LONDON.- Dominique Lévy Gallery announces a transatlantic exhibition that captures a fleeting but profound moment of creative intersection in the careers of three exalted Post-war artists. Local History brings together rarely seen early works of the 1950s through early 1970s by Enrico Castellani, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella, and juxtaposes them with important later examples that reveal each artist's distinct evolution and the varying degrees of reverberation from their brief aesthetic collision in the 1960s. The exhibition takes as its starting point Judd's effort to formulate what he dubbed a "specific object" - an artwork that was neither painting, nor sculpture but something beyond the confines of those existing categories - and spotlights the surprising impact upon his quest of Castellani's and Stella's early experiments with radical painting.
Local History takes place concurrently in London and New York, inaugurating the gallery’s new space at 22 Old Bond Street on October 13, and opening at Dominique Levy’s space at the historic landmark 909 Madison Avenue on October 30. The exhibition has been organized by noted curator and art historian Linda Norden, with Peter Ballantine, who is regarded a leading expert in the work of Donald Judd and was one of the artist’s long-time fabricators. A book featuring essays by Norden and Ballantine complements the exhibition.
The exhibition coincides with AZIMUT/H: Continuity and Newness, currently on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice through January 19, 2015, celebrating Azimut/h, the Milan gallery and eponymous review founded in 1959 by Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni. Castellani’s work is also featured in the major exhibition ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, on view October 10, 2014 through January 7, 2015 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Local History takes its title from a passage in an essay Donald Judd penned in 1964, examining some of the best art being shown in New York City at the time. Ostensibly an exhibition review, Judd’s text in fact was a manifesto calling for a new kind of art freed from the concerns of expressionism and medium-specificity, ideas he elaborated more fully in his better-known ‘Specific Objects,’ which followed soon after. Enrico Castellani, whom Judd regarded as father of the style that came to be known as Minimalism, and Frank Stella were both championed in these texts, and their experiments exerted strong influence on Judd’s own. Local History at Dominique Lévy revisits the cornerstone objects of this transformative period, testing Judd’s hypotheses in physical form.
Exhibition Highlights
In the late 1950s, Enrico Castellani began making works that utilized the canvas as a three-dimensional property to radically redefine the notion of painting. The canvases of his Superficie monochromes have been pushed, pulled, and poked from above and below, by orderly patterns of nails that radically alter their surface structure, yielding effects that border on the metaphysical without ever allowing the viewer to forget the material means through which these optically reflective and absorbing surfaces are generated. Meanwhile Stella, fresh out of Princeton University, was progressively articulating a new agreement between painting as image and as object in which the physical and visual were similarly held in tension. In his essay ‘Local History’, Judd describes Stella’s paintings as “slabs [that] seem like objects” whose “successive painted angles create phenomena in the form of optical illusions.” Both artists were essential for Judd’s formulation of a specific art object that “need only be interesting.”
Among key Castellani works in Local History, three in particular stand out. In New York City, the tempera painting ‘Superficie Nera’ (1959) is a precursor to the manipulated, dimensional canvases that the artist eventually articulated more precisely with his ordered arrangements of nails beneath and above the canvas. In this work, Castellani uses chestnuts to achieve sculptural effects, calling to mind the grids of things like bread and eggs in the Achromes of his close friend and collaborator Piero Manzoni; unlike Manzoni, however, Castellani concealed his “non-art materials” beneath the surface of the work. The 1963 painting ‘Superfice rigata bianca e blu’ witnesses Castellani actively transforming painting into a sculptural object and an exploration of architectural space. And in London, the exhibition presents Castellani’s magnificent ‘Superfice rossa’ (1964), made the same year that Judd published his ‘Local History’ and ‘Specific Objects’ essays.
Judd is represented Local History with works spanning three decades. In New York, the artist’s ‘Untitled (DSS 41)’ of 1963 gives viewers a look at an early, formative, articulated and now iconic Judd floor piece. The channel cut into this work reveals a progression of similarly notched parallel wood panels that mete out space in much the same way Stella's stripes do. In London, Local History includes two of Judd’s late “recessed” wall pieces – ‘Untitled, 1992 (recesses)’ - that evidence his ongoing commitment to objects over sculpture, investigations of open volumes that are spatial in an architectural rather than pictorial sense, without being massive. As in the 1963 Judd floor piece in New York, the “action” in ‘Untitled, 1992 (recesses)’ takes place within each volume’s interior. In the London “recesses,” however, the gallery walls are pressed into service as the four sidewalls of the piece.
Among the masterworks by Frank Stella on view in the New York portion of Local History are ‘5 Eldridge Street (Blue Horizon)’ of 1958, and ‘Untitled’ (1959) – two paintings that reveal a young artist in rapid progression. ‘5 Eldridge Street (Blue Horizon)’ is an example of Stella's initial explorations of the stripe as an incremental, structural element. This work reveals a conventionally expressive brushstroke giving way to ordered lines that measure out length and width on the canvas. A mere year later, silver metallic paint is a material in its own right, distinct from the ground that Stella leaves visible through incised, parallel, structural lines and unpainted margin. (The painting appeared on the cover of Art International, 1960 IV/1, with the magazine title running down that unpainted margin.) By 1964, Stella was confidently testing boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture, as evidenced in ‘Tetuan 1’ (1964), on view in the London portion of Local History. His material and structural manipulation - the painting’s fluorescent yellow alkyd and the dramatic misalignment of this diptych’s configuration - parallel similar experiments in both Judd's and Castellani's art at that moment. In this one powerful work, viewers can find evidence of a brief but powerful coincidence of intention and effort on the part of three great artists of the 20th century.
