Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
Current & Upcoming
January 20, 2020 - March 29, 2020
This exhibition will focus on the collages and collage-prints of Robert Motherwell which employ the material and visual elements of product packaging and printed text fragments as crucial elements in their composition. Emerging from the long history of still life in both European and American art, Motherwell’s use of materials from everyday life is distinct from the more ironic or less personal approaches of his contemporaries Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
The concept of “product” underlying this presentation of Motherwell’s collages is not limited to branded items, such as the iconic Gauloises cigarette packages. Rather, the materials introduced into these works from the “outside world” apply more broadly, signifying the sensual, the artistic, and the intellectual concerns and experiences of the artist, layering and blending meaning and materiality within the collages. This approach also reflexively calls attention to intellectual and aesthetic “products,” such as music and literature, and to the product-ness of art itself.
Motherwell’s collages directly and expressively incorporate the mundane and quotidian material evidence of a burgeoning consumer culture at the point where it intersects the creative life of a highly self-aware artist. These collected fragments are often obliquely diaristic, and lend specificity to Motherwell’s abstract compositions. The materials consistently activate the planar spaces and join the gestures of his work with tangible immediacy; however improvisational their presence in the compositions may seem, their placement is always carefully intuited.
Some of the collaged elements recur with such frequency that they become part of Motherwell’s formal lexicon, part of a personal iconography. In the collage-prints, a transformation occurs as the collaged elements shift, from being “unique” aleatory or collected objects introduced into painted, glued or drawn compositions, to replications and iterations of these objects-become-signs, without losing their specific resonance for the artist. Motherwell, in the collage-prints, was meta, almost avant la lettre, collaging replications and facsimiles of commercially produced packaging, often varying their scale or coloration, and drawing our attention to the complex layers of significance embodied in the “found” versus the “made,” the “unique” and the “replication,” the object, the gesture, the icon, and the sign.
Organization: Curated by Paul Bright with the assistance of Claire Altizer/Dedalus Foundation. Support provided by WFU’s IPLACe and Office of University Advancement. Special thanks to John Metz and JP Morgan Chase.
Events and Programming
February 3
12:30 pm & 2pm: gallery walk-throughs with Claire Altizer (Dedalus Foundation) and Paul Bright (Hanes Gallery)
February 4
12:30: Gallery walk-through
6pm: reception
7pm: Louis Goldstein performance: Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories
March 26
4pm: Paul Bright talk: Beyond Cut & Paste
5pm: reception
6pm: Polyorchard performance: works by Fluxus member Ben Patterson
Recent
November 4, 2016 – March 26, 2017
Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design proposes a fresh look at the internationally recognized designer and examines his work in the Parisian cultural context between the wars to highlight his circle of influential patrons, engagement with the period’s foremost artists, and designs for the film industry. Chareau and his wife were keenly interested in contemporary art, and the exhibition reunites several pieces from their collection of paintings, sculptures, and drawings by significant artists such as Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, and Robert Motherwell.
The exhibition also explores the enduring consequences of Chareau’s flight from Nazi persecution, the dispersal of many of the works he designed during and after World War II, and his attempts to rebuild his career while in exile in New York during the 1940s, including the house he designed for Robert Motherwell in 1947 in East Hampton, Long Island.
February 10 – September 6, 2017
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the institution will display in the rotunda over 170 modern works from the permanent collections held in New York and Venice. Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim will explore not only avant-garde innovations from the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, but also the radical activities of six patrons who brought to light some of the most significant artists of their day. Foremost is the museum’s founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949), who with support from his trusted advisor, the German-born artist Hilla Rebay (1890–1967), set aside a more traditional collecting focus to become a great champion of nonobjective art—a strand of abstraction with spiritual aims and epitomized by the work of Vasily Kandinsky. Assembled against the backdrop of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s, Guggenheim’s unparalleled modern holdings formed the basis of his foundation, established in 1937 for the public good.
More from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
February 5 - June 18, 2017
Matisse and American Art examines Henri Matisse’s profound impact on American modern art from 1907 to the present. The exhibition juxtaposes 19 works by Matisse with 44 works by American artists including Robert Motherwell, Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, Maurice Prendergast, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, John Baldessari, Sophie Matisse, Faith Ringgold, and Helen Frankenthaler.
September 7 - October 28, 2017
Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition of the early paintings of Robert Motherwell, which will open on September 7, 2017. Comprised solely of paintings from the 1940s and early 1950s, the exhibition will be one of only two such solo presentations to focus on the artist’s early explorations in painting, and the first in New York City.
