Krakow Witkin Gallery

“Bauer's hand is intensely subdued, both distant and personal, inviting the willing viewer to be still.” –Elaine Sexton In 2014, Robert Bauer and Bronlyn Jones had a two-person exhibition with the gallery. Eleven years later, Krakow Witkin Gallery now presents a solo exhibition of Bauer's small landscapes in tempera and gouache, painted over the past five years. “These are like conjured memories ... If they were only about depiction they'd be insufficient. It's their retraction from facts that makes them about the persistence of vision,” writes William Jaeger about Bauer’s work that was included in a 2017 exhibition at Skidmore College’s Schick Art Gallery. Bauer paints with a keen attention to subtle detail through an exploration where he employs pencil notes, photographs, studies of other works sometimes of the same subject, and also more abstract memories of the time and place. Consistent with this layering is the artist's process of addition and subtraction. Bauer adds brushstrokes in a slow and steady process but just as carefully, he often sands and/or washes the painted surface so as to embed, subdue, and/or remove paint. The layering of sources and processes results in a balance of chance, choice, and control. Poet and critic John Yau writes, “The reticence of Bauer's paintings mixed with his sensitivity to tonality and light suggests that he slows time down in order to register its passing.” Robert Bauer was born in Iowa in 1942 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He moved to Boston in 1985 and currently lives in midcoast Maine. Bauer’s work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery. He is the recipient of three Massachusetts Cultural Council grants, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants in Painting, and he was a finalist in the 2006 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.  Bauer’s work is represented in public and private collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Harvard Art Museums. “The atmosphere of hushed reverie” –Elaine Sexton

"My ego is not satisfied to idle along with inspiration or put up a great fuss called “suffering.” It has to be subdued. The only way is isolation. In isolation there is no comparison no stimulation. Ego finally is quiet enough so that one can pay attention to other parts of the mind. Then drawing is possible." –Agnes Martin Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in solitude. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art, imbued with beauty, openness, and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971 by Robert Feldman of Parasol Press, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were the 30 silkscreens of crisp lines and grids that make up “On a Clear Day.” Upon completion of the project, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of the project and was the first museum to acquire the entire suite. In a 1973 review of the MoMA exhibition, Thomas Hess wrote, “[Agnes] Martin has become the object of a cult and, as if to back off from her admirers, has done a series of silkscreen prints, currently shown at the Museum of Modern Art. In these, she has stripped her image of all hand-quivers and fluttering variations to emphasize the mechanics of its linear structure. The basic schema is a square grid. The number of vertical and horizontal lines is different, so each square is filled with either thin or wide rectangles. Thus one work has nineteen horizontal lines and nine vertical ones, yielding squat, wide, tile-like rectangles. Another has nine horizontal lines and 23 vertical ones, with narrow, upright tiles. Other combinations include: 8-10, 8-2, 12-9, 19-12, 9-23, 6-23. Counting the lines in a Martin composition suggests the chiming quality of her work... In Martin’s paintings on canvas, these developments were accomplished with a refinement of touch which led many of her admirers to applaud her manual dexterity and sensitivity. Now she chooses to direct us to the bare bones of her art and expose the imaginative leaps that underlie her craft.” In her private writings, Martin affirms the balance of calculation and intuition in her compositions, stating, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles … When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” 35 years later, in 2008, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair & Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote, "Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its individual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.” “I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind—that grid … So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent.” –Agnes Martin

In her first exhibition with Krakow Witkin Gallery, Victoria Burge explores and extends the historical relationship between the Modernist grid and handwritten notation. Using found imagery in 19th and early 20th century diagrams and charts sourced from research libraries, Burge makes works that both transform and honor pre-existing visual codes and their makers. For works on paper such as Sterope or her Untitled slate objects, Burge begins with a coded textile pattern and lets the diagram serve as foundational inspiration, rather than as rule. She reimagines the weaving notations using typewriter keys or hand-drawn markings, transforming the patterns in such a way that would nullify them in their former context, rendering them indecipherable to a weaver (a line extended just a hair too far, a mismatched pair of symbols, or a point left idling in space). Within the mark making, imperfections such as an off-center circle or a not-quite-straight line hint at the human labor inherent in even the most formal of constructions.

