Robischon Gallery is pleased to present three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring the work of pre-eminent California sculptor Manuel Neri, prominent New York painter Gary Komarin and influential Colorado sculptor, Scott Chamberlin. Each artist, by way of their chosen medium of plaster, bronze, painting on canvas or ceramic, distinguishes himself in the language of abstraction while pushing forward the traditions of both Late Modernism and Figural Abstraction. Manuel Neri, making his historical sculptural mark most notably since the 1970s, employs both a classical and rough-hewn expressionistic sense toward the figure. Gary Komarin, with his boldly improvisational, smart and spirited painted compositions, equally challenges and engages. Scott Chamberlin, whose uncommon complex variations of surface and shape, provide a contrasting stilled or animated presence to each exhibited ceramic head. From the modern to the decidedly contemporary, all three distinctive artists offer an inspired view where both past and present dialogues in art inventively merge.

Manuel Neri
“FIGURA | Form + Fragment”

Robischon Gallery proudly presents “FIGURA | Form + Fragment,” a unique culminating exhibition by esteemed American artist Manuel Neri. In the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition for the artist, Robischon celebrates Manuel Neri as a significant sculptor of international note, by featuring select life-size sculptures and maquettes in both plaster and bronze, along with works on paper. Neri, now eighty-six years of age, has allowed for an exhibition of his work which spans from 1980 to 2013, as further confirmation to his audiences of his standing as an important connecting voice to the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s, as well as a contemporary artist with his own sense of form and bold quality of surface. From then until now, Neri’s first chosen medium of plaster – a mixture of wet sand and pulverized limestone or gypsum – has always offered a highly sensitive surface for the artist’s instinctive mark. For Neri, with his family roots in Mexico, and ties to Italy as well, the material of plaster with its historical and alive qualities inherently provides a link to classical sculpture and ancient typologies, while providing a vehicle for both disciplined and energetic intuitive expression. The life-size plaster figure on exhibition, entitled Catun Series IV (Tavla), along with an additional Ostrakon plaster maquette, conveys the artist’s masterful and brave commitment to his essential material since his earliest plaster figures of the late 1950s. Chiseled, marked and painted with enamel via the artist’s signature abstract approach, Neri’s affinity toward plaster and its surface quality, critically informs his bronze life-size figures and bronze fragments. The sculptural works on view, highlight a kind of circularity in color and surface – from the inherent natural white of the plaster, to the artist’s unpredictable use of charged or muted yellows and blues on both plaster and bronze, to sculptures cast in bronze, though cloaked as if plaster, in layers of white enamel. The more predictable use of color and material are radically defied by the artist, as gesture and surface ignite the work.

Since the early 1970s, the dynamic Mary Julia Klimenko, with her active collaboration, became Manuel Neri’s primary model for his numerous, highly-recognized works in varied mediums of plaster, ceramic, bronze, marble and mixed media on paper. From the artist’s widely-shown, large-scale standing wall-relief sculptures to his signature life size figures, Neri has maintained the freedom of abstraction alongside an abiding sculptural discourse with the distilled female figure - both for its potentiality for full creative expression, as well as through the identifiable form, as a representative for all human life. Neri has rarely wavered from the raw and powerful essence of female forms in his work, and respectfully so, by virtue of his quiet and introspective nature. Every figural work reveals its own vulnerability or vitality - and with pared down essentials, each work communicates a formal sense of abstraction, along with an inherent opportunity for narrative. For some viewers, the sculptures’ raked surfaces, small shoulders, closed hands and intentionally featureless faces, may convey a sense of universality and speak to the fragility of the human condition. To others, the exploration is beautifully abstract and formal. Neri’s embrace of the expressive, even primal, in gestural shape and mark, transcends any binary discourse between abstraction and its antithesis: figural-based work. Integrating both sculpture and painting in his work, Neri’s figural imagery is his primary vehicle for abstraction with his personal vocabulary of incised, furrowed or painted elements which delineate his often highly textured and yet nuanced figures.

As author and independent scholar Bruce Nixon illustrates in his essay entitled “Manuel Neri and the Assertion of Modern Figurative Sculpture,” Neri’s early choice of figuration was greeted with trepidation since abstraction dominated the art of the time. Even artists with a broader cultural recognition such as Alberto Giacometti, faced similar resistance with figural sculpture during the advent of abstraction, but the relevance of the figure equally prevails.” Nixon states, “Neri values the centrality of the figure in the history of art and its immense eloquence as a form, but at the same time, he is always aware that, in the atmosphere of the late twentieth century, he will be required to establish himself as the authority in his work, the source of both its authenticity and its communicability.” In this context, Neri has produced “perhaps the most formidable body of figurative sculpture in post-war American art.” Nixon continues, “Neri’s work…is idiomatic, inimitable and immediately recognizable – forms of delicate integrity and evocative gesture are submitted to the addition of a highly developed colorist and a textural treatment of surface that recreates the figure as an articulate ‘speaking’ subject indigenous to the artist. Neri constructs forms that capture the condition of the figure/artist striving to make itself/himself known in a world of time and spatial divide. Neri’s figures strive to ascertain how the human expresses itself across those same spaces, and to discover ways in which expression might be amplified through the artist’s means.” With great dedication over Manuel Neri’s many creative and productive decades, and by cultivating a truly authentic, evocative and hard won personal lexicon, the artist not only serves his highest calling in the studio, but once again shores up the timeless truth for the viewer, that the discipline of art and the inspiration that follows is fully extant in the modern present.

