Artist’s Reception: Friday, June 10, 5:30 – 7:30pm
LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Robert Natkin: The Architecture of Atmospheres. This large-scale survey of paintings and drawings traces the artistic evolution of Robert Natkin (1930-2010)—a salient figure in the history of Post-War American painting. Bringing together works created between 1972 and 1983, the exhibition represents five distinct series—suggesting their singularities, their congruities, and the points of transition between them.
In his authoritative text examining the art movements of the second half of the twentieth century, published by Phaidon and entitled Artoday, the eminent historian Edward Lucie-Smith describes Natkin’s work as ‘the ultimate development’ in that part of American Art Modernism that is referred to as Color Abstraction.” Substantiating the author’s supposition, each of the works on view has extended the visual lexicon of a movement whose unique place in the history of visual culture is assured by its pioneering embrace of lush, unbroken surfaces and sensuous fields of color.
Softly textured and subtly atmospheric, Natkin’s Intimate Lighting series was generated with the use of color-saturated sponges and rags lightly pressed against canvases to create a highly individuated analogue to pointillist composition. The series is among the artist’s most reductive, and the color variety in these works has the effect of interweaving to produce a unified color-light that appears to emanate from deep within the surface of the canvas. Gently toned but jubilant, and forceful despite their nuance, these works evince the artist’s masterful capacity for expressive understatement.
Commenced on the occasion of a 1974 solo exhibition at the Holburne of Menstrie Museum in Bath, England, which was to be accompanied by a catalogue consisting solely of black and white reproductions, the artists’ Bath series transformed this restriction into the foundation for continued formal development. Resolving to paint in black and white, Natkin explored textural variations that would evoke the weathered walls of Bath’s ancient architecture. The artist’s Color Bath series, represented in this exhibition, manifests a gradual re-integration of muted coloration that further dynamize these works.
Further evolution of the Color Bath series witnessed the artist organizing its gossamer textures into the distinctive, semi-fixed framework of curtain-like vertical folds that underpin the Bath Apollo series. Culminating in the boldly pigmented works of the Apollo series, the adoption of a simultaneously secure and dynamic compositional armature liberated Natkin from previous structural constraints—setting in motion an unmitigated attention to surface variations and chromatic interactions that would fully achieve the elusive conditions that the artist had termed “a visual vibrato.” Informed by the collision of the creative and quotidian, their rigorous compositional orders—impacted by profound spatial tensions and dramatic linearity—manifest the Nexamination of Mies Van Der Rohe’s architectural contributions to the Chicago skyline.
Inspired by a 1977 visit to the Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland, the Bern series pays homage to Klee’s facility with formal dynamics. This small series of work re-engages with motifs explored in previous series—including vaguely referential squiggles, hatchings, blobs and ellipses co-opted from Native American and Persian artistic traditions—but fuses these semiotic undercurrents with a painstaking attention to image construction informed by Natkin’s extensive experimentation with process. This profoundly multivalent fusion of arcane symbolism and an accessible lyricism results in several of the artist’s most celebrated and sought-after compositions.
Born in Chicago in 1930, Natkin encountered Abstract Expressionism in 1949 through an article in Life magazine. At that time a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved briefly in New York, where he would be deeply influenced by the paintings of Willem de Kooning. Returning to Chicago, he became closely associated with other Chicago artists—including his future wife, Judith Dolnick—and opened a gallery in which their work was exhibited in the late 1950s. These artists, including Natkin, were prominent in Chicago’s 1957 Momentum exhibition; and, in 1960, Natkin was included in the historic Young America exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. By the time of his passing in 2010, Natkin had earned a reputation as one of the nation’s leading color abstractionists.
Natkin’s artwork is an important component of numerous esteemed public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Le Centre Georges Pompidou.