Today, Sol LeWitt is equally known for his two- and three-dimensional works, but in the late 1940s, through about 1960, the artist focused on painting as well as drawing, and printmaking. By the mid-1960s, his paintings had transitioned through deeply impastoed paint, to paint on dimensional supports, to a focus on fully three-dimensional form. With this new-found focus, LeWitt began engaging skilled craftspeople to assist in the construction of his pieces (he called the works, “structures”). In order to communicate what he wanted, he drew fabrication diagrams using simple perspectival lines. Horizontal, vertical, and diagonal (in two directions) lines served LeWitt’s purpose of communication. Shortly after he started using this sort of diagram, he also began exploring drawing with these same four directions of lines (first on paper, then on walls) but now as the imagery with no external referents. With some time, he came to call this simplified imagery, “Lines in Four Directions.” The current exhibition focuses on early works made between 1968 and 1979 that speak to his exploration of “Lines in Four Directions” and that imagery’s relationship to concurrently-made three-dimensional works. Throughout the exhibition, works are arranged so as to provide both context and counterpoint for each piece. Several examples are below: A three-dimensional 1979 metal open cube structure has a grid of 3×3 cubes within it, so that it makes not just the 27 individual cubes but one larger overall cube, as well. Depending upon how one views the piece, one sees a dynamic arrangement of lines in four directions in space. Paired with this work, a 1971 etching consists of a dense field made entirely from lines in four directions. While the etching exists in two dimensions and the cube in three, the aesthetic and the exploration are deeply entwined. A surprising work to be included in a solo exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s is an 1887 collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s series of photographs, breaking down the stages of human motion from multiple equally-important vantage points, informs the grids of LeWitt’s works, which utilize Muybridge’s scientific method for LeWitt’s formally-reduced investigations. LeWitt gave this particular example of Muybridge’s work to a friend and colleague in a frame of his own making. Flanking this piece are two iconic works of LeWitt’s. A 1974 single open cube (defined by the 12 edges of a cube, rendered in metal that has been painted white) stands to the left of the Muybridge. To the right is a 1969 drawing, “Four Varieties of Line Direction.” Both works speak to LeWitt’s reductivist inclination. For the cube, while it initially appears simple, there are infinite ways to experience the defining border lines as well as what the cube “frames” through it. For the 1969 drawing, as described above, what once had been used merely as tools to describe something else, have become the focus of the exploration and now stand as an elegant drawing of quadrants of four different “sets” of parallel lines where the balance between the hand-drawn and the ordered, along with the contrast between the different directions of the lines, co-exist and provide quiet tension. These juxtapositions are arranged in honor of LeWitt’s own methodology of presentation. “Straight Lines in Four Directions & All Their Possible Combinations,” a suite of etchings from 1973, exemplifies this gesture. Over fifteen sheets of paper, the artist presents lines in four directions and (and per the title of the work) all their combinations. The sixteenth sheet (the “colophon”) provides a diagram of the 15 in their proper arrangement and in the space of the 16th, places the text describing the project, so that when one hangs the work as illustrated on the 16th sheet, there is a set of nesting “images” where each smaller version is, in a way, equal to the larger one (the overall project is the same as the image of the 15 arranged on the 16th sheet, the text on the 16th sheet is equal to the entire project, etc.). With all of these comparisons, differences, and relationships, it becomes clear that a key to an understanding of LeWitt’s work is his sense of equality. Three-dimensional and two-dimensional, open and closed, dense and sparse, big and small, imagery and text, idea and object, etc. were treated by LeWitt as equally significant. This exhibition presents the audience an opportunity to celebrate the eye and mind with which LeWitt approached life.

“I want people to see these works as I see them and I try to, without hitting people over the head, allow them to think … and either make sense of it or not.” (Fred Wilson) Fred Wilson (b. 1954, Bronx, New York) has long investigated the meanings of symbols and objects as part of his multidisciplinary, research-based practice. Through alteration, juxtaposition, decontextualization, and selection, among other actions, the artist provides opportunities for new interpretations and associations that reframe social and historical narratives. Working across sculpture, painting, photography, collage, printmaking, and installation, Wilson imbues reclaimed images and objects with personal and historical importance. Legacies of colonialism and erasures of Blackness in Western European art are often the subject in his exchanges with these objects of different geographic and temporal origins. For the current exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery, an early sculpture is juxtaposed with a rare, complete suite of photogravures to show both the depth and breadth of the artist's visual and intellectual explorations. For "Art World" (1994), Wilson has taken a found globe and selectively removed Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. Wilson has stated, "At this point I had sort of shifted it because it was really about that time and that the art world was only the United States and Europe, and all these other places were just not there." The art, though, is not just highlighting the absence, but what happens to the globe with that absence. The physical changes to the found object reveal to the viewer a thin structure supporting an incomplete, warped shape that one can see through but can no longer rotate smoothly. These are changes to the object that are both physical alterations and also serve as lenses with which to see the metaphorical ramifications of a limited "art world." "THE MASTER PLAN or In Between the Big Bang and Modern Art is the Restroom" (2004-2009) consists of 22 photogravures where Wilson has employed specific gallery floorplans from visitor orientation maps of eighteen European and North American museums of anthropology, art, cultural or natural history. Omitted from these maps are all but a few words and icons of collection care terminology or visitor services signage. Displayed as an immersive installation of evocative but anonymous abstract forms, a viewer can explore one's own "master narrative" by comparing one plan or symbol usage to the next. The subtitle, "In Between the Big Bang and Modern Art is the Restroom" evokes an evolutionary perspective, the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, still embodied today in the organization of materials cared for by Western museums, supported in most cases by a hierarchically distributed space division. Hopefully, while the removal of information leaves room for assumptions, indicators highlighted by the artist enable a clearer path of thinking. Wilson recalls that, at the beginning of his career, "working simultaneously in the educational department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Craft Museum made me wonder about how the environment in which cultural production is placed affects the way the viewer feels about the artwork and the artist who made these things." The artist’s early work was directed at marginalized histories, exploring how models of categorization, collecting, and display exemplify fraught ideologies and power relations inscribed into the fabric of institutions. His groundbreaking and historically significant exhibition "Mining the Museum" (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, radically altered the landscape of museum exhibition narratives. As interventions, or “mining,” of the museum’s archive, Wilson re-presented its materials to make visible hidden structures built into the museum system, and American Society as a whole. Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice and how it has changed over time, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands: “I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.” His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. While appropriating curatorial methods and strategies, Wilson maintains his subjective view of the museum environment and the works he presents. He questions (and forces the viewer to question) how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display—and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express.

