http://thepacegallery.com/ The Pace Gallery en Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:33:16 GMT Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:33:16 GMT catalog@thepacegallery.com http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1361"&r_referrer=Exhibition&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1361"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0| Non-Lieux, a legal term meaning neither guilty nor innocent—in effect, “no verdict.” ]]> exhibition_1361 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1360"&r_referrer=Exhibition&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1360"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0| exhibition_1360 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1353"&r_referrer=Exhibition&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1353"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0| Ubi sunt, literally means 'where are...' and is a medieval Latin poetic motif that speaks to the transitory nature of youth, life, and beauty. Sodi mines an emotive power from the essential crudeness of the materials that he uses to execute his paintings, focusing on the creative gesture and the spiritual connection between the artist and the process that brings his paintings into being. The exhibition follows a major show of the artist’s work at The Bronx Museum of the Arts last year. ]]> exhibition_1353 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1357"&r_referrer=Exhibition&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ACurrent Exhibition&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"Exhibition_keywords 1357"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0| exhibition_1357 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 319"&r_referrer=NewsItem&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 319"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
But what actually happened at the Happenings? Because they were so ephemeral, and documentation is so patchy, art historians have spent decades trying to figure that out. So have their creators.

“It’s very hard to remember,” Mr. Oldenburg said. “If you look at the scripts, you can’t understand anything, and a lot of it changed during the performance. The best record of those days is still photography.”

And the most prolific photographer was Robert R. McElroy, a college acquaintance of Mr. Dine’s, who hung out with the artists and photographed their work, until his attention was diverted by his job as a staff photographer for Newsweek. The thousands of images he made languished in storage until about five years ago, when Milly Glimcher, director of special projects at Pace Gallery, finally gained access.

The result is “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963,” opening Friday at Pace, at 534 West 25th Street in Chelsea. It includes nearly 360 photographs (most by Mr. McElroy) as well as artworks and ephemera that came out of those events. The catalog is published by Monacelli Press.

In advance of the show some of the creators and participants — including Lucas Samaras, now known for films, photographs and multimedia work, and Patty Mucha, a painter and Mr. Oldenburg’s first wife — shared their recollections with Carol Kino, as did Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, who attended several Happenings and is married to Ms. Glimcher. Here are edited excerpts:

LUCAS SAMARAS For “18 Happenings” Kaprow created isolated spaces with little constructions in them, a couple of blocks or beams of wood. Then he would put chairs in them, so that people could sit in the same room with something happening. In one room he had a woman sit in front of a table with oranges, just squeezing them. The idea was to see something real happening in front of you and to then imagine it as a special event.

PATTY MUCHA To me [Kaprow’s Happening] was shocking, was really mind blowing. It was the tail end of the Abstract Expressionists, and they were kind of boring — all those shows that were going on everywhere — but these artists were just completely alive.

SAMARAS The others started making Happenings almost immediately. Whitman’s read as poetry; for Claes it was more connected to the cinema; Red Grooms started doing stuff that almost looked like commedia dell’arte. He would paint his face white, and he was a redhead, so he looked spectacular.

RED GROOMS All of us were painters or makers of something. I guess we all had a knack for doing something theatrical, and there was a certain sort of movement in painting at that time. Pollock was a prime influence, with his all-out gestural approach and his innovation of putting the canvas on the floor. There were poetry and jazz sessions too that became a kind of theater. You could get out on the stage without having to do traditional acting.

Inspired by Kaprow, Mr. Grooms had already put on “Walking Man,” his first Happening-like event, that September in a gallery in Provincetown, Mass. Afterward he returned to New York and opened the Delancey Street Museum in a downtown loft. That’s where he staged his second performance, “The Burning Building,” in December 1959. It featured a cast of five, and included two fireman characters.

GROOMS I was enamored with all sorts of theater — circuses, carnivals, ice shows, things on television. In high school assemblies I would do skits; I’d come out in a tutu and do a pratfall. So my Happenings were physical as well. In all of them I played this character called the Pasty Man, who would come out from behind the curtains with this candle. In “The Burning Building” one of the Firemen slipped behind me with a sock full of flour and hit me over the head with it. A hand came out from the curtain and took the candle as I fell back into the Fireman’s arms, and he dragged me behind the curtain.

More events followed. In January 1960 the Reuben Gallery staged an “Evening of Happenings,” which included Robert Whitman’s first performance. In February, at the Judson Church, Mr. Dine and Mr. Oldenburg organized “Ray Gun Spex,” a series of six performances conceived by themselves and others. Mr. Oldenburg staged his first piece, “Snapshots From the City,” in the Street, an urban environment that he built in the space. For Mr. Dine’s event, “The Smiling Workman,” he dressed like a clown and enacted a performance with paint: stroking it on canvas, drinking it (that paint was actually tomato juice) and pouring it over himself.

JIM DINE Claes and I would see each other every night on the Bowery picking up detritus from the street. It was very easy to find things that you could make so-called art out of. But besides wanting to be plastic artists, we felt a need to perform, to make visible the energy that young men had.

CLAES OLDENBURG There was nothing especially new about the form; it was how the performances were put together and the thought behind them. My first consisted of Patty and me in costume performing a kind of wild dance while Lucas was offstage in charge of the lights. With Lucas, whatever you ask him to do, he’s going to do it his way. So there were many periods we were in total darkness.

