Krakow Witkin Gallery

Group exhibition featuring Sarah Charlesworth, Giulio Paolini, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Shellburne Thurber

Krakow Witkin Gallery announces a focused presentation of Josef Albers’s “Structural Constellations”. Albers began exploring machine-engraved laminated vinyl at approximately the same time he began the first “Homage to the Square” paintings. As Jeannette Redensek explains, “to study the perception of color, the painter restricted himself to just four compositional formats for the next twenty-six years; to study perception of space, he limited himself to linear constructions.” To make the “Structural Constellations”, Albers cut lines into a laminated plastic called “Vinylite” (or “Resopal” in Germany). To do so, Albers engaged machine shops (which normally would be engraving signs for dentist and lawyer offices or even the instrument panels for submarines). The process consists of using a pantograph, where the movement of tracing Albers’s template with one arm of the device produces identical movements in the second arm (which has a router to cut the shape into the laminated plastic). A pantograph allows for multiple size variations from the same template. Furthermore, the laminated vinyl has a black top layer and a white under-layer. The router cuts through the black, exposing the white, so as to create both a sculpted recess and a white line. This simple process, combined with the illusion within the imagery, demonstrates one of Albers’s true gifts – the delicate balance between complexity and simplicity. “Albers’s art is rational but also playful. The artist was inspired by the same scientific, poetic and consummately generous spirit that compelled Kandinsky to write Point and Line to Plane. But in his New Haven, Connecticut, studio in 1950, Albers had as much in common with Concept artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s as with Bauhaus painters of the 1920’s. He can in fact be seen as an intellectual and artistic bridge between the generations. For him the idea was ascendant, foremost, predetermined. An artist was but a humble craftsman enacting conclusions.” (Redensek) In putting this project together, Krakow Witkin would like to extend many thanks to Jeannette Redensek of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for her expertise and generosity of time and spirit. Furthermore, Cristea Roberts Gallery, the representative of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for editioned works, are incredible colleagues with which to collaborate not just on this project, but in general. In their London gallery this coming December will be the exhibition, “Josef Albers: The Early Prints 1916-1950”. Also forthcoming is “Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life” at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Krakow Witkin Gallery is honored to present a survey of Tara Donovan’s editioned works made between 2004 and 2016. Known for her rigorous process of experimentation, Tara Donovan has earned acclaim for her ability to harness the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods and transform them, through mass accumulation, into ethereal works that challenge a viewer’s assumptions and perception. Donovan has done this in large-scale installations, discrete sculptures and various works on paper that utilize print processes, often in experimental ways. The results, whether with rubber bands, Slinkys®, styrene cards, or pins, are always open to interpretation and often suggest organic forms. Donovan states, “it is not like I’m trying to simulate nature. It’s more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow.” Donovan’s many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (2008); and first annual Calder Prize (2005), among others. For over a decade, numerous museums have mounted solo exhibitions of Donovan’s work including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2018), Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2015), Milwaukee Art Museum (2012), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2008), Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007-2008), UCLA Hammer Museum (2004), and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999-2000). Donovan’s work appears in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Krakow Witkin Gallery is proud to present “Jenny Holzer: Texts Work,” a selection of works utilizing texts the artist wrote, compiled and presented in different forms over the past thirty-five years. The earliest work in the show is the iconic “Truisms” (1977-79), presented here as part of three different works (two LEDS and a granite footstool). The “Truisms” series was written by Holzer to resemble existing truisms, maxims, and clichés. Each Truism distills difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward fact. Privileging no single viewpoint, the “Truisms” examine the social construction of beliefs, mores, and truths. The “Truisms” first were shown on anonymous street posters that were wheat pasted throughout downtown Manhattan, and subsequently have appeared on T-shirts, hats, electronic signs, stone floors, projections and benches, among other supports. The selection here also includes the 20 sheets from “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-1982). Influenced by Holzer’s readings of political, art, religious, utopian, and other manifestos, the “Inflammatory Essays” are a collection of 100-word texts that were printed on colored paper and, originally, posted throughout New York City. Like any manifesto, the voice in each essay urges and espouses a strong and particular ideology. By masking the author of the essays, Holzer allows the viewer to assess ideologies divorced from the personalities that propel them. With this series, Holzer invites the reader to consider the urgent necessity of social change, the possibility for manipulation of the public, and the conditions that attend revolution. In addition to these two early bodies of work, there are numerous other pieces, including a metal plaque, several photographs of recent projections, a single etching as well as a suite of etchings from her body of work using redacted material and four LED pieces of different scales. Within the last 15 years or so, Holzer has gone back into her texts and combined different ones so that, while the individual bodies of text continue to cause impact, the juxtaposing of subject matter between texts cause a challenging dialogue. Much like within the early Truisms, where no single viewpoint is privileged, the relationship between the subjects in the various texts provide a non-hierarchical approach to investigation. Not only a survey of the texts used, this selection serves as a display of the varying combinations and dynamic readings of the texts when presented through the different media that Holzer uses. For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the 1970s with the New York City posters, and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. Holzer received the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the Barnard Medal of Distinction in 2011. She holds honorary degrees from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and Smith College. She lives and works in New York.

