Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter and GRIMM are pleased to present Volker Hüller: Special Online Presentation from June 17 - July 10, 2020. This collaborative project features etchings and mixed media paintings by the German-born multidisciplinary artist whose works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY (US); The Dallas Museum of Art, TX (US); and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (IL), among others. Volker Hüller's (b. 1976, Forchheim, DE) works reveal scenes from the artist’s personal life as well as narratives of misadventure and mythology, brought together in dialogue with bold abstraction. Selected works - including new works on paper can be viewed online at vandorenwaxter.com, grimmgallery.com, and the gallery’s Artsy and Artnet pages. Across material and techniques, Volker Hüller utilizes a precision of texture and line-making to create challenging allegories of art history & myth. A skilled draftsman, this collection of etchings and mixed-media paintings highlight the artist’s use of narrative and fallacy as vehicles for the re-exploration of visual history. For Hüller, the use of linework across mediums doubles as a formal concern as well as a conceptual model from which a genealogy of visual expression can take shape. The use of formal line coalesces with a symbolic throughline of historical styles, art history’s various expressions becoming the allegory depicted in Hüller’s work. In Hüller’s paintings, each canvas is intricately layered with accumulations of collaged canvas, sheets of paper, dried organic material, stones and other mixed media. There is a three-dimensional surface which adds to the physical linework of the paint application, the whole of the painting’s texture in flux. Often painting in monochrome, Hüller forces a hyper-focus on linear qualities, outlines and shadows. The obscuring of the figurative subjects’ legibility allows room for the realm of psychic space, where the artist’s exploration of authentic expression and representation comes forward. Where the artist’s paintings belie their 3-dimensional surfaces, Hüller’s etchings find form in their scratchy, elusive movement. Delicate lines construct hybrid figures at conflict with any narrative of inner or outer reality. The etched forms, layered with watercolor and Shellac, appear in a collage-like quality, like Hüller’s paintings, experimenting with fragments and rhythms to keep the image field open. Included in this online presentation are five new etchings, highlighting narrative forms yet, as in the artist’s signature style, ambivalence persists. Trees form a subliminal anchor to the natural world across these recent works, and challenge the existence of Hüller’s tragic figures, who are possibly found buried, hanging, and likely met with death. Here, tragedy and mythology form an inseparable connection to Hüller’s practice. Much like the allegory of the centaur, seen in Dead Myth (2020), Hüller’s compressed worlds are filled with uncanny symbols of humanity’s unbridled, primitive subconscious preserved through narrative forms like the history of art. Focusing on the interconnection between the human body and allegory, Hüller’s loaded ethings expose a primal and permanent state of reality, revealing the possibility that violence and barbarism are hallmarks of our cultural history. Throughout his practice, Hüller ultimately reveals that figuration itself, and its allegorical counterparts, are not stable subjects from which an ideological paradigm of understanding might be possible. Hüller’s figures, in fact, symbolize a crisis of representation itself: the refusal to depict a clear-cut story of any kind is an attempt to oppose the definition of meaning that traditional Apollonian law imposes. Figuration at the extremities of existence can simply not be reduced within the framework of conventional hermeneutics. Hüller’s construction and deconstruction of images is a kaleidoscopic procedure; an assembly of present and past visual codes, changing mythical and historical fragments into an entirely new way of seeing.