GROOMS It was like a sandlot sports game or something, where you just choose sides. Somebody’s the director and makes up the plays, like in football. It’s very improvised, but it’s been directed a bit.

DINE My first performance wasn’t some spontaneous act any more than a painting is. I thought it through, I wrote it down. I made some sketches, prepared the set and hoped for the best. I trusted my own sense of drama. I had no idea what kind of reaction I would get, but the reaction I got was so tremendous that it was heavy.

SAMARAS The Happenings were crowded, though a crowd could mean 20 people. But it was still magical for us because they responded.

In November 1961 at the Reuben Gallery, inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s race to the Moon initiative, Mr. Whitman staged “American Moon,” with six performers, intricate lighting and a set with catwalks. He also made the audience members sit inside six separate tunnels, rough-hewn structures positioned around a central stage, and transformed them into participants.

ARNE GLIMCHER Happenings were really a kind of marvelous experience of one’s sense of self, one’s fear of close contact with other people, especially because you were mashed together. People were trapped in those tunnels.

SAMARAS All the happenings happened in dumpy places. When artists started moving into lofts, they wouldn’t even clean them. So you went to this groovy place, and it was dark, with a few lights or flashlights. It was a spectacular jolting of your senses.

ROBERT WHITMAN Everything about the production was as crude and as primitive as it could be, because nobody really had any money to spend on any of this stuff. And it was generally more visual than traditional theater: the accent was on the plastic composition more than storytelling.

MUCHA We saw very little traditional theater. One year Claes’s mother gave us tickets to see “Camelot” for our wedding anniversary, with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. Claes could hardly bear it. He pretended to be asleep.

In December 1961 Mr. Oldenburg moved his studio to East Second Street and opened his installation “The Store,” where he sold handmade versions of manufactured goods. In 1962 he held several Happenings there.

MUCHA Claes was indifferent to the comfort of the audience. He’d torment them. In one of the “Store” events Lucas and I did a dance: He picked me up, I serpentined all over his body and chomped on a challah bread and read the comics from The Daily News. We had the entire studio, and part of the audience stood behind a canvas scrim with holes in it, so they could only peek through. I don’t think they saw it all.

OLDENBURG The audience was made to suffer. At one performance the only person allowed to sit was Duchamp. He said, “I am very old, and I cannot stand, please let me sit down.” I thought, “Maybe it’s a trick. But then again, he was very old.” I think Duchamp went to everybody’s performances. “Nekropolis I” ended with us all becoming mice, dressed in burlap bags. We crawled out into the audience slowly; we couldn’t see. Then we were supposed to just drop somewhere and not move until they went home. According to the story I wound up on the feet of Duchamp. But I couldn’t see who it was. It’s a good story, but as time goes by you wonder, “Did this really happen?”

Because of the transitory nature of the Happenings, the few things left over from them came to be seen as valuable. Some of the props from Mr. Oldenburg’s performances, sewn by Ms. Mucha, became the basis for his soft sculptures.

MUCHA I made my first prop for “Snapshots From the City”: a wig with long lollipop curls, made out of black tights that were stuffed and then tied in various places so they looked almost like braids. For “Store Days II” I made some props out of muslin, a sailboat and a freighter, and I did a dance with them. They were later sold to the Guggenheim. They actually became art.

Kaprow, who died in 2006, abandoned Happenings in 1963. By then Mr. Dine and Mr. Grooms had already stopped performing, and Mr. Oldenburg was focusing on sculpture. Only Mr. Whitman continued.

DINE It was becoming more public. Dealers were beginning to turn up.

OLDENBURG At first almost everybody there was someone that you could recognize in the art scene. Then as the performances got more publicity, there came strangers. There was even something called a “thrill club,” organized on Long Island to bring people in for exciting weekends in New York. They would arrive in limos. But they were mystified and mostly disappointed. As time went on, the audience became less and less interesting to me. I couldn’t really reach them.

SAMARAS It was a short period, and it was terrific. It was like you had a tribe, a group of entertainers going from village to village with a tambourine. But then you get to a point where you say, “I’m not getting enough out of this.” Everything has a beginning, middle and end, even if you don’t want it to. ]]> NewsItem_319 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 314"&r_referrer=NewsItem&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 314"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
By then, the artist had lost interest in his most controversial early works. "He told me that their vitality was only in the period of time where they were provocative," says Arne Glimcher, Pace Gallery founder and chairman. But he still hoped to irk and challenge his fans.

Suffering from osteoporosis and emphysema, Dubuffet dedicated the last few years of his life to a series of wild and incongruous paintings. Pace will show about 20 of these staunchly abstract acrylics, made in 1983 and 1984 (the artist died at the age of 83 in 1985). They show how Dubuffet continued to test the standards of taste and convention.

Born in Le Havre, France, in 1901, Dubuffet didn't pursue art in earnest until he was in his 40s, at which point he developed a deliberately "unskilled" style inspired by what he termed "Art Brut." He start exhibiting his own work in Paris and championed visceral, antiacademic art made by sociopaths, psychics and the mentally ill. Mr. Glimcher represented Dubuffet in the U.S. starting in 1968 and, by the time of the artist's death, was his exclusive agent.

Dubuffet's last works comprise two groups. "Mires" ("Sights," in English) are bright, acrylic-on-paper renderings. All of the figures, objects and animals that appear in much of his earlier oeuvre are seemingly absent—or deconstructed beyond recognition.

