Case Study: An Indonesian Theme Park Must Destroy Its Knockoff of Chris Burden’s ‘Urban Light’ After Losing a Suit Brought by the Artist’s Estate

Visitors at Chris Burden's Urban Light installation at LACMA. Photo ©Chris Burden/licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

by Sarah Cascone

An Indonesian selfie paradise has been ordered to destroy one of its most popular attractions due to a copyright violation. The offending photo op, Love Light, appears to be a ripoff of Urban Light (2008), the famed public art installation by the late artist Chris Burden.

The Indonesian Commercial Court at the Central Jakarta District Court agreed with that analysis, siding with the Burden estate in its lawsuit against Rabbit Town. The tourist attraction on the island of West Java, in the city of Bandung, has 30 days to remove the infringing artwork and issue a public apology to the estate.

“This is a landmark case for the Indonesian court system, and a win for all artists globally,” Yayoi Shionoiri, the executive director of the Burden estate, told Artnet News in an email. “We believe this decision sets a precedent that artist rights can be protected internationally through the application of the copyright framework.”

Rabbit Town did not respond to inquiries from Artnet News, but the park’s Instagram account was still posting photographs of the infringing work as recently as yesterday, calling it “our icon.”

The original Burden installation greets visitors at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

AES Collaborates with Robert Moskowitz Studio to Design and Launch a New Website

Building on the friendship and the near 20 year relationship between co-founder Jason Andrew and the artist Robert Moskowitz, Artist Estate Studio, LLC, is pleased to announce the launch of a website for the artist’s studio. The website features signature works from the artist's now six decade career as well as extensive biographical information, exhibition history and bibliography.

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RobertMoskowitz.org →

Robert Moskowitz (b. 1935) has been described as a significant link between the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School and New Image painters of the 1970s.

“Bob’s style is consistent in conversations as it is in the work; a variety of reflective statements on his personal life; an internal balancing, the method of a sensitive man whose gift is to adapt statements specifically about himself in terms that relate to a larger means.” —Michael Hurson

Moskowitz first gained recognition exhibiting at the Leo Castelli Gallery in the early 1960s. His inclusion in the historic exhibition Art of The Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art in 1961, signaled his arrival into the contemporary discourse of the time. His work was featured in New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, where together with works by Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Hurson, Neil Jenney, and Susan Rothenberg, Moskowitz’s pared-down often silhouetted images marked a resurgence of figurative painting in the late 1970s.

Awards include John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (‘67), New York State Council on the Arts Grant (‘73), National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship (‘75). Teaching positions include Maryland Insitute College of Art, Baltimore (‘64-’73), School of Visual Arts, New York (‘69-71), Yale Norfolk Summer School (‘67,’69). Visiting Artist appointments include Art Institute of Chicago (‘74), Ohio State University (‘75). In 2001, Moskowitz was Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

In 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden mounted a major retrospective of the artist’s work, which traveled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Over the course of his six-decade career, Moskowitz has focused on a variety of images, from well-known art historical sources to more commonplace things like birds, icebergs, and buildings, all executed against stark, monochromatic backgrounds.  Using symbolism, metaphor, and repetition, the artist’s images offer arresting images of timelessness—a teetering balance between recognition and abstraction.

Case Study: Judy Chicago Prepares to Release Her Autobiography

Judy Chicago Reflects on What It Takes to Preserve an Artistic Legacy

At 81, Chicago’s opportunities continue to multiply.

by Arden Fanning Andrews

In these turbulent times, creativity and empathy are more necessary than ever to bridge divides and find solutions. Artnet News’s Art and Empathy Project is an ongoing investigation into how the art world can help enhance emotional intelligence, drawing insights and inspiration from creatives, thought leaders, and great works of art.

It’s noon mountain time, and Judy Chicago is in her kitchen. “She makes the best coffee,” her studio manager says while positioning the camera toward the sunroom sofa bathed in Belen, New Mexico light.

Coming into frame and taking a seat, Chicago wears a pink hoodie over a t-shirt with “It’s A Judy Thing (You Wouldn’t Understand)” emblazoned across the front. At home, the artist, educator, author, and self-described humanist shares 7,000 square feet with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, and her team. “Downstairs is all commercial,” she explains. “Studio, office, storage.”

Photo info published on ArtNet.com: Judy Chicago, 2020. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY.

