Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. After studying at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, he graduated in 1961 with a BA in English literature. During this time, he began working in steel mills in order to support himself. In 1964, he graduated from Yale University with both a BFA and an MFA. Receiving a Yale Traveling Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, followed by a year in Florence funded by a Fulbright grant. Serra’s early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. A famous work from this time involved throwing lead against the walls of his studio. Though casts were created from the impact of the lead hitting the walls, the emphasis of the piece was really on the process of creating it: raw aggression and physicality, combined with a self-conscious awareness of material and a real engagement with the space in which it was worked. Since those Minimalist beginnings, Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality—but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired. His series of "Torqued Ellipses" (1996–99)—which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel, bent and curved, leaning in and out—carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected. One of Serra’s public works is the sixty-foot-tall "Charlie Brown" (1999, named for the Peanuts comic-strip character to honor its author, Charles Schultz, who had died that year), which was erected in the courtyard of an office building in San Francisco. Serra lives in New York and Nova Scotia.
Serra studied painting with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture between 1961 and 1964. He claims to have taken most of his inspiration from the artists who taught there, most notablyPhilip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman.[4] He continued his training abroad, spending a year each in Florence and Paris. In 1964, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for Rome, where he lived and worked with his first wife, sculptor Nancy Graves. Since then, he has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in 1968.[5] In New York, his circle of friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.[6] At one point, to fund his art, Serra started a furniture-removals business, Low-Rate Movers,[7] and employedChuck Close, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and others.
Exhibit is pleased to have Weight III, a Richard Serra print from Gemini in its inventory. Come by and take a look at this magnificent piece from this influential artist.
For more in depth information on Richard Serra, read this article from the New Yorker.
Morgan Robinson's functional sculpture and free standing sculpture has a definite Asian sensibility. That is no coincidence. Morgan spent a year in Japan working at a furniture factory. Morgan's Chochin sculpture Chochin reflects his attachment to those principals. Chochin mean Lantern in Japanese. The symbolic meaning of Chochin in Japanese is Enlightment.
Come by the gallery to see more of Morgan's work. The show runs through July 14. Also, see more of Morgan's work in our online catalog, viewable at the following link:
My father studied art with Arshile Gorky and I was born in the same hospital where Franz Kline was born, which may explain my affinity toward Kline and Gorky. Although I have three college degrees, I grew up in my father's studio and whatever I've learned about art, I learned there. As for the work itself, each canvas evolves through several stages, or "edits," and takes 6 months to a year to complete; the titles are used both for thematic reasons, as well as for compositional elements in the work.
Come by Thursday June 14, from 6 until 8 pm to see Jim's new work.
Please join us on Thursday evening from 6 until 8 as we open a show of new work with local artists, Melissa Key, Jim Polan and Morgan Robinson. Please see below Melissa's artist statement.
Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of a task. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned. This body of work reflects a focus on flow as it corresponds to water.
Until late last year, the market ascension that has made Gerhard Richter the world’s top selling living artist could have been characterized as a slow burn. True, the 80-year-old painter had enjoyed decades of renown, with top-notch gallery affiliation, countless museum exhibitions, and even the early honor of representing the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1972 Venice Biennale. Richter’s market prices, however — particularly for his critically heralded, richly colored, multilayered abstract works — had been rising at a tortoise’s pace.
That slow but steady advance turned supersonic at Sotheby’s New York last November, when a group of eight Richter abstract canvases of various dimensions and dates from a private collection fetched $74,280,000 against combined pre sale estimates of $27 million to $36.7 million. The psychedelic, purple-haze-colored, and squeegeed "Abstraktes Bild" (“Abstract Painting”) of 1997, measuring a mural-scale 8 feet 61∕8 inches by 11 feet 17∕8 inches, fetched a record $20,802,500 (est. $9-12 million). It flattened the previous mark set by "Kerze" (“Candle”), 1982, at Christie’s London just one month earlier, when the 323∕4-by- 241∕2-inch photo painting (as Richter’s photograph-based works are called) made £10,457,250 ($16.4million). At Sotheby’s, the buyer of the new first-ranked Richter was the billionaire Lily Safra, who donated the painting to the Israel Museum in memory of her late husband, the Lebanese-born banker Edmond Safra. The unnamed consignors, later revealed to be the London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock, had acquired the work on the primary market at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, in London, in 1998, a time when auction prices for Richter’s large-scale abstractions stood under $500,000.
