Robert Morris Untitled (L-Beams) 1965

Barry McGee on creating work indoors

M.I.A. | Bad Girls

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Ellsworth Kelly | Reliefs 2009 - 2010, Matthew Marks Gallery, LA

Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”  Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”

Matthew Marks Gallery

Cyprien Gaillard | Centre Pompidou

Yayoi Kusama | Centre Pompidou

Andrew Lord

 Listening, 1996-1998

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

I: 28 x 16 x 15 1/2"

II (with lid) 29 x 15 1/4 x 15 1/2

Biting, 1995-1998

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

Vase 1: 30 x 21 x 21"

Vase 2: 29 x 16 x 14"

Swallowing, 1999-2007

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

Jug: 24 x 12 x 16 1/5"

Vase: 27 3/4 x 13 x 12 1/2"

Three-Legged Plate: 21 x 20 x 20"

From his earliest exhibitions in the late seventies and early eighties, Lord has used clay as a medium of fine art to explore various subjects. While these subjects are as varied as silhouettes of artists and writers traced by the outer contours of a vase or pendent fragments modeled from his own body, Lord’s work grasps sensation as physical form. He translates the action of the senses—hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling—from their liminal states into objects, both tactile and visual.

In this new body of work, Andrew Lord approaches memory as a sense itself, creating sculpture in clay and plaster based on landmarks from Whitworth, England, where he grew up. Just as he used his own body as an implement to show the physicality of sensation, he treats the act of remembering as a capacity with corporeal potential. He said that “making this work has been a process of finding lost places”; and in reviving genius loci through his own hand, Lord has created a sculptural map of the town, navigating a personal history through the locatable and recognizable features of Whitworth’s geography. In addition to sculpture, this exhibition marks Lord’s first exploration of film, having created a video work based on a recent visit back to Whitworth. While the juxtaposition of the film may initially seem like a corrective to the more subjective sculptural survey, neither represents a standardized view; rather, both incorporate the aura of the artist’s own memory, discovery and desire.

Andrew Lord was born in 1950 in Whitworth, England, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Art & Project, Amsterdam; The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA; Camden Arts Center, London; and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. He has also been included in group exhibitions including “Atelier 15,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; “Westkunst-Heute,” Museen dr Stadt, Köln; “Anderer Leute Kunst,” Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; 1995 Whitney Biennial; “Site and Insight” PS1, New York.

Robert Morris | Felt Pieces

Robert Morris, Untitled, 2010

Felt, 261.6 x 256.5 x 94 cm

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1996

Grey Felt, Steel Bar, 199 x 400 x 124 cm

Robert Morris, Untitled (Pink Felt), 1970

Felt pieces of various sizes, overall dimensions variable

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection  91.3804

© 2009 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: David Heald © SRGF

In 1964, at New York’s Green Gallery, Robert Morris exhibited a suite of large-scale polyhedron forms constructed from 2 x 4s and gray-painted plywood. This kind of simple geometric sculpture came to be called Minimalist because it seemed to be stripped of extraneous distractions such as figural or metaphorical reference, detail or ornament, and even surface inflection. Sculptures like the Untitled (Corner Piece), one component of the 1964 suite, boldly delineate the space in which they are located, thus defining the physical and temporal relationship of the viewer to the sculptural object.

Morris’s sculptures often consist of industrial or building materials such as steel, fiberglass, and plywood, and were commercially fabricated according to the artist’s specifications. The value of the “artist’s hand”—the unique gesture that defines an individual’s skill and style—was inimical to Morris, and the work of art became, in theory, not an “original” object but a representation of the idea from which it was conceived. This notion allowed for the creation and destruction of a piece when necessary; Untitled (Corner Piece), for example, can be refabricated each time it is to be exhibited.

In 1968 Morris introduced an entirely different aesthetic approach, which he articulated in an essay entitled “Anti-Form.” In this and later writings he reassessed his assumptions underlying Minimalist art and concluded that, contrary to earlier assertions, the construction of such objects had relied on subjective decisions and therefore resulted in icons—making them essentially no different than traditional sculpture. The art that he, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and others began to explore at the end of the 1960s stressed the unusual materials they employed—industrial components such as wire, rubber, and felt—and their response to simple actions such as cutting and dropping. Untitled (Pink Felt)(1970), for example, is composed of dozens of sliced pink industrial felt pieces that have been dropped unceremoniously on the floor. Morris’s scattered felt strips obliquely allude to the human body through their response to gravity and epidermal quality. The ragged irregular contours of the jumbled heap refuse to conform to the strict unitary profile that is characteristic of Minimalist sculpture. This, along with its growing referentiality, led Morris’s work of the late-1960s and early 1970s to be referred to by such terms as Anti-Form, Process art, or Post-Minimalism.

Jennifer Blessing

Tree of Life | Terrence Malick

For "The Tree of Life", the director Terrence Malick once again collaborated with the production designer Jack Fisk, with whom he has worked since his first film, "Badlands" (1973).  While "The Tree of Life" covers the origin of life and, to some degree, the history of the universe, a significant portion of its running time takes place in a small Texas town in the 1950s.  “We tried to make it as universal as possible and never do anything that would pull you out of the story, generally we wanted to create a place that many people could relate to."

Todd Eberle | Empire of Space

American Flag, Millerton, New York, August 2006

Grandparents and Dog, Houston, Texas, November 1995

Agnes Martin, Gallisteo, New Mexico, 1992

Todd Eberle: Empire of Space

Publisher:  Rizzoli

Foreword by Glenn O'Brien, Contribution by David Hickey, Photographed by Todd Eberle, Introduction by Graydon Carter

Contrasting ultramodernist photographs taken over a thirty-year period constitute the first book by one of the most celebrated photographers working today. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1963, and first coming into prominence in the early 1990s with his iconic photographs of Donald Judd’s works and architecture, Todd Eberle’s photographs document the disparate images that make up American architecture, landscapes, and society and are united by a minimalist aesthetic that runs through his work. Whether his approach to a particular subject is earnest (an unfurling flag) or kitsch (the Vegas strip), Eberle brings to his photographs a heightened sense of precision, symmetry, and proportion. The Empire of Space is a lavish look at Eberle’s career and features many rare and never-before-published portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and interiors. In the spirit of Walker Evans, Eberle creates an enduring and poetic portrait of America, the arts, and architecture through thoughtfully contrasting and analogous photographs. This exciting and definitive book on Eberle’s illustrious legacy is sure to rank among the most important publications to mix modernism, minimalism, and photography.

About the Author

Todd Eberle is a professional photographer and artist based in New York City. He is currently the photographer-at-large for Vanity Fair and regularly contributes to the New York Times Style Magazine, Interview, and the Wall Street Journal Magazine, among others.