Krakow Witkin Gallery

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.

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.