Manuel Neri studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts and California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Neri has received numerous honors and awards over his career including honorary doctorate degrees from his alma maters and the Corcoran School of Art along with the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, among others. Neri’s work is included in a multitude of significant collections including; Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Des Moines Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, Denver Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., El Paso Museum of Art, TX, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, Honolulu Museum of Art, Laumier Sculpture Park and Museum, St. Louis, MO, Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Portland Art Museum, OR, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, Oakland Museum of California, Palm Springs Desert Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA, The Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, Eli Broad Collection, Los Angeles and many other noteworthy institutions and collections.

Gary Komarin
“Mr. Blonde”

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present, “Mr. Blonde,” the third solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by acclaimed, New York artist Gary Komarin. For Komarin, as a student of the major New York School abstract expressionist Philip Guston, the sense of “painting the unknown” and taking risks in the arena of the canvas became an early driving force in his work. Komarin’s nod to his mentor, Guston, led him to his own thoroughly authentic approach toward abstraction, furthering the movement’s ideals in a riot of off-beat contemporary hues and forms which freely engage automatic impulse. Artistic giant Philip Guston wrote supportively about Komarin’s work as, “plastic, sensitive and serious," stating, “Komarin’s feeling for line, space and form comprises an innate sense of structure.” Komarin humbly speaks to his own work by saying, “My paintings proceed without preconception. I think of myself as a stagehand who sets up conditions necessary for drama to unfold. Once a painting has achieved a life of its own, when it speaks back to me as a painter, this is a good place to be.”

In each work, Gary Komarin freely locates a myriad of painted gestural marks, drawn lines or drips to merge or overlap with pools of saturated color. Unexpected figural elements or objects may at times suggest a narrative as the viewer is additionally engaged or playfully confronted by titles such as Ipso Facto in Orange with Black, Who Is Hercules and Why Are You Calling Him? or most notably the exhibition title, “Mr. Blonde.” The interpretation of the images filtered through the intriguing titles rest solely on the viewer, but strict interpretation is unnecessary and off-point with this abstraction. Komarin recalls his mentor, Guston, saying: “I paint what I don’t know instead of what I do know” – which for Komarin, affirms his personal process to pursue his own natural inclinations with refined instincts. The resulting elements within certain compositions might appear somewhat recognizable, but by design, resist any precise label or naming.

With confidence and curiosity, Komarin is at home in utilizing common materials in uncommon ways. Industrial canvas tarps are often used in lieu of an evenly-woven traditional canvas and layers of latex house paint in a thinned-out sluice mixed with spackle and water to offer equal means for the artist’s direct manner. The resulting house-paint concoction offers unusual hybrid colors while the spackle creates a beautiful matte surface. Working passionately and using color energetically, the quick-drying materials allow Komarin to paint with a sense of urgency – his challenging mark mirroring both material and tension – further ignited by the spontaneous and the deliberate; the conscious and the unconscious and the familiar and the strange.

As a counterpoint to the free-form imagery, Komarin is also known for his various subject-driven series of works on paper. On view, a drawing series of improbable vessels convey the weighted meanings of a sense of the figural, as well as symbolic of the containment of something precious or vital. The artist states, “All cultures have had to find ways to transport water and other fluids from one location to another–water, milk, wine, blood – for practical and ceremonial reasons. I have long been fascinated by the structures and shapes of these traditional objects, particularly those of the most humble and demure variety. An early Egyptian, Mayan or Greek vessel has great poise and stature. Painting vessels is, for me, a very plastic activity that has allowed me a great deal of playful variation. One never knows how they will wind up.”

This quality of the uncharted and on-going territory of questioning beyond the surface propels the artist. The title, “Mr. Blonde,” echoes the search with its provocative reference to the highly-charged Quentin Tarrantino film, Reservoir Dogs. With this homage, Komarin extends the notion of the protective false or the concealed identity in order to address the juxtaposition of the ironic vs the heroic as it applies to his painting. A malapropism of Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants, Tarrantino’s Reservoir Dogs prompts Komarin to explore a self-referential meme for how artists misremember or knowingly appropriate from other artists and art forms while remaining true to their own creative process. The artist inquires, “How much is real? How much is fake?” Does the cloak of subterfuge allow for a kind of emergence - sinister or inspired - beyond what might normally be within a single repertoire? In consideration of “fakes,” Komarin’s ongoing and often exhibited series of painted cakes on brown paper sacks or stylized French wigs, augment the notion of altered reality as the artist “makes a cake” incorporating a paper grocery bag, and paints portraits with no definable features other than that of a head whose chief characteristic is a wig depicted in a variety of flipped, page-boy style hairdos. It is the artist’s call for the authentic that prompts the viewer toward the present moment as each is experienced and pursued past the surface. Revealing the deeply personal source of this call, Komarin states, “My parents had barely escaped the Holocaust and my brother died in his early twenties. His death freed me up a great deal to push my work, take chances and not be afraid of risk-taking in painting – whether on a metaphoric or physical level. Everything in Life is relative to the lens through which you see the world.”

