This is Greg Kucera Gallery's ninth one-person exhibition of work by Robert Motherwell. This end of year show will present 22 prints created from 1962 through 1989. Though first known as a painter, Robert Motherwell produced a total of 536 print editions throughout his artistic career.
Motherwell made his first prints in 1943 near the beginning of his career. He returned to printmaking in the early 1960s at the invitation of Universal Limited Art Editions, then a new printmaking studio which provided the technical assistance the artist needed to make great editions. His ULAE prints, his later work at Gemini G.E.L. in LA, as well as self-published prints created in his own studio, created an impressive body of work which allowed him to explore his Gestures and Collage series in print forms.
In addition to several sugar lift aquatint etchings, a curious etching process (involving tree resin, molasses, shellac, and acid) which allowed the artist to create gestural or linear imagery over fields of color, we are also showing fifteen of the artist’s lithographs. He regarded the lithograph as the most natural of the printmaking forms which allowed him tremendous freedom as an artist.
Motherwell created several artist books illustrating the works of poets and writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce and Rafael Alberti. This exhibition will include his largest artist book THREE POEMS, which abstractly illustrates poetry by Octavio Paz with whom he was close.
Biography Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915. He studied art at Stanford and at Columbia and completed a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford. Since then he has received many international awards for his contribution to the artworld and his work has been seen in numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. His work was seen in a major retrospective exhibition in 1984 at the Seattle Art Museum. He lived and worked in Greenwich, CT and in New York City.
Motherwell died in 1991, at the age of 76. His career as an American surrealist had earned him critical acclaim as a young, promising painter during the 1940s. In the next 50 years, Motherwell continued to enhance his reputation as an Abstract Expressionist painter, as well as a fine printmaker, philosopher and critic. As a very well-read and well-spoken member of the New York School and as the inadvertent spokesman for his generation of artists he was often referred to as the “Dean of American Painters.”
Motherwell was fascinated by many literary figures as well as figures from art history. Within Motherwell’s pantheon of artists the poetry and prose of Mallarmé, Joyce and Poe can easily be related to art by Delacroix, Matisse, Goya, and Piero della Francesca. Motherwell not only painted about, but also wrote about many of these figures.