Marian Goodman, Richter’s longtime dealer, looks farther back, to 1985, when Richter had his first solo exhibition with her in New York (it coincided with one at Sperone Westwater Gallery). Recalls Goodman, “You could buy a 10-foot abstraction for $25,000 or one of the candle paintings starting at around $5,000. It’s kind of shocking, but it’s a fact.”
A confluence of circumstances has contributed to Richter’s global elevation as the most sought-after living artist, among them the recent deaths of titans Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly. For the new global superrich, the large-scale and vibrantly hued Richter abstractions can be easy to live with — a decorator’s dream, really, with a large array of color combinations and sizes yet they possess considerable wall power. And then there is the market's ineluctable need to anoint a new leader.
“The art world always needs a clear top end,” says Thaddaeus Ropac, the Paris and Salzburg dealer, “and for years the top end was taken by a few English artists, namely [Francis] Bacon and Freud. The fact is they are gone, and someone had to take over the reign. Jasper Johns would be the natural contender but he doesn’t appeal enough to the world audience. You haven’t heard much exciting news about Johns recently, and the same goes for Brice Marden. The art market instinctively decided Richter should be the one.”
Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and the force behind the Richter market surge of last November, looks beyond the mysteries of instinct, observing, “Every market needs an artist that combines high quality and beauty. Now, when contemporary art has to be beautiful, Richter is the artist.” Meyer equates Richter’s market power with that of Bacon and Mark Rothko, noting that when the eight Richters were displayed together at Sotheby’s during the New York preview last fall, “I told people, ‘You are standing in a room full of Rothko’s in 1982, because that’s what they are.’”
As it turns out, Richter holds Rothko in low esteem — he greatly admires Barnett Newman and Robert Ryman — and might well flinch at hearing Meyer’s comparison, however complimentary the intention behind it. “Richter has a keen interest in Newman but not in Rothko. He is not drawn to anyone on the romantic side of Abstract Expressionism,” says Robert Storr, currently the dean of the Yale School of Art, who curated the landmark 2002 retrospective “Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which featured 188 works. “He may think about Rothko,” adds Storr, “but not in positive terms.”
Among the paintings that did exceedingly well at Sotheby’s last November was "Gudrun," 1987, a gestural abstraction with a blaze of fragmented and veiled primary colors and aggressive black streaks, which sold to a telephone bidder for $18,002,500 (est. $5.5-7.5 million). The Sursocks had acquired "Gudrun" at Sotheby’s London in June 2001 for £501,276 ($709,350). Richter named the painting for Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the radical left-wing German youth protest group the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the title grants the nonobjective work a politically charged dimension, particularly in hindsight. The year after painting "Gudrun," Richter created the 15-painting cycle “October 18, 1977,” commemorating the rather grisly prison deaths of some of the key members of Baader-Meinhof. The series was purchased by MOMA in 1995.
Another large-scale abstraction, "Abstraktes Bild," 1992, a sweep of brilliant colors and dense layers crafted in a closely choreographed process that Richter has described as “applying, destroying, and layering,” sold at the November 2011 Sotheby’s event to a telephone bidder for $14,082,500 (est. $5.5-7.5 million). It had last changed hands at Sotheby’s New York in May 2005 for $1,248,000.
There will be no shortage of material for the market — Richter is astonishingly prolific. His abstract work began in the 1960s, shortly after he moved from Dresden, in Soviet-controlled East Germany, where he had worked successfully as a mural painter in the Social Realist style, to Düsseldorf in the West. He studied for three years at the prestigious Düseldorf Art Academy, where he befriended and exhibited with Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg (better known later as the dealer Konrad Fischer). Polke and Richter cofounded the short-lived Capitalist Realist movement, a German-flavored exploration of pop consumerism that debuted officially in a 1963 exhibition in Düseldorf featuring the founders with Lueg and Wolf Vostell. Richter is credited with coining the movement’s name as a riposte to Soviet-style Social Realism. He and Polke remained close until the latter’s death in 2010.
During the 1960s, Richter produced some 28 abstract paintings, according to the online archive meticulously compiled by the Swiss collector Joe Hage. The census of abstract pictures jumps to 151 for the 1970s and grows much larger in the 1980s, when Richter produced 201 abstract works in various sizes in the first half of the decade and 344 works in the second half. Discussing Richter’s numerically modest beginning and subsequent sharp uptick as a painter of abstractions, Storr explains, “Reaching the point where he could paint what he calls ‘abstract pictures’ was a significant problem for him — he didn’t want to be caught in the slipstream of previous abstraction, whether metaphysical, transcendental, or social — and it wasn’t until the end of the 1970s that he found a way to really move forward on his own terms.”
