Detail from Sturtevant Warhol Flowers, 1970, synthetic polymer silkscreen on canvas
01.12.2024
This isn’t who it would be, if it wasn’t who it is
Curated by Alex Glauber
This exhibition portrays the breadth of artistic inspiration, ranging from misattribution to homage. For centuries, artists have explored implications of authorship, creative precedent, and tenuous attribution. Through pseudonym, quotation, collaboration, and conceptual obfuscation, artists embrace and anticipate nebulous interpretations of their work. The artists included lay their influences bare or invite an epistemic “misreading” of their work, reminding us that art is rarely created in a vacuum and is instead both beholden to and framed by the past. The self-awareness of this context is borne out in strategies that invite conversations between influences while complicating historiography for future audiences.
This Isn’t Who It Would Be, If It Wasn’t Who It Is features works from over two dozen artists, spanning over five hundred years. Artists include: Mike Bidlo, Vern Blosum, André Breton, Pieter Breughel the Younger, Claude Cahun, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Walker Evans, Ull Hohn, Sherrie Levine, Hannah Levy, Jonathan Monk, Richard Prince, Paul Sietsema, Sturtevant, Ella Walker, Andy Warhol, Michael (Corinne) West, and more.
06.30.2022
On the Nature of things
Curated by Alex Glauber and Alex Fitzgerald
This exhibition surveys and traces key moments in the history of Assemblage as seen through the work of over forty artists spanning nearly eighty years. Taking curator William Seitz’s landmark 1961 exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art as a starting point, the show brings together several artists from Seitz’s 1961 exhibition including John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, and Lucas Samaras, while also exploring how the medium has been adopted and pushed in the intervening years.
On the Nature of Things includes works by a broad range of artistic voices from around the globe, including significant loans from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which champions the work of Black Artists from the American South, to elucidate how various artists speak with and through extent materials.
02.03.2021
Things… Things Fall Apart
Curated by Alex Glauber and David Lewis
This exhibition, with artists from the gallery program as well as an important private collection, takes its title from two Ed Ruscha drawings, Things (2014) and the later Things Fall Apart (2017). Yeats immortalized the phrase “Things Fall Apart” in his 1919 poem “The Second Coming,” which he penned in the midst of the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Nearly four decades later, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe used it as the title of his debut novel about the corrosive effects of European colonialism. Now the current exhibition extends this century-old apocalyptic nightmare into a visual tone-poem: A dance of individual isolation and fragmented self (i.e., lockdown) paired against the possibility of art as connectivity and connection in an age of encroaching dread.
Wallace Berman, Sadie Benning, Barbara Bloom, Robert Colescott, Thornton Dial, Todd Gray, Wally Hendrick, On Kawara, Josh Kline, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Gordon Parks, Ed Ruscha, Deborah Roberts, Haim Steinbach, Kyle Thurman, Martin Wong.
06.26.2019
PAINTERS REPLY:EXPERIMENTAL IN THE 1970S AND NOW
Curated by Alex Glauber and Alex Logsdail
In September of 1975, Artforum published a special issue on painting. In addition to articles such as “Painting and the Struggle for the Whole Self” and “Painting and Anti-Painting: A Family Quarrel”—in which Max Kozloff said “brush wielders were afflicted by a creative halitosis”—were the responses to a questionnaire polling 21 painters on the state and prospects of the medium. While the construct suggests an attempt to engage the question of painting’s future, the tone of both the preface and three questions is exceedingly stilted, rending it more of an obituary than rumination; an indictment of futility.
This exhibition aims to answer the Artforum questionnaire through an exploration of experimental painting practices starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present moment.
11.10.2017
The Anxiety of Influence
Curated by Alex Glauber
In January of 1973 after five years of work, Yale University Professor Harold Bloom published “The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry”, which offered the scholar’s interpretation on how poets contend, engage, and, if great, overcome the daunting shadow of their predecessors’ achievements. Bloom contested that creative inspiration was not autonomous but rather resulted from a poet’s ability to successfully grapple with the weight of historical achievement. “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves.”
This exhibition attempts to map one such network of influence using the work of Eric N. Mack as a contemporary access point.
02.16.2016
The Coveter
Curated by Alex Glauber
Fundamental to the human experience is the impulse to collect. It allows us to safeguard the past, understand the present, and organize the future. As Walter Benjamin noted, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”1 Stemming from the Latin legere meaning “to gather”, it linguistically syncs to our earliest roles as hunter-gatherers. What fuels this quest for beauty is desire and while its focus is mutable, the tendency is not. Whether religious relics in the Middle Ages or antiquities like those assembled o the Grand Tours of the 18th century, individuals have always coveted material culture. For each of the artists in The Coveter, collecting informs, actuates, or determines his or her work. Whether expressed in content or concept— the compulsion to collect is inescapable.
03.08.2014
Idiosynchromism
Curated by Alex Glauber
Dickinson is delighted to present Idiosynchromism, an exhibition that explores the tradition of what many consider to be non-traditional pigments and colorants through examples of material culture and the work of fourteen artists spanning more than three hundred years.
If the Industrial Revolution had not produced an expansive spectrum of colors available premixed and tubed, artists might still rely on the chimerical color recipes found in medieval treatises or 19th century colourmen like George Field who sourced and created pigments for artists. What is easy to take for granted is that the evolution and expansion of the artist’s palette arrived at eccentricity out of technical necessity...
06.22.2012
rorschach
Phillips de Pury & Company is pleased to present “Rorschach”, a selling exhibition curated by Alex Glauber which explores the artistic tradition surrounding Hermann Rorschach’s projective personality assessment vernacularly known as the “Inkblot Test”. While the psychological phenomenon of the inkblot extends back beyond Rorschach’s 1921 tome Psychodiagnostik, its ubiquity since has enticed artists to engage it as a symbol and mechanism. By the time Bruce Conner underwent the test in 1958 he remarked how the popularity of the ten standardized inkblots utilized in the test diminished its efficacy. Nevertheless when Andy Warhol took up the subject in 1984 he revelaed an unlikely expressive desire when he made the presumptive mistake that he, like the patient, was to create inkblots which would be interpreted by a doctor, or, in his case, the public.