Galerie Gmurzynska is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures and collages, by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) – the Grand Dame of post-war contemporary American Art. Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky in Tsarist Russia where she lived until emigrating from Kiev to the United States. After living in Maine till age nineteen, she began what would become a heroic quest as an artist. Throughout her career, she studied with esteemed artists Hans Hofmann in Munich and Diego Rivera in New York, where she lived and worked throughout her career. This exhibition of her sculptures and collages from the sixties and seventies is particularly exciting because many of theses works are being publicly displayed for the first time.
Nevelson’s artistic career was particularly interesting because she did not conform to the feminist-driven work created by other artists, especially that which came to prominence during the sixties and seventies. The sculptures are indicative of the masculine tradition of construction, composed primarily of pieces of wood including parts from doors, panels, spindles, and broken chairs, many of which were found after being discarded by cabinet makers or even brought to her by friends.
As she approached sixty years of age, her impact on American art was recognized by three monumental events which showed her contribution to art. In 1959 Nevelson was invited to participate in the exhibition “16 Americans” at MOMA. Nevelson then represented the United States in 1962 at the XXXI Venice Biennale, and was finally given a retrospective exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967.
Today, Nevelson is once again a center of attention for American Art. The current exhibition “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” at the Jewish Museum in New York, and Galerie Gmurzynska‘s upcoming exhibition brings her work to the attention of audiences in America and Europe where she has continues to be realized as one of the greatest American sculptors of the twentieth century.
Nevelson’s work has strongly been associated with Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Beyond these major periods of the twentieth century, her work is deeply rooted and compared with Constructivism, Surrealism and Minimalism. Other than the Surrealist movement, she disguised the origins of her “object trouvé” with a surfeit of black colour, which unified the objects she assembled. There are many associations with the colour black such as night, death, mystery, and the absolute. Nevelson announced that it became an “alchemical” function to her: the material wood was to convey to another substance. After concealing the pieces with colour, she assimilated them furthermore, while combining and composing them in inexhaustible new orders and constructions. During her artistic career Nevelson changed the colour of her sculptures from dark to light, which was the result of a three-step passage from black to white, and from white to gold. By the late sixties, Nevelson created transparent plexiglass sculptures: small crystalline constructions that made space, mass and light indistinguishable.
The group of collages in this exhibition are all unique pieces, each composed by a myriad of materials such as wood, paper, splinters. In contrast to the black sculptures these are only partially painted black; the different use of colour causes another effect: the fragments do not get uniformed but they embrace and embody their surface, texture and form. Brought together, these collages present a group of work that was relatively unknown and we are excited to bring this work to the public.