Richter maintains a disciplined production schedule in Cologne, where he has lived since 1983. Although he has several assistants mixing paint and preparing canvases and a manager to oversee the enterprise, he works alone in his studio, aided by lightweight aluminum ladders and armed with a formidable variety of brushes and custom-made squeegee tools with which he achieves his trademark spectacular surfaces. The abundance of Richter’s abstractions may make the works appear numbingly similar to some observers, the result of a marathon-like effort to create material for an insatiable art market. Meyer acknowledges the copious output but doesn’t see that as a hindrance to evaluating the work in terms of quality and rarity. “Like great Rothkos,” he explains, “there may be 40 or 50 great Richter paintings, so you sort that out and know exactly where you are.”
Still, one can’t help but ask why the abstractions have zoomed so high in value, especially since they have generally played second fiddle in the market to the photorealist paintings, such as "Mustang Squadron," 1964, and "Ema (Nude on a Staircase)," 1966, which first brought Richter fame. That disparity seemed especially acute last November at Christie’s, the same week the abstracts racked up record prices at Sotheby’s, when Richter’s "Frau Niepenberg," 1965, a blurry painting based on a found photograph, offered by the Astrup Fearnley Collection in Oslo, was bought in against an estimate of $7 million to $10 million, despite the work’s inclusion in the important 2009 exhibition “Gerhard Richter Portraits,” at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
Intriguingly, Richter’s representational and abstract works, while typically distinguished in the market, are not absolutely separate in his creative process. As Storr explains, “Underneath many abstract paintings are figurative paintings, and certainly after the mid-1980s Richter regularly used abstraction to cancel out photo based images with which he was dissatisfied or used photo images as the sacrificial lamb of abstraction. If you X-ray these works you may find something else underneath.” Storr cites as examples “canceled” paintings from the “October 18, 1977” cycle that lurk beneath the surfaces of some of Richter’s abstract works. He also mentions "Clouds," a bravura two-panel abstract work from 1982, also owned by MOMA. “First you have a cloud painting,” he observes, “and then a kind of Al Heldish or hard-edged and geometric abstract painting that [Richter] then built over and dragged” with a squeegee. “You have three different genres within the same painting.”
From The Ascent Of Gerhard Richter by Judd Tully, Art + Auction, July 2012
Last week I had the pleasure of making a visit to Carolyn Cole's beautiful studio in Portland, Oregon. Carolyn's paintings are widely recognized, but came into national attention most recently in March 2010, when her work was featured in Architectural Digest. This year, one of Carolyn's paintings was added to the Portland Art Museum. Carolyn is a rigorous worker, and paints everyday. The day of my visit found her a bit bereft of paintings, since she had recently opened a show at her Portland gallery. Carolyn's work is shown throughout the United States, and her schedule mapped out months in advance, so I felt lucky to have the opportunity to visit her on my brief visit to Portland.
Carolyn shared several new paintings with me, some of which I have shown in photos. In the next few weeks, we will be receiving several of these new pieces.
Carolyn shared that she is using a new, softer, richer color palette which lends a silkiness to the pieces that makes them very comfortable and easy to live with. Cole's control of paint and her attention to color theory are immediately evident in this new body of work.
Exhibit is so excited to welcome Carolyn to the gallery in September this year! Stay tuned for updates and more images of new paintings.
We were so pleased to open a show last night of michelle y william's newest work,Best Laid Plans. Here is michelle's statement for the show.
best laid plans - statementsomeone once said, (or wrote, or sang) "life is what happens when you're making other plans" - mother nature most certainly has other plans. be it hurricane katrina in the south or tornadoes in cenrtal US or the earthquake spawning tsunamis in japan & indonesia.
this new body of work is patterned in the fickleness of mother nature. contrasting colors intend to present a unifying mood within the viewer. a nod to cool-dewy mornings or strong-skied evenings, the presentation is of a sentiment that our surroundings so often bring us. while the fixation is not necessarily of a weather-strewn hour, it is of the same turmoil and simultaneous calm that coexist within a storm. it is about the power and necessity of this balance, and about how, as the viewer, we can so continually feel vitalized by what we cannot predict. of course, while a nature of the unknown will remain, the work is meant to help ground us with the ability to stare down this unknown and steal from it a moment of the serene. we must find solace in the bittersweet renewal forced upon us.for better or for worse, there is only so much control we all have - & after that, we must simply let go.-michelle y williams
Come by and see this fabulous artist's newest work! Show hangs until June 09. 2012.