Daniel Buren is famous for his use of a repeated 8.7 cm wide stripe that defines, confounds and explores issues of continuity, pattern, recognition and space. The artist has created a lasting body of work that is at once, one continual repetition and yet also a forever changing exploration of comprehension, form and surprise. He began painting in the early 1960s but by 1965, had stopped traditional painting so as to use the the striped awning canvas common in France. Overall, Buren’s works integrate visual surface and architectural space by focusing on the gesture of placement as a way of highlighting the process of ‘making’ rather than a visual/pictorial representation of anything else. A few key moments in his career: • Buren started by setting up hundreds of striped posters, so-called “affichages sauvages”, around Paris and later in more than 100 Metro stations, drawing public attention through these unauthorized acts. • He had his first important solo exhibition at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in 1968, where he blocked the only entrance to the gallery, a glass door, with a striped support. • A year later, without being invited, Buren wished to take part in Harald Szeemann’s exhibition, “When Attitudes Become Form,” taking place in Bern in 1969. Two of the contributing artists offered him space in the show, but he instead covered billboards in Bern with his stripes. • In June 1970, he put stripes on the front and back of Los Angeles bus benches without permission. • For his first New York City solo show in 1973, Buren hung a set of nineteen black and white striped squares of canvas on a cable that ran from one end of the John Weber Gallery to the other, out the window to a building on the other side of West Broadway. Nine pieces were inside the gallery and nine outside. A middle piece, which connected the outside and the inside parts of the installation, was placed halfway out the opening where the window frame had been removed for the duration of the exhibition. • In 1977 Buren cut up one of his artworks from 1969 and made a new work, designating that the sections should hang in the corners of a wall, whether that wall was empty, had doors or windows, or even had other artworks already hanging on it. • In 1986, when François Mitterrand was president of France, Buren attained leading artist status after he created the 3,000-square-meter sculpture “Les Deux Plateaux” (1985–86) (more commonly referred to as the “Colonnes de Buren” (“Buren’s Columns”), a work in situ for the Cour d’honneur at the Palais Royal in Paris. • Also in 1986, he represented France at the Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion Award for best pavilion. Over his career, Buren has had major solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 1989, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2002, Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2005, Modern Art Oxford in 2006, and at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 2011, among many others. For the 52nd Venice Biennale, Buren created a new site-specific work for the Giardini of the Italian Pavilion, and was also curator of Sophie Calle’s contribution to the French Pavilion. He has created over 80 permanent public installations on four continents.