What's left are hastily drawn, marker-like red and blue streaks and shapes that form stacks of blobs and ellipses in fervent pieces like "Mire G 111 (Kowloon)," from Aug. 4, 1983.

Dubuffet called his final paintings "Non-Lieux," a French trial term for "cases dismissed" and a metaphor for a rapidly concluding life. They're coarse, violent streaks on black backgrounds that look like the visual embodiment of madness itself.

"He told me they were his last works," Mr. Glimcher adds. "He said, with a chuckle: 'I have been painting for over 40 years—I don't think it is good for my health.' "

"Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years" will go on view from Jan. 20 through March 10 at the Pace Gallery's 510 W. 25th St. location in New York.
]]> NewsItem_314 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 519"&r_referrer=PressRelease&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 519"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
"Happenings: New York, 1958–1963" will capture more than thirty of the original Happenings and the contributions of the main participants—Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. The exhibition will bring together for the first time more than 300 photographs by five photographers who witnessed and documented the performances, including many photos that have never before been seen publicly. Rare film footage and original ephemera related to the Happenings’ production, including outlines, sketches, scripts, press releases, announcements and posters, will also be on view.

The exhibition will also feature artworks created during and around the performances, including Red Grooms’s vibrant "Painting from 'A Play Called Fire.' " The painting, on loan from the Greenville County Museum of Art, was both the centerpiece and product of Grooms’s first performance in Provincetown in 1958. The exhibition will also feature an untitled installation on muslin, painted by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns during "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" in 1959—the performance conceived by Allan Kaprow that forever changed the course of art history by moving art off of the wall and into life, involving the participation of the audience and incorporating sound, smell, poetry, music, and lights.

Other highlights of Happenings: New York, 1958–1963 include Jim Dine’s "Car Crash," 1959–60, a dark oil and mixed-media painting on burlap with crosses, exhibited during "Car Crash" (performed at Reuben Gallery, November 1–6, 1960), and "The Valiant Red Car," 1960, on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the painting that hung in the lobby of the gallery during the same performance. Claes Oldenburg’s muslin sculpture "Freighter and Sailboat," 1962, on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, used in Oldenburg’s "Store Days II" (performed at Ray Gun Manufacturing Company, March 2–3, 1962), will also be on view. Carolee Schneemann’s "Quarry Transposed," 1960, a wall relief from which her performance, "Newspaper Event" (Judson Dance Theater, January 29, 1963), evolved, is also included in the exhibition.

In describing the Happenings, art historian Milly Glimcher writes: This vital series of performances was part of a worldwide reappraisal of art and the role of the artist within accepted art practice. The Happenings artists personified the collapse of the hegemony of painting and sculpture as they introduced elements from daily life and popular culture into environments and performances. It is indisputable that between 1958 and 1963 these events transformed art, the perception of art, and its reception by the public, which itself had been transformed by these actions. As ground-breaking as the Abstract Expressionists had been, they remained within the historic traditions of painting and sculpture. The Happenings artists, each in his or her own way, destroyed the boundaries between art and life, as Rauschenberg aptly expressed it.

"Happenings: New York, 1958–1963" will be arranged predominantly chronologically, enabling the viewer to understand the movement as it unfolded through time. The exhibition will also premiere Robert Whitman’s "Inside Out," a five-film installation piece (1963–2009), created as Whitman moved beyond his initial performances. In 1963, Whitman, using 16 mm black and white film, captured Suzanne De Maria, Simone Forti, John Vaccaro and Larry Rutter individually as they sat around a table in conversation with one another, as well as another shot of the table from above. The films were to be projected simultaneously in one room—one on each wall, and the bird’s-eye view on the ceiling. In 2009, Whitman revisited the unrealized project, adding three sound loops derived from interviews with the three living participants, and a fourth derived from Vaccaro’s comments on Rutter, who passed away several years ago. The four sound bites and films will loop continuously, none in sync with another.

"Happenings: New York, 1958–1963" will be on view at 534 West 25th Street from February 10 through March 17, 2012. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on February 9 from 6 to 8 p.m.

For more information about "Happenings: New York, 1958–1963," please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email info2@thepacegallery.com; for reproduction requests, email reprorequest@thepacegallery.com. ]]> PressRelease_519 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 520"&r_referrer=PressRelease&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 520"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
"The Present" (2011) is Graham’s third body of work in a trilogy that includes "a shimmer of possibility" (2004–2006) and "American Night" (1998–2002). MACK will publish a 114-page hardcover monograph of the new work in conjunction with the exhibition.
 
"Paul Graham: The Present" features sixteen diptych and two triptych photographic works taken from life in contemporary New York. Shot in a manner that both honors and updates the legacy of great street photography—by such luminaries as Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand—this new series radiates with the frenetic energy of a city in constant motion, with its perpetual shifts in awareness of people and place. Graham, however, radically amplifies these fleeting intersections by bringing them to us complete with their double: twin images separated only by the briefest fraction of time. These sibling photographs allow us to see the moment and its doppelganger simultaneously arriving, as time unspools before our eyes.