Awarded the prestigious Joan Mitchell Prize in painting, Komarin has also received the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship In Painting, New York, Elizabeth Foundation Prize in Painting, New York, Benjamin Altman Prize in Painting, National Academy of Design Museum, New York and The New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Painting. Komarin maintains an expansive world-wide exhibition schedule with many solo exhibitions in Zurich and Basel, Switzerland, London, England, Kiyoharu, Japan, Dubai, UAE, and New York, among others, in addition to being in numerous museum collections including: Denver Art Museum, Musee Kiyoharu Shirakaba, Hokuto-city, Yamanashi, Japan, Musée D’art Mougins, Mougins, France, Museum of Fine Arts, Corpus Christi, TX, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, Boise Art Museum, Idaho, Montclair Art Museum, NJ, Noyes Art Museum, Oceanville, NJ, Zimmerli Museum, New Hyde Park, NJ, Arkansas Museum of Contemporary Art, Little Rock, AK, Boston University Art Museum, Yoshii Foundation Collection, Tokyo, Japan, among others, along with work in significant private and corporate collections. Additionally, Gary Komarin is featured in the documentary film entitled Still, directed by Colorado filmmakers Amie Knox and Chad Herschberger, which relates Clyfford Still’s contribution to American art and the influence of Abstract Expressionism on generations of distinguished artists like Gary Komarin.

Scott Chamberlin
“Heads”

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of influential Colorado artist Scott Chamberlin. “Heads” showcases the artist’s newest series of ceramic wall sculptures that continues an ongoing exploration of Chamberlin’s interest in the body as form. With his inimitably provocative, humorous and economical configurations, the artist’s subject for the series, the head, represents where the mind resides; the center of intellect, thought, memory, understanding and the repository for perceptions of identity. Fittingly so, it is also the locus of imagination – fertile ground for the vision of Chamberlin. With a spare sensibility toward capturing the essence of abstracted human form, Chamberlin is never averse to place himself at the intersection of the eccentric and the elegant – a location where the strange can morph into the seductive, and the disturbing into something beautiful. For “Heads,” an aspect of Chamberlin’s work, is to offer a shift from a simple rudimentary reading of the universal head-form into one that conveys a more confounding, complex and mysterious content.

In equal measure to their potent forms, the artist’s sculptures are viscerally inviting with their surprising textured clay surfaces with vibrant or lustrous glazes. Formally, each head holds its own personality from one to the next – such as a seemingly elemental but bizarre sweep of clay atop a round form implies hair on one work, but as an element for a different head, twigs suggest a beard. The combined vocabulary is both primal and refined with unexpected color and highly textured finishes ready to engage the eye. The titles of the sculptures designate each work with a word that means “head” in various languages such as Catalan, Esperanto, Japanese and Yoruba. Yet, Chamberlin’s initiative is to also take the viewer away from conclusions that are overly reliant on the intellectual to contemplate the work, as it is the experiential perceptions of the evocative that transcends the intellectual. Chamberlin states, “I am interested in making artwork that is understood or apprehended through involuntary or unconscious urgings – in ways other than through reason or intellect. I want the response to be more instinctual, to come through the gut more than through the head. This does not mean the intellect is not used, it means the intellect is not the starting point. I am somewhat skeptical of the intellectual response, primarily because it is so often manipulated by so-called education and fashion. I seek to make work that presents itself before language forms, before it can be given a name. In this very complex, information based world, it appears experience or assimilation without language is diminished.” Within this context, Chamberlin’s heads offer the viewer a different and open-minded perspective. Meeting face to face with each new work, a kind of reverberation is possible – purely seeing each sculpture’s wonder in form or sensing the magic that a past idol from another culture might possess. Felt and imagined, ancient and contemporary, Chamberlin’s “Heads” offer both the compelling vernacular of abstraction and an investigation deeply rooted in the personal as well as the universal.

A professor at the University of Colorado, Scott Chamberlin has an MA from Alfred University, Alfred, New York. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and fellowships including a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, Creative Faculty Fellowships, University of Colorado at Unitec in Auckland, NZ and The European Ceramic Work Centre, in s’- Hertogenbosch, Holland, two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowships and a Colorado Council on the Arts & Humanities Visual Arts Fellowship. He has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions including Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CU Art Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder, Taiwan Ceramics Bienniale, Taipei,Taiwan, Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, Michigan, and other venues in Portugal, Sweden, New Zealand, London and the Netherlands, to name a few. Chamberlin is a sought-after visiting professor and artist-in-residence his work is included in the permanent collections of CU Art Museum, University of Colorado, International Museum of Ceramic Art, Alfred, New York, Denver Art Museum, Dordrect Museum, Dordrect, Holland, Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, Museum Het Kruit Huis/European Ceramic Work Centre, s’-Hertogenbosh, Holland and Daum Museum, Sedalia, Missouri.