Art, Money & Law: Notes on the Clyfford Still Estate

View of the exhibition "Clyfford Still: Paintings," 1979, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Ben Heller

Ten years after Still’s death, the disposition of his estate remains unresolved. Herewith some speculations on the future of this huge cache of important work.

When I expose a painting I would have it say, “Here am I; this is my presence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive, naked, unafraid…“
—Clyfford Still, May 1951

A great joy surges through me when I work. … With tense slashes and few thrusts the beautiful white fields receive their color and the work is finished in a few minutes. … And as the blues or reds or blacks leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry their power infinitely beyond the bounds of the limitating field, I move with them. … Only they are complete too soon, and I must quickly move on to another to keep the spirit alive and unburdened by the labor my Puritan reflexes tell me must be the cost of any joy.
—Clyfford Still, February 1956

Clyfford Still, one of the great painters of the Abstract Expressionist period, died in 1980 at the age of 75. He left an art estate whose size and character are unique in our time. The estate and the way it is being handled raise important issues which have troubled us in the past and will continue to trouble us in the future. We wonder: What are the different rights of the deceased, the heirs, and the public in that estate? What is the best way to dispose of so major an art estate?

Virtual Event | What is Legacy Planning?

Our friends at the R.B. Kitaj Studio Project have invited us to join them in a discussion.

Join us Thurs, Feb 25 at 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT

Organized & moderated by Tracy Bartley

Director of the R.B. Kitaj Studio Project

Panelists:

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*After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Julia Schwartz

Director of Administration and Development
for the Artists' Legacy Foundation

Julia Schwartz facilitates the Foundation's awards and outreach programs. She works with nominators, jurors, and the Foundation's board to administer the Artist Award. She also manages educational programs including the Legacy Discussion Group, in which specialists give free lectures on organizing artwork, maintaining collections, and making long-term plans for creative legacies. The Foundation acts as a resource for artists interested in learning more about estate planning and archiving. Schwartz received a Bachelor of Science in design at UC Davis, and has worked as a consultant to artists and arts nonprofits since 2005.

Jason Andrew

Founding Partner of the Artist Estate Studio, LLC

Jason Andrew is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. Specializing in the field of Post War American Art, Mr. Andrew is the Curator/Manager of the Estate of Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov. Since this appointment in 2002, he has organized countless exhibitions and lectured extensively on the artist and his contemporaries including organizing the first retrospective of the artist’s work in New York City at the UBS Art Gallery in 2009. Mr. Andrew has published extensively on the artist and his contemporaries and is currently editing the catalogue raisonné of works by Jack Tworkov. In 2016, Andrew was made Head of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray.

Julia Gleich

Founding Partner of the Artist Estate Studio, LLC

Julia Gleich is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004, Ms. Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. Following on from this success, she has joined forces with Jason to become a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC.

Case Study: The Enormous Seven-Part Catalogue Raisonné on Pioneering Spiritual Abstractionist Hilma af Klint Is Finally Being Published

Hilma af Klint, Childhood Group IV (1907). Photo courtesy of Bokförlaget Stolpe/Artbook | DAP.

By Sarah Cascone

When the Guggenheim Museum was planning its 2018 retrospective on Hilma af Klint, the Swedish artist was not exactly a household name. When Klint died in 1944, she left behind a will that precluded her work from being publicly shown for decades.

But the exhibition, showcasing Klint’s visionary abstractions—which she created five years before what is widely considered the birth of abstract art and the Modernist movement—became a runaway hit, attracting more than 600,000 visitors, an institutional record.

The catalogue begins with the automatic spiritual sketches Klint created as part of the Five, a group of women who sought to contact the dead under the guidance of a medium during séances. It goes on to present the ambitious, large-scale abstract works that she made at the behest of one of her spirit guides, which were to be displayed in a circular temple—and the 10 small sketchbooks she used to illustrate the project when she wanted to share it with others during her travels.

Individual volumes are priced at $50 each, or the full clothbound set can be pre-ordered for $350, with an expected ship date of late November. The catalogue was designed by Patric Leo and includes texts by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist.