Coupled together, the images reveal unexpected and serendipitous affinities from moment to moment. In one diptych a woman walks confidently down the street, only to trip and fall in the next instant. In another, a man with an eye patch navigates his way down a crowded street; seconds later he is replaced by a businessman with an exaggerated wink. Happenstance collides with fate, fortune with misfortune, as the ebb and flow of the city twists and spirals in a mesmerizing dance. Graham reinforces the power of these unstaged vignettes by installing the large-scale works just a few inches off the floor (the diptychs measure more than twelve-feet wide and the triptychs more than eighteen-feet wide). The effect is all consuming, drawing the viewer into the action as it unfolds, where subtle shifts in focus transform the moment and our consciousness of it.

Graham’s previous series "a shimmer of possibility" and "American Night" reflect his experiences across the breadth of America, while "The Present" is a paean to New York City, his hometown. All three bodies of work reflect upon contemporary America, but also explore the medium of photography as means of artistic expression. With "American Night," a visual commentary on the social fracture of the United States, Graham pushes light to an extreme, intentionally over exposing his images to create blindingly white scenes bleached of nearly all color and detail, rendering near-invisible the dispossessed people and landscape. In "a shimmer of possibility," Graham examines the compression of time in photography, slowing the cognitive process down as a way of recognizing the profound beauty in life’s overlooked moments. In Graham’s newest work, a sense of consciousness becomes the dominate theme, expressed through highly specific focus and the heightened awareness it renders.

"a shimmer of possibility" and "American Night" have been the subject of seventeen collective solo exhibitions worldwide. In 2003, "American Night" went on view at PS1, Contemporary Art Center, New York. "a shimmer of possibility" debuted in the U.S. at the MoMA, New York, in 2009, and subsequently toured through London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid. Graham was the subject of a major traveling survey of his work, co-organized in 2009 by the Museum Folkwang, Essen (2009), and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2011). "Paul Graham: Photographs 1981–2006" was also shown at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009–10). steidlMACK published a 376-page hardcover book in association with the survey. "Paul Graham: The Present" will travel to Carlier│Gebauer, Berlin, in April, and Le Bal, Paris, in October.

Photographic books are an integral part of Graham’s practice. He has published a dedicated monograph for nearly every series, most famously his twelve-volume collection for "a shimmer of possibility," created in collaboration with steidlMACK. This book was honored with the 2011 Paris Photo Book Prize for the most important photography book published in the past fifteen years.

Paul Graham (b. 1956, United Kingdom) is a British photographer living and working in New York City. In 1981, Graham completed his first acclaimed work, by photographing life along England’s primary arterial road in a series of color photographs entitled "A1: The Great North Road." His use of color film in the early 1980s, at a time when British photography was dominated by traditional black-and-white social documentary, had a revolutionizing effect on the genre. Soon a new school of photography emerged with artists like Martin Parr, Richard Billingham, Simon Norfolk, and Nick Waplington making the switch to color. In 2011, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired the complete set of prints from "The Great North Road," the original set Graham had used to print his first book in 1983.

Over the past three decades, Graham has travelled widely, producing twelve distinct bodies of work that include "Beyond Caring" (1984–1985), "Troubled Land" (1984–1986), "New Europe" (1986–1992), "Television Portraits" (1986–1990), "Empty Heaven" (1989–1995), "Ceasefire" (6–8 April 1994), "End of the Age" (1996–1998), "Painting"s (1997–1999)," American Night" (1998–2002), "a shimmer of possibility" (2004–2006), "Films" (2011), and "The Present" (2011). He has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions worldwide. In 2001, photographs from Graham’s series "Paintings" were included in the group exhibition "Plateau of Humankind" as part of the 49th Venice Biennale.

Paul Graham’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; European Parliament, Brussels; Arts Council of Great Britain, London; Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Musee de la Photographie, Belgium; Museum Communali, Italy; National Museum of Photography, United Kingdom; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Winnipeg Art Museum, Manitoba, as well as in private collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

For more information about Paul Graham: The Present, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email info2@thepacegallery.com; for reproduction requests, email reprorequest@thepacegallery.com. ]]> PressRelease_520 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 315"&r_referrer=NewsItem&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 315"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
Among the visitors noting Hockney’s transformation from chronicler of poolside California to English Arcadian was Nicholas Serota, director of Tate. “I said to Nick, ‘Would you like it?’ The next stage was seeing it at Tate.” Hockney gifted the painting to the museum in 2008. The same year, he continues, “the RA offered me this whole space, all 10 rooms, for 2011. I took a couple of days to say yes but I said it had to be 2012 – because I needed four springs: first to observe and prepare, then to paint. I’m an opportunist, and I was being given a fantastic opportunity.” So, during three springs he became intensely familiar with the day-to-day changes in the landscape near his home, before, in a few frenetic months last year, painting the 52 works that comprise “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011”.

This vast series is the first to be installed, in the RA’s intimidating Gallery III, and when I arrive Hockney is standing alone contemplating it. “I knew this room is the most difficult to hang,” explains the 74-year-old artist, adding with a wink, “or it has that reputation.” Huddled in black overcoat and grey suit, with tweed cloth cap and scarf, he looks bright and excited, blue eyes shining behind big half-rimmed glasses, skin glowing – he has just returned from taking the waters at a favourite European haunt, the luxurious Brenner’s Hotel in Baden-Baden (he drives there and back so that he can smoke on the journey). I have to trot to keep pace with him as he strides across the echoing gallery, checking the placement and spacing of the cycle that is the exhibition’s centrepiece.