The current exhibition, “Sherrie Levine, Walker Evans, the Library of Congress, and others: The Burroughs Family (a collection)” took 88 years to come together. Below is a recounting of how and why it was assembled: In June of 1936, Walker Evans traveled to Alabama with writer James Agee on an assignment for Fortune magazine to produce a new installment in a series of articles on the Depression and its effect on what the magazine considered “average” Americans and specifically for this assignment, sharecroppers. To do this, Evans took a leave from the Resettlement Administration (which was soon succeeded by the Farm Services Administration) where he was working, with the agreement that the negatives would become property of the US Government. While Fortune declined to print their article, Agee and Evans continued the project, ultimately publishing the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which Evans’s photographs prefaced Agee’s text. In Alabama, over eight weeks, Agee and Evans had become familiar with three families of farmers in Hale County: the Fields, the Tingles, and the Burroughs. The writer and the photographer embedded themselves in the lives of these families, sharing their day-to-day experiences. Evans made photographs of the families, their homes, and their ways of life. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee notes that the Burroughs’ home, despite appearances, was only eight years old when the pictures were made. In addition to farmland and housing, Floyd Burroughs also leased farm equipment and, as payment, surrendered half his harvest to his landlord. He regularly ended the year in debt. Evans’ photographs neither romanticized nor criticized their subjects, they presented them. In 1981, 45 years after Evans photographed these families, Sherrie Levine re-photographed reproductions of Evans’ work straight out of a book for a project she titled “After Walker Evans.” Evans was one of several male “artist hero” of classical Modernism that Levine had chosen to reproduce work by as a way of questioning traditional notions of the male artist as authority and/or genius. Levine’s use of the prefix “After” in her title acknowledged the chronological precedent of Evans while also referring to the widely accepted practice in the history of art of making copies “after” established masterpieces. By claiming these existing photographs as her own, as well as titling them as she did, Levine asked questions about authenticity, ownership, and originality, as well as how these aspects have traditionally been the basis for valuing works of art. Levine has stated, “The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts: their relationship to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed." The use of the word, “ghost” by Levine makes sense for her own work and it also resonates for Evans’ approach and the “lives” of the negatives from the Let Us Now Praise Famous Men series as, over the course of Evans’ life, the negatives had been used to make prints by Evans and by his associates, as well as by the Library of Congress itself (the Federal organization that manages the FSA holdings and owns the negatives). The definitions of the words “authentic,” “original,” and “vintage” are murky when it comes to these works. Similarly, over the years, Levine had re-printed some of the images from “After Walker Evans” in various sizes (from approximately 3 x 5 inches to 9 x 13 inches). At larger sizes, one sees the quality of the reproduction being captured as much as the image of the Burroughs family, themselves. The 1981 prints were praised as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority and a critique of the commodification of art. Little comment has been made, specifically, about the various prints Levine has made since 1981. With this sort of grey-zone being seemingly significant for Levine’s practice and also for the lives of Evans’ works, a presentation fully engaging the “ghosts” seems an appropriate way to present both artists’ works together. Central in the presentation is Evans’ own print, “Burroughs Family, Hale County, Alabama,” (the image of the entire family, standing against an exterior wall of the family home). Above that is Levine’s “After Walker Evans: 1,” (the image of most of Floyd Burroughs and his neighbor’s children standing against/near a porch post). Surrounding these two “original” photographs are other photos, all different images of the Burroughs, all from Evans’ negatives. The exhibition, as a whole, has vintage prints by Evans and by associates, and vintage prints by the anonymous printers at the Library of Congress. Also on exhibition are a number of 2024 digital prints that come directly from scans of the original negatives and were recently printed by the Library of Congress. Furthermore, also included in the exhibition is the original 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It first came to publication with 30 images by Evans in 1941 and was met with little acclaim. It was reissued in 1960 (now with 61 images) and has since become a “classic” of American literature. Since that time, the book has been reprinted numerous times (with selective editing and re-sizing of the various images). Nine versions of the book are on display and available for perusing. As a whole, the exhibition hopes to honor both Levine and Evans, as well as the numerous other people who have played significant rolls in these projects (Agee, the Burroughs, Library of Congress, and many others), and also attempts to bring forth the problematics of both artists’ practices so that they can be appreciated. (The group of books and photographs are being kept together and sold as one collection.)

Join us for the public opening reception on Saturday, June 15th, 2024 from 3pm - 5pm

Join us for an opening reception with the artist on April 20, 2024, 3pm - 5pm