Exhibition News: "Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s" opens at Minus Space

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Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) Nine Sketches, 1975, Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 13 1/4 x 13 1/2 in (33.7 x 33.7 cm) [CR 186]
© 2021 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Jack Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s

February 6-May 1, 2021

MINUS SPACE

16 Main Street, Suite A
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.minusspace.com

Special COVID Hours: Saturdays, 11am-5pm + by appointment
DUMBO | corner of Main + Water
A or C to High Street | F to York Street | 2 or 3 to Clark Street

Brooklyn, NY — MINUS SPACE is honored to present the survey exhibition Jack Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s. Organized in collaboration with the Estate of Jack Tworkov, Van Doren Waxter the exhibition presents two dozen works on paper spanning the years 1970-1981, many of which are presented to the public for the very first time.

Renowned painter Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was at the forefront of American modernism for seven decades. He forged a disciplined painting practice through ever-evolving methods, materials, and formats resulting in a singular artistic vision which continues to be avidly discussed and celebrated today. Starting in the mid to late-1960s, Tworkov’s earlier exuberant, gestural abstraction began to evolve into an increasingly reductive and analytical one. He started to organize his new paintings and accompanying drawings around the grid format and to utilize orthogonal lines, geometric shapes, and a limited color palette. Tworkov’s previously animated brushstrokes transformed into a kind of repeating hashmark that formed shimmering, transparent patterns.

Tworkov’s striking works on paper produced during the 1970s reveal and document the breadth of this experimentation during this critical transition in his late work. On view in the exhibition are a broad array of drawings from this period which range in approach from quick sketches for eventual paintings – sometimes with up to twelve separate studies ganged up a single page – to larger, highly-refined charcoal drawings on paper.

The artist utilized a noteworthy array of drafting materials in these works including graphite, pencil, colored pencil, and charcoal on a variety of supports, such as paper, translucent vellum, and graph paper. With these materials Tworkov explored a broad new visual vocabulary of radiating lines, checkered grids, shifting architectural planes, and translucent triangular and quadrilateral shapes, often dynamically depicted as if balanced on a single corner. Of particular note, the exhibition features ten works from his rigorous, rule-based Knight Series, which were informed by the various L-shaped movements a knight piece could potentially make across the checkered plane of a chessboard. The unpredictable, stepped lines added an inventive element resembling a constellation into the composition of his drawings.

The exhibition will also present one of Tworkov’s contemporaneous, large-format paintings entitled Q2-76 #1 (1976, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 inches), as well as the accompanying study on graph paper. A concurrent exhibition of the artist’s geometric paintings from this period entitled Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s will also be on view at Van Doren Waxter, 23 E. 73rd Street, New York, NY, from January 14 – March 20, 2021. 

For further information about Jack Tworkov and available artworks, please contact the gallery. Available works can also be viewed on our new web site, as well as on our Artsy page: www.artsy.net/minus-space.

Jack Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s

The eight paintings and seven drawings that comprise Towards Nirvana/ Works from the 70s all date from an important decade for Jack Tworkov (1900–1982). The 1970s saw a solo show at the Whitney Museum curated by Marcia Tucker (1971), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1974) (presented to the artist by artist and dealer Betty Parsons), and a career survey at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (1979) which toured the UK. Significantly, Tworkov had undertaken changes to his painting, moving away from the more obviously gestural spontaneity that marked his development in Abstract Expressionism in New York. Trial and error evolved into a meditative, analytical approach for which Tworkov also developed a new medium of oil pigment mixed with Lucite (a synthetic organic compound) thinned with turpentine. This method emphasized the quality, particularity, and viscosity of his brush mark—a mark he would eventually set over a mathematically calculated pencil grid. The mark as a discreet, repeated element remained a constant focus throughout Twrorkov’s long career.

Jack Tworkov, OP-Q2-77-3.5.8 Series, 1977. Oil on paper, 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy the Jack Tworkov Estate and Van Doren Waxter. © 2021 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In his essay, “On My Outlook as a Painter: A Memoir” (1974), originally published in Leonardo: International Journal of the Contemporary Artist, Tworkov spoke of a “ruling middle-class… [that] now preens itself as the patron and advocate of every outrage-as-innovation. It has coopted bohemia and captured its style and established it as typically bourgeois.” He continued, bemoaning “the vulgarization of life and politics for which the same class is to be held responsible.” The turn away from a devalued, expressionist abstraction towards an austere, conceptual, and rigorous painting, though no less sensual, reflected Tworkov’s observations on and experiences of the wider world—not simply his formal innovation.