Fifty-one of the works in “The Arrival of Spring” are prints: simplified, boldly coloured, close-up depictions of motifs – from an emerging patch of dandelions to an arch formed by bare branches that is amplified into a tunnel when the foliage grows – observed along a single-track road running from Hockney’s home in Bridlington to Kilham, 10 miles away. “They’re all drawn on an iPad but I drew them knowing that they would be printed to this size – about a metre and a half high – which is possible because of new software; previously they would have pixellated,” says Hockney. Each is titled simply by the date it was made.

The 52nd work is a 15-metre oil painting, Hockney’s largest yet, dramatically stylised, cropped, of purple and ochre tree trunks and outsize luscious leaves seeming to dance across the canvas, which reminds me of Georges Seurat. “I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way,” Hockney says. “But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture.”

If he is painting time, referencing the pastoral tradition which often marks late work – artists from Poussin to Twombly tackled the four seasons in old age – Hockney is, nevertheless, upbeat, evoking each moment of spring as celebration, not elegy. The series is exuberant, joyful: is he as optimistic in life? “Tragedy is a literary concept,” he shoots back. “Is it ever a visual concept? Spring is very energising to me. I was in California for 30 years – you get spring there but it’s very slight – so when you come back the seasons hit you a lot more. I realised there was something I’d missed. Spring is a wonderful event to watch and I’m a very visual person.”

Gregory Evans, Hockney’s former lover and long-term manager of his Los Angeles studio, says of such pictures that “Hockney is painting his boyhood”, and certainly his familiarity with this landscape is crucial. “I take a chair out to the Woldgate and sit down for half an hour – then when you go straight back to the studio you’ve got a hell of a lot in your head. You need to go with a question – it was Bonnard who said he didn’t paint outside because there was too much to see. I was in Giverny last winter, I sat there, looking at the pond, thinking what does the cloud behind the tree look like reflected in the water, I’m going to concentrate on that today. It was only a three-minute walk back to the studio, the memory would be very good for an artist such as Monet. Monet, chain-smoking Monet, began his ‘Nympheas’ in his seventies. I’m sure it gave him 10 years, it’s life-enhancing.”

The Yorkshire wolds are not quite Hockney’s water lilies but, like Monet, he is distilling artistic experiment out of his own secluded world while pursuing themes that are lifelong obsessions. “I need great big spaces, that’s why I went to California, and then why I went to east Yorkshire. I’m a bit claustrophobic, I don’t like crowds, I live by the sea – that’s what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington. But I’m not finished with LA – I tell them there that I’m on location, they understand that in Hollywood.”

In October, he revisited California to paint Yosemite National Park on his iPad; at the Royal Academy, a team including Evans, Hockney’s Parisian assistant Jean-Pierre Gonzales de Lima and the show’s curator Marco Livingstone grapples with how to hang the prints in the small, cramped room Hockney has chosen to riff on “the obvious grandeur of Yosemite – while east Yorkshire gets the big gallery”.

A debate ensues on placing these towering, emphatically vertical compositions depicting Yosemite’s plunging waterfalls and sheer rocks, so big that each took 10 hours to print. “I drew these knowing they would be printed 12ft high; I wouldn’t have done them otherwise. We have to hang them high so you can look up. So ... ” – Hockney surveys the works with a grin – “so, in spite of the financial news, things could be looking up. We had this marvellous mist in Yosemite, very rare, with the clouds below you. You drive out through that tunnel and it’s so spectacular you just put your foot on the brake, everybody does. The thrill is spatial. All landscape is. However good Ansel Adams’s photographs are, they never quite do Yosemite justice.”

Hockney’s love-hate relationship with the camera has lasted his entire career, into what he calls today’s “age post-photographique”, where digital manipulation has enlarged the form’s possibilities but undermined its claim to veracity. His own uses of photography twist unpredictably throughout this show. Two key Californian pictures, for example, “Mulholland Drive: the Road to the Studio” (1980) and “A Closer Grand Canyon” (1998), each anticipating the panoramic Yorkshire views of roads and plains, form its core retrospective element, and when Hockney sets off to inspect their positioning, I ask whether he finds it strange to see these quintessentially American works in London. He edges conspiratorially towards me. “Stranger than you would think – because the original of ‘Mulholland Drive’ is still in LA. This is a copy.” He chuckles at the chutzpah of displaying a seven-metre photographic replica of the earlier work alongside the rich, dense oil painting of the Grand Canyon. Then we move closer. “Up near, of course, you can tell – it’s the physicality. But every part of this show echoes every other, you know.”

Thus he hangs the limpid watercolours of ripe corn and blotchy rain, “Midsummer: East Yorkshire”, his first explorations of 21st-century English landscape, in rows on one wall so that the scenes coalesce into a single image, recalling the effects of 1980s Californian photo-collages such as “Pearblossom Highway”, exhibited nearby. “I’m fascinated by pictorial space, always have been,” says Hockney. “Doing this show, with these spaces in mind, has been a great stimulant.”

In particular, he “began to see that recording the arrival of spring was possible. The snow came, I went out in the car and drew it on the iPad, so I’m warm – I feel the cold intensely because of my thin legs. When I’d done five paintings I realised that using the iPad was a method of recording all the changes I knew would occur. To show spring, you have to show what happens before.”