Known as one of the founders of Conceptual Art, Robert Barry, in the 1960’s and 1970’s explored sound waves, barely visible string, releasing inert gas into the atmosphere and announcing that exhibitions would be closed. The projects engaged issues of audience involvement, perception, spatial relationships and art world structures. Early on, Barry used written language as art, counter-point and explanation for his work. The use of language soon became his ‘signature’ medium. Barry’s works are, in one sense, austere. Clean words and surfaces provide visual allure. Reading the chosen words provides an opportunity to get into the works and to better “read” the art. However, no defined references exist in the works. One must be willing to question and explore the potential connections, both for the artist, but more so for the viewer. Each of the formal decisions Barry makes provides opportunities for more specific readings of the work, yet there is no one narrative or reference to be made. How the artist makes work that is powerful to look at, captivating to read in their specificity, introspective to explore and yet wide open, is a big part of why the work is so strong. The texts in the presented works have no one specific narrative or point of departure. Barry has dispersed the words across, over and beyond the surfaces. The arrangements, juxtapositions, and proximities of the words give further opportunity not only to read the words but to read INTO the words to think about what the relationships may be. In some, the reflective quality of the mirrors and mylar reflect imagery and colors in the space, as well as reversing, repeating and spotlighting various elements of the room. How much is on purpose and how much is open to chance is forever unknown. The known, the unknown and the grey area between are key to equally examine in Barry’s work. In order to do this, one must also equally examine the general, the personal and the universal. Barry’s first solo museum exhibition was in 1971 at The Tate in London and over the years he has proceeded to have solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Folkwangmuseum Essen in Germany, the former Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, the Musée St. Pierre, Art Contemporain in Lyon, France, the Haags Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, Netherlands, the Dum Umeni Brno in the Czech Republic, and the Kunsthalle Nurnberg among others. Group exhibitions with Barry’s work have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Seattle Art Museum, Jewish Museum, Kyoto Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art in New York, among hundreds of others. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Panza Collection, Varese, Ludwig Collection, Cologne, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum für Monderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Germany, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, among many others.

Krakow Witkin Gallery announces an exhibition of large-scale silkscreens that Mel Bochner has made over the past five years. For these new works, Bochner has photographed the Plexiglas blocks with which he has made his monoprints and then printed those photos as multi-color screenprints. The imagery shows not only the texts, but the scrapes, chips and imperfections in the well-worn blocks. Printing this imagery with high contrast color juxtapositions, Bochner explores the relationship between the visual and the textual (when and how one moves between viewing, reading and deciphering a work of art). With no one fixed voice, he has made pieces that are confounding, confusing, dynamic, and humorous simultaneously. As a bit of history, in 2001, Bochner began a series of works engaging everyday speech by using synonyms derived from the latest edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Bochner was inspired by the Thesaurus’ then-new permissiveness to broaden his linguistic references juxtaposing proper with vernacular, formal against vulgar, high against low. Twenty-one years later, and still drawn from Roget’s Thesaurus, as well as dictionaries of slang, the language in the recent works can vary from the casual to crude and can simultaneously be read as defeatist and elated, all while engaging social issues of the day. Roberta Smith wrote in a New York Times review, “The new Bochners unleash something malicious, sharp and funny that has always lurked beneath the surface, conveying the rage of life while maintaining the artist’s characteristic surface of elegance, intellect and formalism. In a sense they are Expressionistic works, filled with pain, and grinning and bearing it.” Simultaneous with the exhibition, the Art Institute of Chicago has just opened a major retrospective of Bochner’s drawings. It is on view through August. Mel Bochner [born 1940] is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists which also included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson – artists who, like Bochner, were looking at ways of breaking with Abstract Expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual, led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his 1966 Working Drawings as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.’ Over the course of a career that has spanned nearly six decades, Mel Bochner has been at the forefront of Conceptual Art, producing thought-provoking work in nearly every medium: drawing, painting, prints, photography, sculpture, books, and installations.