Idling II (1970) is a vertical painting, with a black margin abutting the sides of a descending sequence of varying grey brush marks. The paint runs as the narrow brush marks are applied with an even rhythm. The paint weaves and interlaces unpredictably between control and accident—open within measure, a freedom within chosen restraints. There is an aliveness to the marks made by the thinned paint after it leaves the brush and encounters gravity, moving sideways, creating angled curves, or more or less flowing directly downward. The field of modulated color is meditative, and full of incident, held between the dark vertical boundaries that enable the field to be concentrated, rather than expanded as an otherwise all-over monochrome might. The specificity of the painting qua painting is as unforced as it is intense.

Video | Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape

This virtual event took place on Wednesday, January 6 at 12pm EST

Presented by the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Lecture by Jason Andrew with Julia K. Gleich
Introduced by Rachel Stern, Exe Dir of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York

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Supplemental information (click to download):

“Ford Madox Ford and Janice Biala,” by Jason Andrew, PN Review, July-August 2008
This article discussed the first meeting and subsequent life of English novelist Ford Madox Ford and American painter Janice Biala.

“No more Parades End,” by Sara Haslam, Times Literary Supplement, June 2018
This article discusses Ford Madox Ford’s last library and what it tell us about ‘the Tietjens saga.”

Have a question or comment about this lecture?

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About this Event

Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York.

Her arrival in Paris in 1930 from New York City marked the beginning of an extraordinary life: one full of adventure, a passion for literature, and an appetite for art. On that fateful trip she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford shared with her all he knew and introduced her to the many artists forging a new Modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein among others. Biala became Ford’s most fierce advocate remaining devoted to him, at his side, until his death in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939. Biala’s commitment to Ford did not soften at his death.

In this lecture, Jason Andrew shares his research and insight into Biala’s harrowing effort to traveled back to the South of France, which was in Mussolini’s crosshairs, to make the daring rescue of Ford’s manuscripts and library, just as war would consume all of Europe. Joining Andrew in this presentation is choreographer Julia K. Gleich, who will bring voice to the letters of Janice Biala.

Virtual Event | Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape

Biala (1903-2000) “June Femme,” c.1933, Oil on panel, 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 in (66 x 55.9 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala © Estate of Janice Biala / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

January 6, 2021 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Free

Lecture by
Jason Andrew, Independent Scholar, Curator and Producer in New York

with
Julia Gleich, Choreographer

Introduced by
Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York

Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York.

Her arrival in Paris in 1930 from New York City marked the beginning of an extraordinary life: one full of adventure, a passion for literature, and an appetite for art. On that fateful trip she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford shared with her all he knew and introduced her to the many artists forging a new Modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein among others. Biala became Ford’s most fierce advocate remaining devoted to him, at his side, until his death in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939.

Biala’s commitment to Ford did not soften at his death. In this lecture, Jason Andrew shares his research and insight into Biala’s harrowing effort to traveled back to the South of France, which was in Mussolini’s crosshairs, to make the daring rescue of Ford’s manuscripts and library, just as war would consume all of Europe. Joining Andrew in this presentation is choreographer Julia K. Gleich, who will bring voice to the letters of Janice Biala.

Jason Andrew 

is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. He is the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio LLC, the entity that represents the estates of Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and Elizabeth Murray among others. He has written, lectured, and curated extensively on the life and art of Janice Biala and her contemporaries including a retrospective of the artist’s work at Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2018, as an exhibition focused on Biala’s work 1952-1962 on view at McCormick Gallery, Chicago through January 2021.

Julia K Gleich

is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA from the University of Utah. In 2004, Julia Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. She then became a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC. Ms. Gleich is the founder and Artistic Director of Gleich Dances, which has received critical notice in The New York Times, DanceInforma, DanceInsider, Village Voice, The New Criterion, The Brooklyn Rail, among others.

The event is part of our monthly series
Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression, which is generously sponsored by Allianz Partners.
Future events and the recordings of past events can be found HERE.

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

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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]

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[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.