We return to Gallery III and he stops at “13 January”, depicting the quiet grey road flanked by reddish bare trunks and branches, tapering towards a tunnel of trees shrouded in fog. “This is a normal dull January day but, with the iPad, I could establish the background colour, then I put in two colours in about 30 seconds, then you can draw very quickly, with a wide range. With pencil you don’t have that range, with watercolour you have to mix the colours. With this” – he holds up the turquoise-cased iPad he has clutched throughout our conversation – “you can establish subtleties, little light changes. Even on dull days there is a lot of colour if you really look. The trees only go black when it rains. In February, there’s not much foliage, it’s pretty barren, then you get snowdrops, daffodils. I knew what was going to come. First the leaves, the grasses begin to grow, then the blossom, the blackthorn, hawthorn.”

With the iPad he can meet “nature’s deadline”. He whips it from its case and shows a record of the creation of a painting last week, a wintry view of Woldgate. He shows how he defines the composition with a stylus – “it’s a little more accurate than with the fingers” – then builds detail, effects changes – “you can make the brush bigger, the colour transparent”, and “all from a program that costs £8, and you have everything in your pocket, you don’t even need a pot of water. It’s faster than watercolour or charcoal. Any good draughtsman is interested in speed – you can tell it in Rembrandt’s drawings. Lots of artists would have responded to the iPad – Tiepolo, Van Gogh. There are disadvantages – the loss of resistance; part of drawing with pencil is knowing the resistance from the paper – but the advantages far outweigh them.”

As a virtuoso draughtsman able to master any medium, Hockney is always seeking new challenges. The latest is the moving image: he has set up a mini-cinema at the Royal Academy, and offers me rapid screenings. In one, 18 cameras shoot the drive along Woldgate over a year. “It’s the four seasons in two minutes. It’s about movement – the hawthorn in the wind, very lively, we had to get out quickly to film that. And the cow parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace), the detail there is like Dürer.” In another, Wayne Sleep choreographs a tap dance on a yellow-painted floor – “like the yellow brick road and Dorothy’s shoes – yellow is a colour you hardly ever see on television. Van Gogh says it’s the colour of hope, perhaps that’s why” – filmed by multiple cameras. “Pure joy,” says Hockney, predicting “there’ll be queues to see it”. He eyes me intently as I watch, concluding in triumph: “You’re scanning all the time, no camera is moving – you move. 3D’s not good enough – we’re offering a better solution! The film’s title is ‘A Bigger Space’ – this show’s not just about landscape, you know.”

I don’t think Hockney will revolutionise film; rather, he flirts with other media – as Picasso did with sculpture, or Twombly with photography – to fuel his exploration of painting. At heart, this show demonstrates how he is commanding new technologies, as well as art history, in a countercultural quest to prove that painting, in an age dominated by conceptualism and installation, can be as theatrical and monumental as any 21st-century spectacle.

It’s a truculent, brave view and has already unnerved the Royal Academy, which reckoned it had a safe landscape show on its hands only to find Hockney designing a poster for the exhibition reading “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally” – interpreted, in a Radio Times interview, as a dig at Damien Hirst. On the afternoon I left Burlington House, the RA was fretfully drafting a denial – “David Hockney has not made any comments which imply criticism of another artist’s working practices” – but my last view was of the artist himself, who grew up during the second world war as the son of ostracised Methodist pacifists, cheerfully going his own way, absorbed in the hang of one of his most absurdist paintings, a seven-metre reworking of Claude’s “The Sermon on the Mount”. He has called his version “A Bigger Message”.

David Hockney: ‘A Bigger Picture’, Royal Academy, London, January 21-April 9 (www.royalacademy.org.uk), then Guggenheim, Bilbao and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Sponsored by BNP Paribas ]]> NewsItem_315 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 516"&r_referrer=PressRelease&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 516"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
During the final two years of Jean Dubuffet’s life, his canvases exploded with raw emotion. The artist’s mental landscapes described a non-place, made perceptible by fluid intertwining lines and radiant colors that seem drawn from an alternate reality. “To see the last works,” Murphy writes, “is to see all of Dubuffet, his theories contracted into an energetic force comprised of wild, fluid brushstrokes that appear as if they could escape from the confines of any boundaries imposed upon them.” After twelve years of working on his Hourloupe cycle (the longest series of his career) with a palette of primarily red, blue, and black, contained by thick black outlines, in 1983 Dubuffet unleashed an extended color palette across the canvas, removing the borders and a representational reference point. Nearly twenty works drawn from the final two bodies of work by the artist (Mires and Non-Lieux) will be on view.

From February 1983 to February 1984, Dubuffet painted the Mires series exclusively. These paintings were, as Murphy explains, “the alarm clock that wakes us from dreaming in the language of the Hourloupes,” so that “we are, again, reset.” The “Test Patterns,” as the artist referred to the paintings, were to evoke in viewers a visceral reaction that might rid the mind of the teachings of culture and tradition so as to see them with a naked eye. The Kowloons—a title which references the city in Hong Kong that Dubuffet imagined but never travelled to—are vibrant paintings of blue and red on bright yellow ground. The Boléros, limited to a palette of blue, red, and white, vibrate with the energy of the Spanish and Cuban dance they describe.

Dubuffet’s final series, painted in 1984, were entitled Non-Lieux, a legal term meaning neither guilty nor innocent—in effect, “no verdict.” In a letter to Arne Glimcher towards the end of his life, Dubuffet explained his conception for the paintings:

These paintings were intended to challenge the objective nature of being (être). The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy (fantasme); being is an attribute that the mind assigns to fantasy. One could apply the term ‘nihilism’ to this challenge of being, but it is reverse nihilism, since it confers the power of being on any fantasy whatsoever, given that being is a secretion of our minds.

