Castelli Gallery

In 1978, Robert Morris created a series of twelve black ink drawings titled, In the Realm of the Carceral, showing various details of prison architecture rendered as bold, linear graphics. Castelli Gallery is presenting eight drawings from the series. Alongside these works, the exhibition will include three works from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione, 1745-60, a well-known collection of etchings depicting the dark and labyrinthine interiors of imaginary monumental prisons, examples of which may have fascinated a young Morris visiting the Nelson-Atkins Gallery in his hometown, Kansas City. Robert Morris emerged as one of the founders of the Minimal Art movement in the 1960s, which revolved around the Green Gallery in New York. He is also known for iconic Felt works, which were first shown at Castelli in 1968. The 1970s were a decade in which many artists became committed to activism and politics. Morris was at the forefront of this effort, participating in the Art Workers Coalition, a protest group that launched a major critique of public museums’ political inaction and questionable corporate partnerships. Politics influenced Morris’s work as well, which increasingly explored themes of obedience, authority, submission, confinement, subjugation, and disorder. This turn is clearly illustrated in Morris’s In the Realm of the Carceral, and critics have attributed to the Carceral drawings a threshold moment in Morris’s career. According to Branden Joseph, the Carceral drawings are “the series of works with which Morris’s minimalist project may be said to have ended.” Other writers, however, suggested that the drawings suggest a new way of interpreting the definition of Minimal Art. Regardless of this debate, Morris continued to engage with power, its various articulations in space, and its psychological effects on the viewer for the remainder of his career. In his own time during the Italian Enlightenment and since, Piranesi is known as an artist whose work forges an interface between reason and imagination, order and feeling. Piranesi’s Carceri infuse his distinctive dramatic vaulted spaces with an alternative impression of Palladian Rome: an imaginary world of psychological and physical horror. Piranesi’s etchings were also an influence on Michel Foucault’s influential text, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Written in 1975 and translated into English in 1977, it is a fundamental book about prison, not only as a place to confine and isolate the body from society, but also as a condition of the mind. It is likely that Morris encountered Foucault’s writing during this time, and these readings may have reminded the artist of his earlier experience with Piranesi’s Carceri etchings, inspiring him to make his own Carceral drawings. Accompanying this exhibition is an illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by art historian Miguel de Baca.

During this time, Castelli Gallery will be focusing on blog posts, just released a new one about the Castelli / Sonnabend Videotapes and Films. We will be posting blog posts in the coming weeks on artists like Richard Pettibone and Joseph Kosuth, along with a previously unpublished interview with Leo Castelli.

The exhibition at 24 W 40 restages Robert Morris' audio installation "Voice" (1974) alongside preparatory drawings and diagrams. A selection of Morris’ "Blind Time" and "Labyrinth" drawings are displayed at 18 E 77 St.

The exhibition at 24 W 40 restages Robert Morris' audio installation "Voice" (1974) alongside preparatory drawings and diagrams. A selection of Morris’ "Blind Time" and "Labyrinth" drawings are displayed at 18 E 77 St.

This exhibition focuses on ephemerality as a formative principle in Keith Sonnier’s work through a display of sculpture from the 60s and 70s which mark his initial engagement with this concept/quality.

This exhibition focuses on ephemerality as a formative principle in Keith Sonnier’s work through a display of sculpture from the 60s and 70s which mark his initial engagement with this concept/quality.

Castelli Gallery, 24 W 40th Street, is pleased to present ‘Dot, Point, Period’: a Curated Installation by Joseph Kosuth. Since the 1960s, Kosuth has used the “curated installation” as a key conceptual/aesthetic strategy for exploring questions of authorship and the basic nature of art. ‘Dot, Point, Period’ will be the first time such an installation has been displayed in New York City since Kosuth’s seminal, The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1990. ‘Dot, Point, Period’ focuses on the dot or period as a graphic form that marks out a visual space and in so doing defines meaning in both written language and art. By punctuating intervals that delimit thoughts and also indicate moments of rest—pauses for the intake of breath—the period indexes the cadence of oral speech within text. Similarly, in art, the dot, fragment, or stroke registers visual continuities and ruptures that establish significant relationships between the constituent elements of an image. In this respect, the dot-form functions as a useful aid for shaping and coding meaning in both visual and verbal mediums, yet its rules are not essentially fixed in either. When considered independently from the structures of grammar, syntax, or composition, the dot’s semantic value remains indeterminate, awaiting the contextualizing framework of a given text or image. Consequently, the dot’s significance derives from its use, determined by convention and repetition, by what is built through and around it. The dot registers the influence of context in determining the significance of its component forms.

1963 – Boxing Match, Revisited explores a little-known yet influential exhibition that took place in downtown New York at Gordon’s Fifth Avenue Gallery from February 27 – March 24,1963. The original exhibition featured sculpture by Shusaku Arakawa, Robert Morris, Ay-O and Masunobu Yoshimura. These artists’ paths converged in the early 60s when all four independently relocated to New York City and quickly became immersed in the city’s flourishing avant-garde art scene. Boxing Match emerged out of these artists’ recognition of the formal affinity between their work, which shared a basic box shape. Among the works include in the exhibition were several large, four by eight foot, “coffins” by Arakawa. In a review for Arts Magazine, Donald Judd described these pieces as “Surrealist” “monsters”—lined with pink silk and sporting additions such as “a phallic tail of foam rubber.” These over-the-top coffins contrasted with the understated work of Robert Morris, who debuted his sculptures Column (1961), Untitled (Cloud) (1962), and Box With The Sound of Its Own Making (1961)—works that eventually became defining examples of the Minimal art. Ay-O, was represented in the show by a series of small square boxes titled Square Sun ‘61. The illuminated interiors of these works were pierced with nails, producing a visual effect that resembled rays of sunlight. Yoshimura contributed a group of “columns” and “coffins,” echoing the sculptures of Morris and Arakawa. These work were made of rippled plaster studded with knobs made out jello molds. Although many of the sculptures from the original exhibition have since been destroyed, 1963 – Boxing Match, Revisited will include works by all four artists dating from the 1960s, which exemplify each artist’s distinct set of aesthetic concerns during this period. These pieces will be shown alongside photographs and ephemera related to the 1963 exhibition. Through this presentation, Boxing Match, Revisited aims to excavate this all but forgotten moment in post-war art history, bringing attention to its significance as the first exhibition of Robert Morris’s Minimal works as well as a precedent for the seminal Boxes exhibition held in 1964 at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. Perhaps most importantly, the show highlights the creative exchanges taking place between American and Japanese avant-garde art groups during the 60’s, which were integral to the developments of movements such as Pop, Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. For more information please contact Broc Blegen at broc@castelligallery.com