City.

Genre-defying painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013), died February 9, 2013 in Albany, NY. He was 89.

Artschwager, who was often linked to the Pop Art movement, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism, resisted classification through his clever genre mixing. His most well known sculpture, Table with Pink Tablecloth (1964) is an amalgamation of Pop Art and Minimalism and consists of a box finished in colored Formica, creating the illusion of a wooden table draped in a pink tablecloth. Artschwager often used household forms in his work including chairs, tables, and doors. In his paintings, Artschwager often painted black and white copies of found photographs and then outfitted them with outlandish frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal.

Artschwager was born in 1926 in Washington, D.C. and went on to study at Cornell University. In 1944, before he could finish his degree, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe. Upon returning to the United States after World War II, Artschwager completed his degree and decided to pursue a career in art. He moved to New York City and began taking classes at the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, one of the founders of Purism. With a growing family and bills to pay, Artschwager took a break from making art to start a furniture-making business. After a fire destroyed his workshop, Artschwager returned to making art, developed his defining style, and was taken on by the Leo Castelli Gallery, which represented him for 30 years.

A few days prior to Artschwager’s death, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan closed a major career retrospective of his work. It was the second of its kind to be organized by the museum.    

The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden commissioned internationalled renowned artist Barbara Kruger to create a site-specific installation for one of the museum's most-visited public spaces. Opening Aug. 20, "Belief+Doubt"(2012) will fill the lower-level lobby and extend into the newly relocated museum bookstore. Approximately 6,700 square feet of surface--including walls, floor and escalator sides--will be covered in text-printed vinyl, surrounding viewers with lettering up to 12 feet high in a high-contrast color scheme of red, white and black.

"Belief+Doubt" speaks to the social relations and networks of power that define daily life. At a time when the value of certitude is taken for granted, Kruger says she is "interested in introducing doubt." Large swaths of the floor are covered in open-ended questions ("WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENT?"), while the area facing the bookstore explores desire and consumption ("YOU WANT IT. YOU BUY IT. YOU FORGET IT.").