These paintings are an exercise for training the mind to deal with a being that it creates for itself rather than one imposed upon it. The mind should get rid of the feeling that it alone must change while being cannot change; the mind will train itself to vary being rather than varying itself, the mind will train itself to move through a space in which being is variable and never anything but a hypothesis, the mind will practice using its ability to provide its own fulcrums wherever it wishes, it will learn to rely on illusion, to create the ground on which it walks. The mind will learn how to move through all the various degrees of being, and it will feel at ease when being is undependable, flicks on and off, remains potential, and sleeps or wakes at will. Being and thinking are one and the same.

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) was one of the most enigmatic painters of the twentieth century. A student of the Académie Julian in Paris, he left school in 1918 to pursue an independent form of art education. Like many of his generation in Europe in the wake of World War II, Dubuffet sought artistic authenticity outside of tradition, in the margins of society. He looked to the art of prisoners, psychics, the uneducated, and the insane to liberate his own creativity and coined the term “Art Brut,” a predecessor to outsider art of the late 1940s.

In his lifetime, Jean Dubuffet was the subject of twelve major museum retrospectives including The Museum of Modern Art (1962), which traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London (1966); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966), which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal (1969-70); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1973, 1981). Today, Jean Dubuffet’s work can be found in more than fifty public collections worldwide.

In 1973, Dubuffet established a foundation to preserve and realize his monumental works. The foundation is located in Paris and in Périgny-sur-Yerres, where the Closerie Falbala, a monumental sculpture and the artist’s major work (designated a historic monument in 1998), is situated near the former sculpture studios that house the artist’s architectural models. The Villa Falbala, which Dubuffet built to shelter his Cabinet Logologique, stands at the center of this enormous walled simulacrum of a garden. Paintings and elements from the artist’s production of Coucou Bazar, performed in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, are also on view in Périgny-sur-Yerres.

The Pace Gallery has represented Jean Dubuffet since 1968 and since that time fifteen solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the gallery.

For more information about Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email info2@thepacegallery.com; for reproduction requests, email reprorequest@thepacegallery.com. ]]> PressRelease_516 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 517"&r_referrer=PressRelease&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent Press&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"PressRelease_keywords 517"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
Exhibited side-by-side, Jensen’s colorful and tactile abstract paintings and LeWitt’s minimalist white structures reveal the vastly different outcomes that can arise from similar conceptual foundations. Jensen uses mathematical systems to construct two-dimensional grid paintings and demonstrate color theories, but the work itself is metaphorical, referencing pre-Colombian and Asian cultures, textiles, and divination. LeWitt’s three-dimensional grid sculptures, in contrast, are self-referential, rooted in logic and reality, and governed by mathematical instructions that objectively organize space. The exhibition will include eight paintings by Jensen and eight open geometric structures by LeWitt.

Jensen's intricately organized diagrams reflect his distinctive conceptual approach, begun in the late 1950s when he started to refine his wide-ranging studies of systems and philosophies—from theories of color and light, mathematics, and the Mayan calendar, to scientific formulations—into multicolored checkerboards. The paintings on view, made between 1960 and 1975, include one of Jensen’s largest and most complex works, A la Fin de l’automne (1975). A honeycomb of color, numbers, and symbols, the elements alternate between light and dark, with each square bearing an abstract marker. Jensen had travelled to Brazil and Peru just one year earlier, and the work suggests the pattern of a pre-Colombian tapestry rendered in thick impasto.

In contrast, LeWitt’s austere open structures, made from basic geometrical units arranged according to pre-determined mathematical sequences, reflect their own poetics. A pillar of minimalist and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt helped revolutionize the definition of art in the 1960s with his famous declaration that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Reducing art to its essentials, the cube became the basic modular unit for his artistic inquiry—the “grammatical device” from which his work would proceed. A universally recognizable form that could not be mistaken to represent anything other than itself, the cube eliminated the necessity of inventing another form, allowing the form itself to be used for invention. The exhibition will feature all manner of structures of forms derived from the cube, made out of wood or aluminum and painted white, from between 1971 and 1997, including the ceiling-mounted work Hanging Structure (1992), and a maquette for an outdoor structure similar to those recently featured in the Public Art Fund’s landmark survey exhibition Sol LeWitt Structures: 1965–2006, installed in New York’s City Hall Park from May to December 2011.

Concurrently, Pace has installed a monumental concrete block structure by Sol LeWitt on the roof of its Chelsea gallery at 510 West 25th Street, which is visible from the High Line. The structure, Horizontal Progression (1991), continues LeWitt’s interest in generating variety within self-imposed constrictions, moving only horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to the left or right.

This is the first exhibition to examine in depth the contrasts between Jensen and LeWitt, though the work of the two artists has previously been included in group exhibitions at Pace that explore the connections between artists working over mediums and decades, including Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art (2003) and On the Square (2010). The two artists have been included together in other group exhibitions at museums worldwide, including To Infinity and Beyond: Mathematics in Contemporary Art, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York (2008); Structures of Difference, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2003); Generations of Geometry: Abstract Painting in America since 1930, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1987); Grids, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1972); and Plus by Minus: Today's Half Century, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1968).