New Publication: Biala: Intimacy & Exile

$20

Published on the occasion of Biala: Intimacy & Exile: paintings 1952-1962
Organized in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala at McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL, November 7, 2020-January 9, 2021

Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Thomas McCormick with Arno Pro typeface

Published by McCormick Gallery, LLC, and TMG Projects
Printed by Permanent Printing, Ltd.
32 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm

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Excerpt:

Biala chose subject matter over brute expression. Her paintings derive the time-honored triumvirate of still-life, landscape, and portraiture, and yet she approached these themes through an uncommon significance defined through a painterliness of gesture and color in calculated rhythm. Critic Michael Brenson aptly described her as “a blend of intimacy and exile.”[i]

[i] Brenson, Michael. “Biala at Kouros Gallery,” The New York Times, Friday, April 6, 1990.

Case Study (via Artnet.com): How Does Jenny Holzer Get the Rights for All the Texts She Uses in Her Artwork?

A woman watches Jenny Holzer's projection mapping creation entitled "For Bilbao" on the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum's facade on March 21, 2019. (Photo by ANDER GILLENEA / AFP via Getty Images)

I’m enthralled with Jenny Holzer’s new app, which allows you to recreate one of those pieces where she projects words onto buildings. (In this case, the text comes from great authors and thinkers, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Plato.) This iteration originated at the campus of the University of Chicago, but is now available around the world. My question is: How does she get the rights to all those words? 

Jenny Holzer is a national treasure. In 1990, she became the first woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and her work has always reflected our country’s conscience. 

From 1977 to 2001, Holzer penned most of her own material, but she has said that she “quit writing because I wanted to cover more themes, more emotions, to create more depth than I could muster alone. I am not really a writer. So I began to choose texts by others.”

She is sometimes called an appropriation artist, but that term can be misleading. For one thing, her collaborators usually receive credit. (She and Polish poet Wisława Szymborska have met for pineapple, as you do.)

In fact, her clearance efforts might go above and beyond what’s strictly necessary. When you encounter Holzer’s work in the wild—say, on the back of a truck—you’re not necessarily aware that it’s an artwork, so it would be hard to argue she’s taking credit for something she hasn’t put her name on. Moreover, short phrases from longer works like books and poems tend not to be protected at all, unless they are especially distinct. (This was quickly made clear to the people who tried to make mugs that read “E.T. Phone Home”without the approval of Universal Pictures.)

Copyright also only exists for the length of a creator’s life, plus 70 years. Since this latest project involves U Chicago’s core curriculum, most of its authors are likely long gone.

New Publication: Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s

Published on the occasion of Joan Witek’s solo exhibition Paintings from the 1980s,
organized in collaboration with Artist Estate Studio LLC, at MINUS SPACE, 2020.

Introduction by Matthew Deleget; Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Peter Freeby for Artist Estate Studio
Printed by danny luk at arcoiris nyc, inc.
Published by Artist Estate Studio for MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2020
68 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-0-578-76802-1

Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew

I first met Joan Witek in the Fall of 2003 while coordinating an exhibition of her work at the Kouros Gallery. During a visit to the studio, out of the storage racks, Joan pulled Las Meninas (1980-81). When I inquired as to other paintings from the period, she pointed rather embarrassingly to a tall thick roll wrapped in plastic leaning in the far corner of her studio. Intrigued, it has been my desire to re-present this body of work since that time.

The impact of seeing Las Meninas was resounding. Its surface was unlike anything I had experienced. A thin slightly visible blue chalk line laid out the horizontal composition. Thick black marks made with oil stick layered in regularity, and graphite applied to the surface to temper the level of light.

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Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Black and White Squares No. 1, 1948 Oil and enamel on linen 24 1/8 × 30 in. (61.3 × 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Photo: Diego Flores, courtesy Barbican Centre. © 2020 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Known for reductive, even geometric abstractions, it was curious to learn that Witek’s compositions, all of them, originate from a single narrative source. “The painting expresses my Spanish flair,” she told me. Witek’s father was Spanish, and as she described in her studio notes, “the title first came to me and I didn’t know what it was—eventually discovered it was Velázquez’s title.” Her notes continue: “Associations with me: Spanish / the Spanish love of black / named after the women who cared for the princesses at court—my being a woman / Spanish.”

The repetitiveness and regularity of Witek’s works seemingly link her to Agnes Martin. However, Witek’s approach—the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning and the initiation of actions and proceedings—categorically moves her past Minimalism and closer to that of Process Art. In this regard, Witek shares a sharp sensibility with her peer the sculptor Jackie Winsor who described the origins of her work, “These things of mine certainly aren’t minimal. They’re not reduced to the most elementary things. The focus is not the cleaning up of abstract expressionism.”8 The same can be said for Witek.

