10 Nov 2011 to 21 Jan 2012
Hours: Monday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY
10011
New York
North America
T: +1 212 255 8450
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W: www.tonkonow.com
BETSY KAUFMAN: Many Paintings ROBERT WATTS: Some Objects LAWRENCE WEINER: 3 Videos
November 10 through January 21, 2012
The exhibition features artists from three generations, working in disparate mediums, connected through their investigations of color and form.
Robert Watts (1923–1988) was an enigmatic, influential figure whose ideas and innovations from the 1950s through the 1980s were actively embraced by colleagues such as Allan Kaprow, and subsequent generations of artists including Allan McCollum, Sherrie Levine, and many others. Prolific and highly experimental, Watts was a central figure in Fluxus and participated in every major art movement of his time from Neo-Dada and Pop to conceptual and postmodern art.
Watts's extensive oeuvre includes innovations in sculpture, photography, film, sound, and performance. His use of found objects, jokes, visual puns, and cast body parts personified the legacy of Marcel Duchamp. Among the works on view in the exhibition will be Paint Box With Chrome Brush (1964), created in the spirit of the Duchampian "rectified readymade."
Works by Robert Watts are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art in Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962¬–1978 (through January 16, 2012); Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond, both at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (through December 3); and Fluxus at Rutgers at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J. (through April 1, 2012).
Lawrence Weiner is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists working today. Since the early 1960s, he has created conceptual, language-based works that radically redefine the presentation and reception of the art "object." His structures have appeared throughout the world in extraordinarily varied manifestations ranging from public architecture to manhole covers. Weiner also produces books, prints, posters, drawings, performance, and audio pieces, and since the early 1970s, has created a significant body of works in film and video. The exhibition will include three animated works produced between 2002 and 2007.
For more than twenty years, Betsy Kaufman has subverted the controlled language of minimalist, hard-edged geometric abstraction, and the orthodoxy of systems and serial images to produce a highly varied body of paintings. Spontaneous and emotional in their execution, the artist describes her process as "telling stories with surprises." Within her precise execution, lush satiny surfaces, and rich idiosyncratic color, the viewer discovers the paradoxes of subtle spatial shifts.
Between 2008 and 2010, eschewing her longtime practice of making large paintings on canvas or small works on paper, Kaufman assigned herself the disciplined task of painting on very small canvases until her studio walls were filled. The exhibition will include selections from the more than eighty paintings she produced.
Betsy Kaufman has lived and worked in New York since 1980 after having earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US and Europe.
TIM MAUL Liquid Nostalgia
7 Photographs from the Museum Wish Series
November 10 through January 21, 2012
The exhibition includes seven color photographs, made from 2009 to 2010, depicting the water fountains at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art. The series is rooted in the artist's longtime attraction to "liquid Imagery," inspired by recent observations in digital animation and television advertising ("splashes are everywhere"), and a certain nostalgia for the obsolescence of water as an element in photographic processing.
For almost forty years Tim Maul has used photography as both the principal medium for his art, and an essential tool for organizing and understanding the world. Since 1973, when he graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a degree in painting, he has produced deadpan, snapshot-style images that tease out the hidden meanings of "the things between the things we see," transforming prosaic renderings into objects that combine intellect, irony and beauty.
From the mid-1970s throughout the 1980s, Maul's photographs challenged accepted norms of artistic photography both in terms of their subject matter (a sheet of stationery, an audio cassette, hotel rooms and office interiors, etc.) and the fact that they were shot like tourist photographs -- on impulse in color using a hand-held camera. Travel, tourism, and a mild fascination with the occult have also been ongoing preoccupations for the artist. In the early 1990s he produced and exhibited a series of black and white photographs entitled A Cultured Tourist, in which he photographed sites in lower Manhattan, pointed out by a psychic. During that time, he also documented other allegedly haunted locations in photographs taken during many annual visits to Strokestown Park, an eighteenth-century manor house in County Roscommon, Ireland.
Maul began his newest series, entitled Museum Wish, after moving from his longtime home in the Village to a new apartment on the Upper East Side. He writes:
I once took a photograph of a pond in a shopping mall that was filled with loose change. Several years later I revisited the image and found that it possessed the contradictory elements I had often struggled to combine in my earlier work: formal abstraction and a subjective narrative. It reminded me of the color field paintings I had made in art school while the haphazardness of the coins thrown in the water suggested post-minimal scatter art and the conceptual works of Mel Bochner which I had admired. Moving uptown in 2005 allowed for more leisurely visits to the museums in the area and I found myself drawn to the man-made bodies of water within them. I observed parents encouraging their children to throw coins into these spaces and to 'make a wish.'
Tim Maul was born in 1951 in Stamford, Connecticut. He arrived in New York in 1969 to attend the School of Visual Arts and has lived and worked here since that time. Although he is best known for his photographs, Maul has also worked in performance and regularly publishes articles and reviews in international art publications. Since 1979 he has had one and two-person exhibitions at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in the U.S. and Europe, including the Berkeley Art Museum; the Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland; Artists Space, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, and many others. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at such distinguished institutions as The Photographers Gallery, London, the International Center of Photography, New York; The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and has performed at PS 1; White Columns; Franklin Furnace; the ICA, Boston; the Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; and many other well-known venues.
