NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander and Bonin and Brooke Alexander, Inc. are presenting (Re)Frame, a collaborative group exhibition that is organized to highlight the consideration of new contexts between artists that have extensive histories with each gallery. The exhibition is composed of both unique and editioned works made with varied media, from 1933 to the present, from Albers to Zaugg.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Robert Mangold

Alexander and Bonin's current exhibition, (Re)Frame, was organized to instigate conversations between artists which are not usually in dialogue with one another. Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Robert Mangold are often associated biographically, but over the course of their long and influential careers, their work has rarely been exhibited together.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold has concentrated on the landscape surrounding her upstate New York home since the 1970s. The Maple Tree (1990) depicts the tree standing just outside the artist’s studio window, a long-time subject in her work. In the tree’s bare winter state, Plimack Mangold focuses on the interplay of branches, shaping the limbs into sculptural forms. Her etchings are the product of an intensive process of drawing on copper plates, then revising, burnishing, and reworking the image until arriving at a final print with the tonal qualities of watercolor and rich drypoint lines defining the tree branches.

Both artists have paid significant attention to the subtleties of visual perception in their work: Plimack Mangold through prolonged observation of the same subjects and Robert Mangold through his use of negative space. In his prints and paintings, Mangold works with fragments and geometric shapes, leading the viewer to reflect on the relation of parts to a whole.

In a 2001 interview with Shirley Kaneda, Mangold explained, "What struck me when I first moved to New York was that so much of what we see, we see in fragments. We see part of a truck going by, or part of a building." His paintings often involve the idea of sections, where each work is a complete form, and yet the fact that they are not whole rectangles or circles, or the inclusion of negative space within a composition, implies that the forms are a piece of something more. He continues by saying, "This is very much a part of the content of the work, something that extended to different series in different ways, this sense of completeness and incompleteness—or perhaps the impossibility of completeness."

The artists both attended Yale University, and after marrying in 1961, moved to New York City. They lived in the Lower East Side, where their neighbors and friends included Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Lucy Lippard, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana. Both artists showed at Fischbach Gallery through the mid-1970s. In 1976, they moved to Washingtonville in upstate New York, where they still reside. Leaving the city changed both of their practices – the breadth of the landscape expanded the scale of Robert Mangold’s work, and the trees on their property became motifs in Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s work.

Re(Frame) was organized in collaboration with Brooke Alexander, Inc.