Memories of Underdevelopment (1981), acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1983, was the painting that followed Las Meninas. Titled after the Cuban film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968), Witek’s studio notes indicate that she first responded to the subject through “organic” drawings in 1968, predating the painting. Having seen the film again on television, she noted “how much of a portrait [the painting] was of me.”

“I’ve always wanted to make incongruous things go together: like squares being portraits,” she once said, “In the 1970s the square was so important. The square as a square was not enough for me. I loved its containment but I wanted the square to be filled.”

That Witek sees many of her works from this period as self-portraits is astonishing—the clarity of a mark and its interpretation as figure / personality.

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Joan Witek, Edward Teller’s Dream, 1982, Oil and graphite on canvas 68 1/2 × 119 3/4 in (174 × 304.2 cm)

Introductory Glyph (1982) references her passion for Pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphs. This towering painting features at its center a single emblem glyph. Tall and sculpted, the totemic offering mimics an ancient stela whose carved glyphs give the reader a sense of place, situation, or setting for the telling of an event or history. “This fits perfectly with my hieroglyphs and their decipherment,” Witek said describing this work, “There is a constant language throughout waiting for that decipherment.”

In her review of this painting exhibited at Rosa Esman in 1984, Lowery Stokes Sims deciphers the painting this way:

The different proportions of the glyphs became imbued with specific meanings that carry into other paintings […] in Introductory Glyph the expanse of the central glyph, surrounded as it is by twelve registers of regularly placed strokes (larger ones on the bottom two rows), creates a decidedly negative space (a compositional black hole) that literally pulls the space dramatically back into the center. To counterbalance this effect, and to achieve a visual electricity that is comparable to that of the diamond-shaped interstices between the bottoms and tops of the rows of glyphs, Witek places a jagged edge down the center of the large glyph.

Edward Teller’s Dream (1982) is a unique subject for Witek as it makes use of the traditional association of black with death. The genesis of the idea for the painting is fully described in her studio notes about having seen the Teller documentary called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb:

the subject… is the emptiness of the vast ‘field’ of vertical four-inch strokes. Here, hopefully, opposites operate and after the vastness is realized, the backup is the tenseness of all those uninterrupted strokes. The painting needed to be ten feet to create that emptiness.

Emptiness is experienced through the repetitive architecture of Witek’s strokes,—what the artist once referred to as “geometrically common destiny”—a bundle of which stack up like a tomb at the bottom center of this painting. And we are right to read the painting this way, as searching for the structure of the composition, Witek studied the architecture of Egyptian funerary tombs.

Jason Andrew reviews Joan Snyder at CANADA

Joan Snyder, installation view. Left: Ode to Summer (2019); Right: Weeping Cherry Tree & Thee (2020) / Courtesy CANADA

Contributed by Jason Andrew

In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.

Unabashedly expressive, her paintings are born of sorrow and moods, loss and struggles, and yes, peace and love as well. The new paintings now on view at CANADA echo a familiar cantata – an unapologetic narrative. “They are a form of keeping time,” Helen Molesworth writes in her witty catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “of remaining present, of acting as both observer and recorder.” The catalogue also features commentary by Wallace Whitney and Sean Scully.

Consistent throughout her work since the 1960s is Snyder’s use of a “stroke” – a heavy gesture succinctly pulled horizontally. Conceived as an alternative to the Great God Grid, this mark can be interpreted as a cancellation, a kind of crossing out. At first, at least, it was distinctly her own. Each stroke works in tandem with saturated orbs, scribbles, and textured elements of collage. While overtly physical, her paintings, often multi-paneled, are not lost to the oblivion of expression.

Snyder has always been outspoken, and her paintings are a kind of glorious outrage. When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:

layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…

The exhibition features a return to a common theme for Snyder, that of her “Field Series.” These works, painted in her studios in Woodstock and Brooklyn, continue to be about the sacred, the serene, fields of moons, moons in mud, rippling ponds, landscapes stretched out, and daily diaries exposed. These lush visions tell powerful stories.

