Kasmin is pleased to present Minimalism and Its Afterimage, curated by Jim Jacobs and Mark Rosenthal, featuring important works by Larry Bell, Liz Deschenes, Dan Flavin, Frank Gerritz, Marcia Hafif, Peter Halley, Ralph Humphrey, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Jonathan Lasker, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Mangold, John McCracken, Howardena Pindell, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Jan Schoonhoven, Sturtevant, and Christopher Wilmarth. On view at the gallery’s 509 West 27th Street location from June 8 through August 11, 2023, the exhibition explores the legacy of Minimalism as it reverberates through various practices in the decades since its inception. Bringing together work produced in a variety of media and spanning seven decades, Minimalism and Its Afterimage demonstrates the ascendancy imparted by Minimalism’s major contributions to the art historical canon.
Famously employed as a modernist artistic device by Jasper Johns, the afterimage refers to a lasting impression, an image that persists in a viewer’s sensory perception even after its external stimulation recedes. This exhibition posits the afterimage as a metaphor for Minimalism’s enduring legacy. Major highlights include a monumental “stack” by Donald Judd (1928–1994), one of the artist’s most recognizable motifs which featured prominently in his 2020–21 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Judd’s precise geometric vocabulary is revisited by German artist Frank Gerritz (b. 1964), whose rigorous process, as seen in a signature work in paintstick on anodized aluminum, merits the artist’s global recognition. A recent work by Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) takes the grid—a preeminent emblem of Minimalism, one that Rosalind Krauss famously claimed to “declare the modernity of modern art”—as a starting point to reveal creative textures and personalized artistic devices. Sol LeWitt’s (1928–2007) large floor sculpture Open Geometric Structure IV (1990) articulates this emblem in a three-dimensional lattice, exercising a formula that the pioneering Conceptual artist developed in the mid 1960s. Dan Flavin’s (1933–1996) the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (1963), a fluorescent tube installed at a 45 degree angle on the gallery wall, marks an important reconsideration of the artist’s first work realized entirely in fluorescent light, a recognized breakthrough in his oeuvre. Nearby, the reflective surfaces of important works by Larry Bell (b. 1939) and John McCracken (1934–2011), two noted Light and Space artists, echo Flavin’s luminous drive. Coinciding with the artist’s centennial, a large-scale black monochromatic work by Ellsworth Kelly rejects rectilinear painting conventions. Casting aside conventionally privileged ideas of authorship and originality, Sturtevant’s (1924–2014) copy of a 1959 composition by premier Minimalist painter Frank Stella, Stella The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (First Version) (1990), propounds appropriation and repetition as a characteristic feature of Minimalism’s afterimage.
Developed in the United States in the late 1950s through the 1970s, the stylistically-reductive and geometrically-informed approach to artmaking now known as Minimalism has been understood as an extension of abstraction’s disavowal of painterly representations. Instead, Minimalism proffers the medium of an artwork as its literal reality, with no attempt made to represent the outside world. The implications of such ideas continue to resonate with generations of painters and sculptors, as in the postmodernist tendencies of Conceptual art, the social commentary of Neo-Geo, or the thoughtful reassessments of Appropriation art.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Kasmin Books will publish a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring a new essay by curator Mark Rosenthal. Against the cool, reductive, and self-referential tenet of the male-dominated demeanor of Minimalism, Rosenthal introduces what he terms the “Afterimage generation” to describe an expressive, subjective, and often handmade quality shared among artists influenced by Minimalism in the decades since. The catalogue will be available for purchase via Kasmin Books in Summer 2023.
About Jim JacobsJim Jacobs is an artist, curator, and dealer based in New York. A former archivist at the famous Leo Castelli Gallery, then assistant to preeminent sculptor John Chamberlain, Jacobs has held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Alan Gallery, New York. He has curated exhibitions for Mnuchin Gallery, New York; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; and Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. Since the mid 1970s, his minimalist lacquer paintings, appropriation art, and abstractions have been exhibited at various venues across the United States and abroad, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Jacobs was educated at Boston University, Harvard, and Bryn Mawr.
About Mark RosenthalMark Rosenthal is a curator, author, and art historian who has held curatorial positions at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, the Philadelphia Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, as well as adjunct positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Menil Collection, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He has curated such exhibitions as Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments; Picasso: The Early Years, 1892–1906; The Surreal Calder; and retrospectives of Philip Guston, Juan Gris, William Kentridge, and Jonathan Borofsky. He has also curated monograph exhibitions of Anselm Kiefer and Jasper Johns. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Iowa.
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