New Publication: Tworkov, Towards Nirvana
$40.00
Published on the occasion of the following exhibitions
Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s
January 14-March 20, 2021
VAN DOREN WAXTER
23 East 73rd Street, New York NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com
Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s
February 6-May 1, 2021
MINUS SPACE
16 Main Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
www.minusspace.com
ISBN: 978-1-7325933-3-6
Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew
While history has pinned Tworkov to a period of the 50s, he broke away from the Abstract Expressionist movement at the very height of his own success. Seen by many as radical,[i] the debut of his new monochromatic paintings at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in Detroit in April 1969, was the arrival of an art less emotive, more stark, more Spartan. “I wanted to get away from the extremely subjective focus of Abstract-Expressionist painting.” Tworkov said, “I am tired of the artist’s agonies […] I wanted something outside myself, something less subjective.”[ii]
Excerpt from Of the Stark and the Spartan: Tworkov in the 70s written by Jason Andrew:
This radical change, years in the making, was consistent with Tworkov’s thoughtfulness and courage and found connections with the generation of artists nearly forty years his younger, which engaged Tworkov at Yale. He recognized their interest in seriality, and shared in their methods to skirt expressiveness and emotion. This generation included Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Bernstein, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Howardena Pindell, Richard Serra and William T. Williams to name a few.
His tenure at Yale coincided this stylistic shift toward diagrammatic configurations spurred by a renewed interest in geometry and mathematics. Using the rectangle as a measurement tool and foundation of his compositions, Tworkov moved away from any reliance on automatism and turned to a methodical creative process. In his words: “I soon arrived at an elementary system of measurements implicit in the geometry of the rectangle which became the basis for simple images that I had deliberately given a somewhat illusionistic cast.”[iii] While this system did not exclude spontaneity and fresh invention, it did impose an element of the mechanical and calculated. And it was this decisively imposed predictability that would undo decades of painting that for Tworkov, history still most remembers.
When these new structured paintings debuted in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, curator Marcia Tucker championed the work:
These pictures—sensuous, personal, endowed with extraordinary clarity and formal intelligence—testify to the energy and timeliness of an artist who has, for over forty years, chosen the path of most resistance in order to challenge his own vision and ours.[iv]
[i] “Tworkov: Radical Pro,” was the title of an Art News article written by Louis Finkelstein and published in April 1964.
[ii] Tworkov, Jack. "On My Outlook as a Painter: A Memoir." Leonardo, International Journal of the Contemporary Artist 7: 2 (Spring 1974), 116.
[iii] Tworkov in Leonardo, 116.
[iv] Tucker, Marcia in Jack Tworkov: Recent Paintings, February 5–March 14, 1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibition brochure.
