Forum Gallery, New York
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Structure
- Additional Information -
New York, NY This exhibition explores the aesthetic relationship between works created by eight diverse artists working between 1940 and 1980. These artists, starting from very different places, came to create dimensional abstract constructions that reflect the purity of color and light, the dynamism of architecture and industrial design and the inspiration whose genesis is the essential beauty of order. Regardless of background and intention, all of the works shown here exemplify a perfectionist ideal that is fascinating to view in the context of contemporaneous abstract expressionism and the minimalism that was to come later.
The earliest works in Structure, by Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974) and Irene Rice Pereira (1907-1994), are seminal efforts to incorporate three-dimensional elements in painting. Shaw created abstractions by cutting planes from his painted wooden surfaces and fitting them back together. Rice Pereira, fascinated by the intersection of art and science in geometry, created complex interwoven fields of light and color by combining transparent and opaque planes and painting on both.
Charles Biederman (1906-2004) was trained at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his early paintings were influenced by Cezanne, Picasso and Gris. His exploration of two and three-dimensional abstract forms culminated in an influential and highly original art of constructed reliefs that combine dense color and linear form.
Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1984) and Nikolai Kasak (1917-1994) were born in Russia and emigrated to America as young men. Although their backgrounds were similar and both were influenced by Russian constructivism, Bolotowsky's fully dimensional “tower†constructions are based in his geometric paintings, while Kasak's pure and harmonious reliefs are evocative of the action that light and shadow bring to dimensional abstraction.
Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965) is perhaps the best known artist of those exhibited here. His reliefs, as is true of his paintings, reflect his interest in Mondrian, but involve overlapping planes that are uniquely his own.
Sidney Gordin (1918-1993) is the only artist exhibited who was essentially a sculptor. In his relief and collage work, Gordin built push-pull compositions that would form the basis for his architectural sculpture in iron and steel.
Eli Bornstein (b. 1922) is the founder of The Structurist magazine, a publication devoted to the art of the dimensional reliefs he and others began making around 1955. Clearly influenced by Biederman, Eli Bornstein has spent his career in the quest to perfect the art form that is his ideal.
Cubist deconstruction, Russian constructivism, Mondrian's neo-plasticism, skyscraper architecture, abstract expressionism; all were there for this art. It retains a freshness and originality that has enduring appeal.
Structure opens with a reception on December 8, 2005 from 5:30 7:30 p.m. and will be on view through January 14, 2006
For additional information contact: Forum Gallery, New York
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