The paintings from this period trace Motherwell’s emergence from an initial Surrealist influence to the more gestural and expressionist paintings for which he has become canonized. Building on the revelation of Motherwell’s innovative approach to art-making that was solidified by the well-received exhibition, Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2013, this show aims to delve deeper into the artist’s ever-oscillating positions between representation and abstraction; automatism and pre-determination; and object versus image.
September 15, 2017 - January 7, 2018 [Zentrum Paul Klee]
February 3 - May 6, 2018 [The Phillips Collection]
The exhibition, co-organized by The Phillips Collection and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, explores the seminal role of Swiss-born artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) in the development of mid-20th century American art. Ten Americans sheds new light on important figures in American Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painting who adapted aspects of Klee’s art and ideology into their own artistic development. The exhibition is the first to feature work by Klee in dialogue with William Baziotes, Gene Davis, Adolph Gottlieb, Norman Lewis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Theodoros Stamos, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin.
February 11 - May 20, 2018
From Motherwell to Hofmann: The Samuel Kootz Gallery, 1945-1966 is the first exhibition that examines the critical role Kootz (1898–1982) played in establishing modern American art as an international force. Kootz’s New York gallery (operational 1945–1966) was instrumental in promoting the careers of several major Abstract Expressionist artists, including Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, and William Baziotes. Kootz was an alumnus of UVA, graduating in 1921, and also made a major gift of paintings to The Fralin in 1976–77. This exhibition was organized by the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.
July 9 - August 30, 2018
Robert Motherwell frequently referred to literary themes in his work, drawing inspiration from poets and authors who he felt shared his aesthetics and his passions. This exhibition explores the ways Motherwell’s relationship with literature is manifested in his art. It contains selections from the three livres d’artiste that Motherwell created, as well as his richly illuminated edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, along with other works that took inspiration from specific poems, such his Elegy to the Spanish Republic and Drunk with Turpentine series.
Viewings by appointment only. Contact Claire Altizer for more information.
March 21, 2019 - May 18, 2019
Kasmin is pleased to announce Sheer Presence: Monumental Paintings by Robert Motherwell, opening March 21, 2019, at the gallery’s flagship space at 509 West 27th Street. This unprecedented exhibition will be the first to focus solely on Motherwell’s approach to large-format painting and will be comprised of eight works spanning the 1960s - 1990, including a core group of paintings from the collection of The Dedalus Foundation. This will be the fourth exhibition on which Kasmin and The Dedalus Foundation have collaborated.
As one of the most novel and confident mark-makers of the Abstract Expressionist era, Motherwell consistently turned to the monumental canvas to pursue his lifelong ambition of realizing “sheer presence, beingness, as such, objectivity and true invention” (R. Motherwell, quoted in an interview with B. Robertson, “Robert Motherwell: Theme and Variations,” ART: New York, broadcast December 15, 1964).
For Motherwell, it was substantial scale that allowed for his intuitive gesturality to become amplified; resulting in paintings that are at once performative, dramatic and imposing. In 1965, Motherwell remarked, “The large format, at one blow, changed the century-long tendency of the French to domesticize modern painting, to make it intimate. We replaced the nude girl and the French door with a modern Stonehenge, with a sense of the sublime and the tragic that had not existed since Goya and Turner” (R. Motherwell, quoted in M. Kozloff, “An Interview With Robert Motherwell,” Artforum, September 1965, p. 37).
The paintings in the exhibition are representative of several major themes explored by Motherwell throughout his career. Dublin, 1916, with Black and Tan, 1963-64, at once alludes to the artist’s continued engagement with social and political ideas, and also reflects his pervading use of large, planar areas of color and spatial ambiguity. Also included in the exhibition is Open No. 97: The Spanish House, 1969, a striking composition from the artist’s seminal Open series. The work displays an expanse of vibrant orange, circumscribed by architectural lines. Its title refers to a house in the Spanish town of Cadaqués, a photograph of which Motherwell had on constant display in his studio—a testament to his enduring dedication to Spain as a subject.
Painted in 1989-90, shortly before Motherwell’s death, The Grand Inquisitor is a formidable example from the artist's last major series of paintings, The Hollow Men. Strongly related to the imagery of Motherwell’s ubiquitous Spanish Elegy series, the abstract forms are set against a bright ochre and bold red ground. Together, the works in Sheer Presence manifest the grandest of Motherwell’s technical facilities and painterly achievements.
March 23, 2019 - May 4, 2019
Recognized as both an accomplished painter and print maker, this exhibition focuses on Robert Motherwell’s monotypes. In the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, the Dedalus Foundation's executive director Morgan Spangle writes: "Motherwell had taken to the painterly monotype process quite naturally, and the results are powerful abstract forms expressed directly by a masterful hand on the plate, exploiting and accepting the medium's unpredictable nature after it's run through the press".
