April 28, 2023
While at The Anderson this semester, I have had the privilege of unearthing exhibitions and artworks from the gallery’s past such as Kendall Buster’s The Shell That Remains and Yoko Ono’s FLY, both from 1996. As my time acting as The Anderson’s Curatorial Research Intern comes to an end, I decided to stick with the 1990s motif for my last research endeavor: Repicturing Abstraction. This 1995 exhibition was a bold curatorial project that displayed the works of 23 artists at four different art spaces across Richmond, with each site engaging a specific theme regarding contemporary issues of abstraction. My research focused on the six artists whose work was displayed at The Anderson as part of Repicturing Abstraction: Guillermo Kucita, Mel Bochner, Javier Tapia, Per Kirkeby, Guy Corriero, and Rebecca Purdum.
The other Repicturing Abstraction sites included The Marsh Art Gallery at the University of Richmond, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and 1708 Gallery. The Marsh Art Gallery showcased work encompassing the idea of The Abducted Image, with the artists confronting the standard ideas of modernism and the Greenbergian notion of purity in painting. The artists featured at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in From Impulse to Image addressed modernist ideology and artistic expression, but with a twist of using a more representational understanding. Basic Nature, at the 1708 Gallery, dove into the formal qualities of painting that have always been a strong cornerstone for abstraction. Finally, The Anderson’s part in this city-wide collaboration was The Politics of Space. The six artists at The Anderson were concerned with the idea of space and the artworks included in the exhibition investigated the role space plays in contemporary abstraction.
Steven High, the director of The Anderson in the 1990s, was a driving force to help coordinate this extraordinary project. In his essay Politics of Space from the Repicturing Abstraction catalogue, he explored the evolution of abstract painting. In the Greenbergian era of modernism, artists were examining the idea of painting being completely self-referential and considering the painting itself as an object. However the tradition of complete purity in abstract painting was exhausted over the course of the 20th century. According to High, the artists included in the exhibition at The Anderson “relaxed” those ideas and infused more illusionistic qualities, beginning to reference the real world in their paintings instead of seeing them solely as objects.
Guillermo Kuitca is an Argentinian painter whose work in the exhibition plays with an ambiguous sense of space. His piece, Untitled, is a black and white silkscreen of a map with the location withheld from the viewer. From a distance, the silk-screened canvas appears purely abstract with white lines reaching all over, reminiscent of an ant colony you may see in a park. Once the viewer gets closer, the map becomes more evident. With the dislocation of the maps and the painting’s name being “Untitled,” Kucita balances between painting as object and real-world reference.
Mel Bochner is an American abstract/conceptual artist whose career began at the height of abstraction in the 1960s. He uses four panels in his Cartesian Abyss drawing that give the impression they are rotating with an empty square in the middle exposing the white wall behind it. Cartesian Abyss obtains an extreme “push and pull” effect to the viewer’s eye due to the warped perspective grids Bochner drew. Each panel has a different perspective going in different directions and like Kuitca’s Untitled, it dislocates the viewer’s sense of space. The exposed wall in the center of the piece reminds the viewer that what they are looking at is a flat object while the grids and floating squares pull them into a totally different environment.
Hopper by Javia Tapia, a Peruvian artist, is dominated by bright red paint that commands the viewer’s attention. Its full length over two panels stretches to 158 inches with the top three quarters covered completely in red. High describes Hopper as a “theatrical piece” because the dripping red paint suggests a theater curtain. Below the mass of red, the last quarter of the piece is mostly white with quick gestures suggesting objects that are not completely obvious to us. The juxtaposition of the two color blocks gives a sense of depth but not enough for the composition to be considered completely representational.
Politics of Space showcases another painter from the 1960s: Per Kirkeby, a Danish artist who also worked in film, sculpture, and poetry. Like many abstractionists from the 1960s, Kirkeby focused on color and was interested in its metaphysical characteristics. His abstracted landscape paintings conjure the essence of European Neo-Expressionism with assertive brush strokes. Included in Politics of Space at The Anderson, Sophus features this approach in muddled greens and blues. In this landscape, Kirkeby considers the illusionistic aspects of space while investigating the formal qualities of abstraction.
Guy Corriero is a product of modernist ideology in the sense that he is strongly interested in the physicality of paint and there is an intense labor that goes into his work. There is a build-up and reduction process that Corriero uses through a chalk-based material and oil paint. There are certain areas where he will sand down the chalk and build up the oil paint to enhance the texture of a surface. Here, the illusion of space is in the actual physical accrual of the materials on the surface. Corriero’s Untitled reveals that process.
The last artist of the six from The Anderson exhibition is Rebecca Purdum. Purdum also works with grand, exciting strokes and her technique communicates ghostly atmospheres. Listen for the Door conveys a feeling of absence in the way the colors fade into each other; the ambience reminds me of Rothko. High compares the feeling and technique of Purdum’s painting to the late abstractions of Monet. The various swaths of saturated color give a push and pull effect, infusing Listen for the Door with a spatial quality. The title also gives the viewer the opportunity to interpret a more representational image.
While the 1970s may have marked the end of modernism, the qualities of modernism will never go away. It is exciting to see how abstract artists interpret the ideas of older painters and expand upon their discoveries to make new and thought-provoking work, as was the case in the four-site exhibition Repicturing Abstraction. One of my favorite painters, Frank Stella, talks about the exhausted flat painting notion of Clement Greenberg and how there was nowhere else to go but to think about the spatial qualities of abstract painting in his lectures from Working Space. The artists in Repicturing Abstraction: Politics of Space do just that, exploring dislocation and dissociation of space in the artworks that were exhibited at The Anderson.
Sources:
Danto, Arthur Coleman. “Repicturing abstraction.” Richmond, Va.: Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1995.
Stella, Frank. Working Space. Harvard University Press, 1986.