Ron Gorchov, Painter Who Challenged Viewers’ Perceptions, Dies at 90

Ron Gorchov at his studio in Brooklyn in 2012. Dissatisfied with painting on a flat rectilinear surface, he began creating pieces that were saddle-shaped. Credit: Brian Buckley

Ron Gorchov, an abstract painter known for vividly colored, saddle-shaped canvases that curved away from the wall and gently warped the viewer’s perception, died on Aug. 18 at his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his Manhattan gallery, Cheim & Read. His family said the cause was lung cancer.

A tall, solidly built man with a kindly face, Mr. Gorchov may have been the closest thing the New York art world had to a gentle giant in the late 20th century. He was soft-spoken and approachable, with a relaxed manner. In a 2006 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, an art newspaper, he said that his paintings came not from angst but from “reverie, and luck” and “out of leisure.” He attracted a wide following among younger painters, particularly in the last 15 years of his life, when his work enjoyed a new prominence.

Mr. Gorchov was one of many painters who, in the 1970s, ignored rumors of the medium’s death while rejecting the scale, slickness and purity of Minimalist abstraction. These artists personalized abstract painting in all sorts of ways, for instance by adding images, working small or using quirky geometry. Several, including Ralph Humphrey, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle, Elizabeth Murray, John Torreano, Lynda Benglis, Marilyn Lenkowsky and Guy Goodwin, put an idiosyncratic, intuitive spin on a Minimalist staple — the shaped canvas. Mr. Gorchov did, too. But he was older, and his art blended some of the grandeur of 1950s Abstract Expressionism with the more skeptical, humorous attitudes of the ’70s.

Maurice Ronald Gorchov was born on April 15, 1930, in Chicago to Herman Noah and Grace (Bloomfield) Gorchov. His father was an entrepreneur. His mother was an artist who had studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and who, “began to give me ideas about art pretty early” he said in an unpublished 2017 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.

When he was 14, Mr. Gorchov began taking Saturday art classes at the Art Institute. In 1946 and 1947 he took night classes there. When he was 15 he began working as a lifeguard, his 6-foot-4 frame enabling him to pass for 18, the required age. At 18, he decided to become a painter.

Ron Gorchov, Painter With Curved Canvases, Dies At Age 90

Ron Gorchov at his Brooklyn Studio. Photo by Brian Buckley, 2012.

Ron Gorchov, the artist famous for his curved, saddle-shaped canvases, died on Tuesday at the age of 90.

Gorchov’s death was announced by Cheim and Reid Gallery of New York, which had co-represented him. Ron Gorchov was most famous for his curved canvases that almost made them a sculpture in their own right. These saddle-type canvases were sometimes stacked across the wall. Gorchov used to staple linen to the frames and painted them white, followed by layers of several colours. The end result didn’t hide the staples and left underlying colours exposed – but Gorchov preferred this ‘clumsy’ style. He said in a 2013 interview that he didn’t seek perfection; he liked the illusion of perfection.

The painter Ron Gorchov, known for his distinctively curved canvases, has died at 90.

Ron Gorchov at his Brooklyn Studio. Photo by Brian Buckley, 2012.

The painter Ron Gorchov, best known for his vividly-painted and distinctly-shaped canvases, died on Tuesday. News of his death was announced by Cheim & Read, which represents the artist in New York. He was 90 years old.

Gorchov was born in 1930 in Chicago, and began studying art at the age of 14, when he took Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1953, he moved to New York, where he became acquainted with acolytes of the New York School, including Mark Rothko and John Graham, among others. Gorchov supported his wife and son by working as a lifeguard until his breakout in 1960, when he was featured in a group show at the Whitney Museum and had his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

While his self-described “abstract surrealist” style was indebted to the Abstract Expressionist titans of the day, Gorchov is perhaps most famous for his experiments with canvas. In 1967, after a brief hiatus from painting, Gorchov created what would become his signature bowed-frame canvas for the first time in Rothko’s studio. The concave works, which resemble shields or saddles, were made by stapling linen or canvas to a bent wooden frame, which Gorchov would then paint with pared down forms rendered in thin, vivid pigments reminiscent of Henri Matisse. The works walk the line between sculpture and painting, and placed Gorchov among the ranks of artists experimenting with shaped canvases, including Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, and Blinky Palermo.

Gorchov largely stayed in this mode throughout his career, and in 1975 his dedication to abstract experimentation landed him a solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery as well as a spot in that year’s Whitney Biennial. The following year, he participated in “Rooms,” the legendary first exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1).

