Rosenbaum Contemporary is pleased to announce the season opening exibition of sculpture by John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson and Joel Shapiro. There will be a public opening reception held on Thursday, October 12, 2006 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. The show will continue until December 4, 2006.
In the 1950s John Chamberlain studied and taught sculpture at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, where most of his friends were poets, among them Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. By 1957, he began to include scrap metal from cars in his work, and from 1959 onward he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Chamberlain’s first major solo show was held at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1960. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1986. In 1993 Chamberlain received both the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C.
Donald Judd challenged the artistic convention of originality by using industrial processes and materials—such as steel, concrete, and plywood—to create large, hollow Minimalist sculptures, mostly in the form of boxes, which he arranged in repeated simple geometric forms. In 1992, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, and received a prize from the Stankowski Foundation, Stuttgart, increasing the list of his numerous awards.
Working in her characteristic assemblage style throughout her long career Louise Nevelson introduced theatricality to her sculptures. Her creations are carefully balanced and controlled within their own space. In contrast to the freedom of abstraction Nevelson maintains her found objects tightly in a monochromatic three dimensionality of the chosen structure. The objects themselves, once recognizable parts of the utilitarian culture are taken out of context and placed together for a purpose of a stunning visual effect. Nevelson’s pieces are expansive, requiring space around them, at the same time achieving a powerfully unified impact. Her sculptures at once explore the complexity of abstraction and recall the intricate collection of trophied possessions.
What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea.' Sol LeWitt's famous manifesto Paragraphs on Conceptual Art from 1967 provides an important clue as to this hugely influential American artist's methodology and intent. LeWitt came to prominence in the 60s through his fusion of conceptual art and Minimalism, and the images and objects that he has made ever since involve the transformation of logical systems through chance and intuition. His work may at first appear straightforward, but closer observation reveals an enormous depth and subtlety of variation. He remains extremely prolific and works across a wide range of media, producing photographs, graphics, structural installations, works on paper and, most significantly, hundreds of large-scale wall drawings for galleries and museums, private collections and public spaces.
Since the mid-1970s, the human figure has become the most significant theme in Joel Shapiro's sculpture. More recently, Shapiro has begun to make human-size sculptures. He does not add anything extraneous to the basic figure, making sculptures that are devoid of "individuating" detail, sexual identity, narrative or identifying context. Through the human figure, Shapiro investigates the very nature of abstraction. Joel Shapiro has achieved a reputation as a significant modernist sculptor. He has been called a Post-Minimalist because his work provides a link between the Minimal art of the 1960s and the "content-laden" art of the late '70s and '80s
For more information please contact Elena Brodskaya at [email protected] or 561-994-9180.