For more information about Alfred Jensen/Sol LeWitt: Systems and Transformation, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email info2@thepacegallery.com; for reproduction requests, email reprorequest@thepacegallery.com. ]]> PressRelease_517 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 311"&r_referrer=NewsItem&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 311"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|
Buckingham Palace announced that the 74-year-old Bradford-born painter and photographer would join the select group of individuals who have achieved distinction in the arts, learning, science and public service.

Hockney's appointment follows the death in 2011 of his friend Lucian Freud, the only painter in the order – which has no more than 24 members at one time.

Hockney's selection appeared to confirm the establishment view that he is now seen as the leading British painter of his day. Augustus John and Graham Sutherland were previous members of the exclusive order, which has its own insignia featuring the crown, a laurel wreath and the words in gold lettering "for merit".

Hockney, a smoker who has campaigned for smokers' rights, responded to news of the honour yesterday with a self-deprecating joke. "No comment," he said. "Other than it's nice to know they are not prejudiced against the older smoker."

He recently turned down a request to paint a portrait of the Queen, saying he was too busy painting landscapes, and in 1990 he rejected a knighthood.

"I do not think life is about prizes," he told the Bradford Telegraph and Argus in 2003 when asked about his decision to refuse the KBE. "I put them all in the bottom drawer and leave them there. I don't value prizes of any sort. I value my friends. Prizes of any sort are a bit suspect."

Members of the Order of Merit gather periodically for lunches at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, which are attended by the Queen as well as Prince Philip and Prince Charles, who are both OMs.

Hockney joins the playwright Tom Stoppard, former Speaker Lady Boothroyd and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, who are already members of the order of merit.

Other OMs include the wildlife broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, the financier Lord Rothschild and Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal. Appointments to the order, which was founded in 1902 by King Edward VII, are in the sovereign's personal gift and ministerial advice is not required. Non-Commonwealth honorary members have included Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.

Buckingham Palace announced that John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia, has also been appointed to the order.

Hockney is back living in Yorkshire, but produced some of the most celebrated images of his career in Los Angeles, including what became known as his swimming pool paintings, the most famous of which was A Bigger Splash in 1967.

Other famous works include Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy – a picture of the fashion designer Ossie Clark, his then wife Celia Birtwell and their cat. In the 1970s Hockney was commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival and Metropolitan Opera in New York to design the backdrops for operatic productions.

Hockney is preparing a major new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London called A Bigger Picture, which will feature his vast new landscape paintings and an innovative moving image collage, which harnesses multiple cameras to capture views of the countryside around his home in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, where he went to live in 2005. It was this project that Hockney gave as a reason for not being able to paint the Queen.

"When I was asked I told them I was very busy painting England actually. Her country," he told the BBC last year. He said she would be a "terrific subject" but "I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really."

As well as producing huge canvases, Hockney has produced a series of images drawn using a painting programme on iPads and iPhones. Hockney has said recently that he has more energy now than he did a decade ago.

"I draw flowers every day on my iPhone, and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning," he told Martin Gayford, an art historian who last year published a book of conversations with Hockney called A Bigger Message. "And my flowers last. Not only can I draw them as if in a little sketchbook, I can also then send them to 15 or 20 people, who then get them that morning when they wake up."

Gayford said Hockney would have no problem "gelling" with other members, calling him a brilliant conversationalist "incapable of saying anything boring".

"He has always had an inner certainty that gives him the confidence to challenge orthodoxy about anything he feels strongly about," he said. "That has shown through in his career, including in his decision to take on landscape painting. People said landscape painting was over and he took that as a challenge, as can be seen in this new exhibition."
]]> NewsItem_311 http://thepacegallery.com?q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 309"&r_referrer=NewsItem&r_type=detail&r_details=x_x_x_x_0_x_x_x_x_x_&r_page=x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_&r_search=0~q_title=Now Searching%3ARecent News&q_searches=1&q_q_1=__uid:"NewsItem_keywords 309"|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0| The space was packed with people, and every few seconds a cry of “Bosco!” could be heard through the rabble. A dozen works by Mr. Sodi were on the walls–large rectangles and circles colored deep fuchsia or dark aquamarine or black. They have craggy, cracked, barnacle-covered surfaces, like jumbo-sized knock-off Yves Kleins, or spray-painted Styrofoam.

In the show’s news release, Mr. Sodi declares, “When I am making a painting, I don’t stop. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep after the preparations are made and the first layer is put down. It’s a continuous action, like a performance.” The release mentions Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning. The whole package made him sound intense, aggressive, insatiable.

It was a surprise, then, to find–when introduced to Bosco (everyone calls him Bosco) by a colleague–that he was actually laid-back and low key, a nice guy who seemed almost perplexed by his good fortune. He is tall with slightly long scruffy hair, and was wearing a tight sweater over a collared shirt.

Someone had told us that another New York gallery had been competing to show his work, and so we asked him about that, but he demurred. “Marc Glimcher is my kind of guy,” Bosco said with a smile. “We got along right away when he visited me.”

We asked him about how he makes his work, and he explained that he layers on sawdust, pigment and other materials–”layer on layer on layer on layer,” he said, placing his hands one on top of another–in his Red Hook studio, and then leaves it to dry and crack. “It involves chance,” he told us.

“Bosco!” someone called out from behind us, reaching toward him for a hug. “Congratulations!”
]]> NewsItem_309