Castelli Gallery

Castelli Gallery, in partnership with Danspace Project, is pleased to present Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake, Drawing in Circles. The exhibition will run from March 14th to April 1st at the gallery location on 24 W 40th Street. Drawing in Circles offers a unique insight into the artists’ processes of choreography and performance, that includes improvisation, collaboration, space, sound, object, and time. The installation will include two videos, one done by each artist, that the artists’ assembled to mark this historical collaboration. Additionally, the collaborative video, With the Earth at My Waistline, first presented in 2021, will also be on display. During the run of the exhibition, there will be three live performances titled Drawing in Circles WHY. The performance will reference the artists’ connection and inspiration to Japan, particularly the influence of Nō. Drawing in Circles WHY marks a significant collaboration between Jonas and Otake as their first public performance. The performances will take place on March 18th at 4 pm, March 24th at 7 pm, and March 25th at 4 pm. Reservations are required for performances. For more information and to reserve tickets, please refer to Danspace Project’s website. Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York. After studying sculpture, Jonas became interested in dance and considered one of the founders of performance art. Her videos were included in the Castelli/Sonnabend Videotapes and Films (CSVAF) division of Castelli Gallery in 1974. Jonas’ work has been marked by historical exhibitions worldwide. She will have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York next year. Jonas currently lives and works in New York. Eiko Otake was born in 1952 in Japan and moved to New York in 1976. In 1972, she began performing under the duo Eiko & Koma, having performed at museums and festivals around the world. Since 2016, Otake has performed on her own. She teaches interdisciplinary courses at NYU, Wesleyan University, Colorado College and UCLA that implement readings, environmental issues and movement study. She currently lives and works in New York.

Castelli Gallery is pleased to present Joseph Kosuth: ‘Fort! Da!’ (Old Work). The exhibition will run January 10th to February 25th, 2023 at the gallery location on 24 W 40th Street. Joseph Kosuth first exhibited ‘Fort! Da!’ in 1985 at Castelli’s 420 West Broadway location. The upcoming exhibition consists of two works included in the historical exhibition and an additional work conceived at the time but never realized until now. ‘Fort! Da!’ references a game Sigmund Freud recounts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, in which Freud describes his grandson throwing a toy and retrieving it while exclaiming Fort! (Gone!) and Da! (Here!). In Kosuth’s exhibition, the viewers face large scale photographs reproducing the gallery space. The photographs have black frames, incorporate elements of text and various colored crosses, and they are installed on the opposite wall they depict. Therefore, the viewers are invited to participate in a variation of the game Freud describes, in which the space seems to appear and disappear in front of them. As Kosuth states: “I have always considered the ‘spectator’ to be an important part of the making process. My work never, I believe, pandered to the presumptions of the viewer–in fact, I feel that the ‘making process’ hinges on rupturing those presumptions.” ‘Fort! Da!’ revisits what Kosuth refers to as the ‘form of presentation’ in his early works. The large-scale photographs, like the photograph of the chair in Kosuth’s iconic ‘One and Three Chairs’, 1965, are intended to be taken with each new installation, as they reproduce the space in which the artwork is installed. This ultimately disrupts the expectation of permanence which has traditionally been attached to objects of art. In ‘Fort! Da!’ this is further emphasized through the use of the heavy black wooden frames. While these “frames” may give the impression that the artworks can be simply taken down from the wall, in reality, they are affixed to the wall and do not serve any practical function beyond that of creating an illusion of a conventional work of art. Joseph Kosuth has been strongly influenced by the narrative and discourse of psychoanalysis. During the 80s he produced several series of works referencing Sigmund Freud. In addition to ‘Fort! Da!’,‘Zero & Not’, ‘Cathexis’, ‘Hypercathexis’, and ‘Intentio’ reside, as Kosuth said, “within the Freudian landscape.” In addition, Kosuth has appropriated and re-worked several of Freud’s texts in installations, special projects and site-specific works. Joseph Kosuth was born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio. He had his first exhibition at Castelli Gallery in 1969 and has since maintained a working relationship with the gallery. He currently lives and works between New York and Venice, Italy. For further information, please contact Chloe Greisman at chloe@castelligallery.com.

Castelli Gallery, 24 West 40th Street, is pleased to present FARAWAY and CLOSE, a group exhibition with works by John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Mike and Doug Starn, and Lawrence Weiner. The works in the exhibition are realized in a variety of sizes and mediums. Yet, a shared interest in the concept of location, intended both as physical space and a space of mind is what brings them together. Lawrence Weiner’s Untitled, 1999, a set of six works on paper, showcase the use of tangible space and direction; while the reoccurring phrase, “Caught by ships passing in the night” resonates a feeling of being lost in the metaphorical space. If the work reminds us of movement in space, Hanne Darboven 12 months with Postcards from Today of Horses, 1982, consisting of 12 framed pages of months from the 1982 calendar, remind us of movement in time. Additionally, Darboven’s collage shows her use of the word heute (“now”) seen across her oeuvre, which she proceeds to cross out, leaving the viewer unsure of the place in time. A group of John Chamberlain’s collages from View from the Cockpit series show an improbable landscape, at the horizon, as improbable is the landscape in the Mike and Doug Starn photo-collage The No Mind Not Thinks solstil, 2013 and the drawing by Robert Morris 10 Mirrors in a Landscape, 1997. These abstract horizon lines portray an uncertainty in place as it relates to space and time. Another work by Robert Morris, 1934 Mid-West Dust Storm, 2010, consisting of a drawing made of Epoxy on three aluminum panels, depicts a terrifying sand storm in the Mid-West, something dating from the time he was a child. This memory of things past reappears in two Untitled drawings by Jasper Johns, in which the artist is including the floorplan of the house where he spent part of his childhood and a reference to the four seasons. In both instances, these recalls in memory showcase the artists’ location at a specific time and place which allows them to return to them through drawing. A location can be far away from us, or close. Above all, a location can be a place in the mind, and as such change constantly. Robert Morris Untitled (Location), 1963-1973, contains four mechanisms that requires the installer to manually change the distance depending on where the work is placed on the wall. By creating a work that has the ability to change depending on the space, it evokes a sense of no absolute location. By bringing together this group of works, the exhibition hopes to bring attention to the similarities between physical space and time when compared to the figurative concept of space of mind. For more information, please contact Chloe Greisman at chloe@castelligallery.com

Castelli Gallery is pleased to present Richard Pettibone: The American Flag, an exhibition of fifteen new paintings that the artist realized between 2020 and 2021. The exhibition is taking place at the gallery’s midtown location, at 24 West 40th Street. Richard Pettibone is one of the central figures of the discourse on Appropriation Art, which developed out of the Pop Art movement in the early 1960s. At the beginning of his career, Pettibone appropriated the work of artists who were his contemporaries, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns. As a source for his work, Pettibone used images printed in the pages of Artforum. The artist copied them faithfully, developing a technique that became his iconic style of making miniature versions of artworks. With the new paintings, Pettibone returns to one of his most familiar subjects: Jasper Johns and the American flag. Several paintings in the exhibition are faithful appropriations of Johns’s work. Others elaborate on Johns, or are completely independent from Johns’s work. In this way, Pettibone is once again challenging one of the fundamental concepts of Western art: the idea of authorship and originality. In speaking about his work and the creative process that has guided him throughout his career, Pettibone says, “No matter how accurately you copy something, you can’t get rid of yourself. It’s just always you.” Accompanying this exhibition is an illustrated catalogue.

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