Tag: pace

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Kiki Smith (1954)

kiki Smith

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling.

In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures. In several of her pieces, including Lying with the Wolf, Wearing the Skin, and Rapture, Smith takes as her inspiration the life of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. Portrayed communing with a wolf, taking shelter with its pelt, and being born from its womb, Smith’s character of Genevieve embodies the complex, symbolic relationships between humans and animals.

Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, the fiftieth Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony in 2009, and has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times in the past decade. In 2005, Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Smith lives and works in New York City.

www.ftn-books.com has some Kiki Smith titles now available.

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Lucas Samaras (1936)

Lucas Samaras

The theme of self-depiction and identity has been a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom yet proposed a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.

Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948, settling in West New York, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, New York, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. His interest in self-investigation began during this period, when he initiated painting self-portraits from the front and back using a mirror. He also gravitated toward the use of pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometrical forms in rich colors and with luxuriant texture, characteristics that would reoccur throughout his work. He soon shifted toward objects, producing assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster.

His first New York exhibition was held at Reuben Gallery in 1959, which came on the heels of his first group show at the gallery, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Through his involvement at the Reuben Gallery and his participation in Happenings, Samaras met Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg. He had met Robert Whitman, another key figure in the Happenings movement, while at Rutgers and the two collaborated on performances. Samaras debuted his assemblage boxes in 1961 at Green Gallery, New York. For the artist, the boxes possessed elements of sculpture, architecture, and painting, amplified by the inclusion of objects such as mirrors and photographs—additions that situated Samaras as one of the earliest artists to emphasize his ego and corporeal self in his art. His early boxes led to his inclusion in his first institutional group show, The Art of Assemblage, held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961.

In 1965, Samaras joined Pace Gallery, which mounted an exhibition of his works made between 1960 to 1966, that included Samaras’ immersive Room No. 2 (1966), also known as Mirrored Room. A culmination of his mirrored boxes, Room No. 2 was his first installation to become a part of a museum collection, acquired in 1966 by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Samaras received his first major solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969, which was followed by his first international museum exhibition, held at the Kunstverein Museum in Hanover (1970). By the mid-1970s, he had also received his first large-scale commission for which he produced Silent Struggle (1976), a sculpture comprised of Cor-ten steel, initially installed at the Hale Boggs Federal Courthouse in New Orleans.

In 1969, Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy. His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. This processed progressed with digital art in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. These technologies gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

Gesturing toward a larger investigation of (self) reflection in his work, found in his mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and use of digital mirror-imaging, Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extension of his body while underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday—a true blurring of art and life.

www.ftn-books.com has 2 of the PAce catalogues now available.

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Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)

Schermafbeelding 2018-12-30 om 16.27.09

One of the greatest sculptors from last century for me is Isamu Noguchi. The reason is simple i have been living for half of my life with designs of Noguchi around me. I have sold lamps and stools by the artist and in our own home a stool is ever present in our interior. The sculptures are different . In many cases executed on a scale to large to place inside and nowadays far too expensive for almost all. But sometimes you can exprience the quality of Noguchi as a sculptor in a simple publication. This is the case with the Pace Wildenstein publications which has al the qualities you are looking for in a Noguchi work. enjoy the photo’s. Publication is available at www.ftn-books.com

noguchi pace a

Here is the text on the artist from THE ART STORY

Isamu Noguchi, a major American and Japanese sculptor and designer, spent over six decades creating abstract works – largely in stone – based on both organic and geometric forms. Greatly inspired by traditional Japanese art, as well as by the biomorphic style of some Surrealist art, Noguchi became internationally known both for his artwork and his publicly accessible furniture and architecture. His ultimate objective, to create and enhance public spaces through sculpture, provided his career with a distinct direction and established him as a critical figure in the worlds of post-war art, architecture and design.

The overarching concept informing Noguchi’s work was his passionate, career-long desire to create art the public could use in a social space. He realized this goal in myriad ways: mass produced furniture and lamps; theatrical set designs; public projects such as gardens, playgrounds and fountains; and sculptural manipulations of the natural landscape.
Noguchi wanted to call attention to the dichotomies inherent in much of his work: he merged geometric and organic forms, found value in both positive and negative space, and created works that challenged the boundaries of design and art. He also integrated the materials and art forms of both his Japanese and American heritages into his innovative creations.
Noguchi was socially and artistically connected to Abstract Expressionism, as evident not only in his large-scale works evoking abstracted forms but also in his friendships with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Yet, his sculpture retained a distinct sensibility in its use of natural materials and its distinct blend of Surrealist and Japanese influence.