“A successful painting has to have something of you and your experience within it.” —Richard Diebenkorn Van Doren Waxter is very pleased to announce Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1946-1952, an exhibition of rarely seen early paintings and drawings made by the distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker on view at 23 East 73rd Street from March 19 to May 9, 2020. The artist has been represented exclusively by the gallery since 1999, and this historical exhibition at its 1907 townhouse devoted to the artist’s stylistic and technical origins in oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, crayon, and collage includes work that has never been shown in the northeastern United States but which was recently exhibited in Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 (2017-2019), organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA. The presentation is accompanied by an illustrated exhibition catalogue containing a scholarly text adapted from the Beginnings essay by Crocker Art Museum Associate Director and Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, who asserts that Richard Diebenkorn is “the greatest artist California has yet produced.” A young Richard Diebenkorn was influenced by his teachers and mentors, such as the painter David Park, as well as by artists such as Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, and William Baziotes. The works on view evidence the artist’s journey of self-discovery. Oil paintings produced in Sausalito, California during the late 1940s with their dark, angular forms, invoke both Surrealism and the fractured planes of Cubism. Untitled (c. 1947) and Untitled (c. 1948), both reveal stylizations that were on view in the artist’s first museum exhibition at the age of 26, Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn (1948) at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In the essay adapted exclusively for the gallery presentation, Shields remarks that the artist made these works feel alive by avoiding “the natural grace of his line and brushwork, and his easily balanced compositions” and instead used his brush “to scrub on pigment that at times looked messy or retained chunky deposits.” During this time, the artist, “whose evolution was extraordinarily rapid,” Shields enthuses, experimented with inexpensive materials such as watercolor, crayon, and collage in a small scale which granted Diebenkorn the luxury, the artist said, of “a kind of tryout or rehearsal of general possibilities.” Untitled (c. 1946) is a bright and luminous pasted paper, construction paper, and pasted cardboard work of overlapping forms and a single floating yellow orb. A highly appealing and unusual work for the artist, its buoyant pink palette is an exception to the predominate works in the exhibition that illustrate as Shields posits, the artist’s battle against “the refined, gracious, and elegant.” Affecting works made in the early 1950s, of “discordant hues… seemingly random forms and energetically meandering lines,” according to Shields, were produced during the artist’s Albuquerque and Urbana periods and before his switch to figuration. A 1952 oil on canvas is a significantly scaled horizontal work measuring nearly four feet across consisting of reds and blacks and repeating edge to edge forms recalling the mesas of western New Mexico. A year prior, Diebenkorn took his first commercial airplane flight, traveling from New Mexico to San Francisco, which left the young artist “absolutely knocked out and thrilled, really taken,” as he enthused in a conversation at the time with Gerald Nordland, the late art historian and curator. Untitled (Albuquerque), an oil made in 1951 and measuring 56 ½ x 41 ½ inches, is characterized by calligraphic forms, cut-out shapes, and “edifying layers…visible revisions” that Shields asserts would become a signature part of his subsequent and acclaimed epic Ocean Park works. Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1946-1952 will be accompanied by a special presentation of the artist’s “wartime” work loaned by Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. These representational drawings, to be installed on the third floor of the gallery, were made during the artist’s military service from 1943 to 1945, a period when he produced sketches and watercolors of soldiers. “It was a happy yet terrifying time,” Shields writes, “as Diebenkorn knew he was to be sent behind enemy lines”—the artist was honorably discharged after the surrender of Japan. A moody 1945 work features its subject rendered in dense, rich ink atop a bright sheet; in another, a young Diebenkorn gazes downward in a graphite on paper (1943) self-portrait striking for its direct likeness and immediacy. About the artist Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922. He attended Stanford University from 1940 to 1943 and was awarded his Bachelor of Arts in 1949. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley in 1943 and attended California School of Fine Arts in 1946. He received his Master of Arts from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. The artist’s earliest abstractions were made while the artist lived in Sausalito, California (1946–1949), Albuquerque (1950–1952) and Urbana, Illinois (1952–1953). In 1953 he moved to Berkeley, continuing his work in abstraction. The year 1955 marks the beginning of a period of more than a decade that the artist worked from direct observation making figurative works from a model, along with still lifes, landscapes, and interiors. From 1966 to 1988 he lived in Santa Monica, taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1973, and began his Ocean Park cycle in 1967. He moved to Healdsburg, California in 1988 where he worked exclusively on drawings and prints until his death in 1993. Recent and significant exhibitions include Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed (2015–2016), Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Matisse/Diebenkorn (2016–2017), organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 (2017–2019), organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; traveled to David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland. In 2016, the artist was the subject of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press), the definitive resource of the artist’s sketches; drawings; paintings on paper, board, canvas; and sculptural objects.

Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1946-1952 will be accompanied by a special presentation of the artist’s “wartime” work loaned by Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. These representational drawings, to be installed on the third floor of the gallery, were made during the artist’s military service from 1943 to 1945, a period when he produced sketches and watercolors of soldiers. “It was a happy yet terrifying time,” Shields writes, “as Diebenkorn knew he was to be sent behind enemy lines”—the artist was honorably discharged after the surrender of Japan. A moody 1945 work features its subject rendered in dense, rich ink atop a bright sheet; in another, a young Diebenkorn gazes downward in a graphite on paper (1943) self-portrait striking for its direct likeness and immediacy. A loan exhibition from a Private Collection and The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation.

Two-venue exhibition in collaboration with CHART