León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires in 1920. His father, Augusto, was an Italian artist who painted religious frescoes and helped build and restore churches. Augusto advised his son not to choose an artistic career because of the poor financial prospects, so León studied engineering at the University of Buenos Aires. He made numerous trips to Italy, where he worked as an engineer and began making abstract art. In 1960, he had a show of his abstract art in Buenos Aires. By 1965, he became known for his art that often included provocative social and political critiques of war, social inequality, discrimination (sexual, religious, and ideological), and abuse of power. He castigated the Argentine government for human rights abuses well before the military took full control in 1976. Fearing reprisal, he went into exile in Brazil from 1976 to 1991. His son, Ariel, was abducted by the military shortly thereafter (and is presumed dead) as part of the Guerra Sucia (Dirty War) in Argentina. Within a few years of relocating to Brazil, partly inspired by the mass quantities of people he saw daily on the streets and partly inspired by political beliefs, Ferrari began the body of work now on view at Krakow Witkin Gallery. ‘Heliografía’ is a process most often associated with architectural blueprints. The main imagery in Ferrari’s heliografías was formed from Letraset (architectural symbols, precut as rub-on stickers). In the current presentation, the vast majority are of a human figure walking, as seen from a bird’s-eye view. Ferrari used huge quantities of this one figure to create imaginary scenarios/environments/plans that can be seen as absurd, pointed, wry, and/or existentially dark. In one work, a repeated ‘line’ of this figure walk in a permanently looped pattern. In another, two organized masses of the letraset figure stand facing in opposition. In a third work, grids of the figure are facing alternating directions so as to create an almost patchwork-like image, somewhere between a crowd and a blanket. While the heliografías point out the dangers of blindly following a particular pattern or movement, they also engage issues of order versus chaos, collective versus individual and oppositional versus intersectional. It is important to recognize how Ferrari engaged the physical objects/pieces of paper of the heliografías. In the 1980’s he printed them and signed them. He would fold and mail them to friends and colleagues.The works existed somewhere between being blueprints, mail art and maps. The folding is a key element in that the images on the paper are embedded in the creases and undulations (from the folding of the paper) to create works that are images, objects and sculptures, all at once. Furthermore, when Ferrari first started making the pieces in the 1980’s, he would sometimes denote that they were part of an edition and other times he would not. In the 2000’s, he revisited the imagery and realized that in order for the process of their making to be resonant with the imagery, message and object, he needed to list them as editions of infinity (endless, like the movement in the imagery) and to not denote which # of the edition they are (denying individuality), thus all the works in the current exhibition are listed as “x/infinity,” balancing the importance of political content with formal and technical exploration. A world-renowned artist, Ferrari’s work is included in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY; the Casa de las Americas, Havana; Daros Latin America, Zurich; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris among many others. The artist received the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale in 2007. In 2009, New York’s Museum of Modern Art showed León Ferrari’s and Mira Schendel’s work in its dual retrospective exhibition, “Tangled Alphabets.” In 2021, the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and Musée national d’Art moderne-Centre Pompidou (Paris) launched a survey exhibition that is currently traveling between museums.

Kay Rosen makes her work by finding, assembling, arranging, composing, simplifying and/or complicating letters and words. The current exhibition, “Kay Rosen: Lists, 1989-1991” consists of every work the artist has made with the ‘list’ form. With Rosen’s direction, a list can be an accumulation, juxtaposition, narrative and/or puzzle. As opposed to traditional grammar, the myriad options of how a list exists has given Rosen both structure and freedom with which to engage formal, social, and political topics. The pieces in the show are in and on a wide range of media (award ribbons, book covers, etching, graphite, handouts, letterpress, periodicals, silkscreen, video and wall painting, among others) and thus show the depth and breadth with which Rosen works. In conjunction with the exhibition, each work in the show now has an associated text (all are available on the website) to further add to the experience of viewing/reading Kay Rosen has been the subject of numerous articles, reviews, and group and solo exhibitions, including in 1998 a two-venue mid-career survey entitled “Kay Rosen: Li[f]eli[k]e,” curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Otis College of Art Design. She has been the recipient of awards that include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2017 and three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants. Her work is included in many institutional and private collections. Rosen taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years. She was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas and lives in New York City and Gary, Indiana. Concurrent with Krakow Witkin Gallery’s “Kay Rosen: Lists, 1989-2021” is Rosen’s “New Work 2020-2021,” a solo exhibition in New York at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.. The show features acrylic gouache paintings on paper, enamel paintings on canvas, and two wall murals. Produced over the past 18 months, these works respond to the fear, isolation, and anxiety experienced by the artist during that time.