Ron Gorchov Dead: Acclaimed Painter Dies at 90

Ron Gorchov.
©MICHAEL AVEDON

Ron Gorchov, an artist whose work often took the form of saddle-shaped canvases with minimalist forms painted onto them, died at 90 on August 18. His death was announced by New York’s Cheim & Read gallery, which co-represented him alongside Maurani Mercier gallery in Brussels, Modern Art in London, and Thomas Brambilla in Bergamo, Italy.

Since 1967, Gorchov created canvases that are curved in such a way that they arc away from the wall, jutting toward the viewer in a manner that lends them a sculptural quality. Sometimes, the paintings appeared in monumental stacks, running up tall walls. Works of the kind have accrued a cult following in New York, where Gorchov was long based, with curator Robert Storr among his most vocal proponents.

In 2005, on the occasion of a show at Vito Schnabel Gallery, Storr wrote, “Ron Gorchov could have been a contender—more times over than any other painter of his generation. If he gets the breaks and goes the distance this time, he will be one of the greatest comeback kids the New York School has ever seen. What are the odds on this happening?”

Many critics have praised Gorchov for retaining his commitment to abstract painting at a time when the medium was presumed dead. During the 1970s, after Minimalism’s rise, many artists in the city had moved on to different mediums, in the process prioritizing lofty ideas about how art existed in relation to its viewer. But Gorchov, along with a cohort of painters that included Bill Jensen, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Mangold, continued to work in painting anyway, and their work evidenced an engagement with form that was considered bygone.

Gorchov crafted his canvases by stapling linen to a frame, then adding a layer of white primer and several layers of pigment. No attempts were made to hide the staples, and Gorchov’s strokes were often loose, leaving multiple colors exposed. In a 1975 review of Gorchov’s show at Fischbach Gallery, Roberta Smith called the technique “clumsy”—which she invoked as an endearing quality.

In a 2013 interview with fellow artist Natalie Provosty, Gorchov said, “I don’t want to be the kind of artist that feels he has to make perfect work. Work doesn’t need to be perfect. I like the illusion of perfection.”

Jason Andrew reviews Rachael Gorchov at Owen James Gallery

Contributed by Jason Andrew

There is a long history of artists expanding the objectness – that is, the sculptural dimension – of painting. Picasso and Braque introduced this concept in their assemblage works; Vladimir Tatlin broadened it in his “counter-reliefs” alongside Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoventhe, the “Dada Baroness”. For the Dadaists, breaking the picture plane meant breaking tradition, embracing chaos, and rejecting logic.

Decades later, as hardcore ideologies dissipated, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Murray, and many others explored the plasticity of painting in more playful and less doctrinaire ways. In her recent work, Rachael Gorchov revisits old ideologies but with an eye to establishing a new framework for painting. Gorchov is clearly interested in the traditional concerns of color, gesture, and pictorial space. And much like her cousin twice removed, the painter Ron Gorchov – whom she only met in adulthood – Rachael has developed a distinct structure for her work.

Although she was already working in ceramic around 2010, I first encountered her concave paintings (made through a combination of mixed-media including papier-mâché and clay) in a solo show she called “Convex Chromascope” at Hunter College in 2015. Her 2017 solo at Owen James (then in Greenpoint) represented a turning point in her work, as brushstroke and shape coalesced into a uniquely warped mise en scène.

Gorchov has incorporated vinyl printing (high-quality scans of paintings on paper) into her compositions. Mimicking a drop shadow as it cascades from a physical sculpture, the vinyl extends the work’s visual space and drama, confirming its strictly physical flatness while introducing the illusion of motion – just as the sun passing overhead designates time. Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings of the late 1980s incorporated sculptural elements that similarly extended their narrative. Although Gorchov’s work is much smaller in scale, her strategy is just as ambitious as Bartlett’s. And much like Bartlett’s sculptural features, Gorchov’s vinyl is a sardonic reminder of modern painting’s literalness.

Gorchov’s recent exhibition at Owen James Gallery (now located on Wooster Street in Soho), opened on the cusp of the COVID-19 outbreak, and I saw the show just days before it closed in early August. It featured nine wall-mounted works and two works installed on the floor. Gorchov now describes her work as “sculptural painting.”