My flag paintings are about the zenith of the twentieth-century history of African people. The majority of them were created during the 1950s and 60s — the years of liberation from colonialism. They embody a “modern’ aesthetic and idea. They contain the typical tropes of flags: the colors representing the green beauty and fecundity of the land, the blue of the majestic sky or water, and the red blood shed in the fight for freedom. But often they also contain black, symbolizing the people. In as much as some mimic the “tricolore” of the colonizing countries, the different colors set them apart, often in stark contrast to their European counterparts. The colors can represent tribal, cultural, religious, and political identities as well as national ones, sometimes simultaneously. Conversely, the missing colors also speak to the fluid and in flux nature of Africa and its national identities. My flag paintings are here to reveal, through a curious absence of color, the dynamic nature of African visual history and thought. They are perhaps intentionally perplexing, to make viewers question and perhaps rethink their assumptions. - Fred Wilson

In 2019, Mike Glier and Krakow Witkin Gallery began planning for Glier’s next exhibition at the gallery. As so much of his work is about site and sight, Glier proposed to make an exhibition engaged with a location near the gallery. Choosing the Boston Public Garden (a Victorian public park dating to 1837 that is steps away from the gallery), Glier spent the week of May, 2019 photographing the Garden and drawing the sounds of the birds. “My artwork is motivated by the rupture between humankind and the natural world and the environmental destruction that flows from this self-inflicted wound. The bird songs which persist in urban spaces like the Public Garden, however, are testaments to unity. Each “doo doo, dee dee” and “twit twit” that resonates off the pavement and brick of the city is a song of reconciliation that says nature and culture are not separate things, but are a single entity, the living world.” (Mike Glier) In the Garden, before putting pencil to paper, he closed his eyes, took an inventory of his senses and registered the fullness of the place, from sound (traffic, human conversations, songs among the birds) to touch (the bench, the sun, the dew) to smell (daffodils and Dunkin’ Donuts). “The language of music and art overlap, so it’s not too difficult to translate sound into image. As a bird call rises and falls in pitch, so does my hand. As the volume increases, so does the size of the mark. Round sounds are drawn as ample loops with a soft hand, and sharp, raspy sounds are made with pointed and short marks drawn with clenched fingers. And the concept of rhythm brings these forms together into a unified visual flow.” (Mike Glier)

To begin 2020, Krakow Witkin Gallery proudly announces an expansive exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work. Through structures (LeWitt’s terminology for his three dimensional works) and gouaches, the exhibition displays forty years’ exploration of the cube. In addition, a large wall piece (“White styrofoam on black wall” from 1993) provides a bold contrast to all the rectilinear forms. The exhibition contains an ‘open form’ structure, a ‘closed form’ structure, a ‘progression’ and an extremely rare 1968 “Hidden Cubes” structure that has never previously been exhibited. The works on paper present two ways LeWitt drew/painted cubes — isometric and trimetric. Furthermore, the different pieces help illuminate the processes he used to layer color on paper to create the variations of tone, positive/negative, foreground/background and surface/depth. By not using illustrative perspective, LeWitt honors the flatness of the paper by presenting all visible sides of the cube and the background as equal. This sense of equality is key to understanding LeWitt’s work from the date of the first piece in the show (1968) to the last (2005). Visible and hidden, monochrome and polychrome, 3D and 2D, and numerous other seeming dichotomies are treated by LeWitt as mutually significant. LeWitt’s longtime assistant, Susanna Singer, describes LeWitt’s overall practice as ‘using a vocabulary to create language.’ This exhibition gives the audience an opportunity to revel in his language and hopefully celebrate the curiosity with which LeWitt approached life.