Co-curated with Al Calderaro
October 21 – December 4, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, October 21, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
1708 Gallery is pleased to present Myron Helfgott: The Ultimate Show, a spirited installation surveying the late artist’s prolific career.
The Ultimate Show samples Helfgott’s wide-ranging exploration of media and features sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, and kinetic and audio works from across his career. These easy descriptors are misleading though as few of his works are neatly categorized. Paintings are three dimensional. Photographs are cut-up or marked on. Sculpture is the consistent thread as many of his works are meant to be experienced as objects that demand and command space.
Just as he worked across multiple media, Helfgott likewise drew on a breadth of sources, like Zen Buddhism and art history, injecting his sense of humor into every subject and simultaneously exalting and undermining his chosen subject matter. He wove fragments of memories and moments of self-reflection into each object and the body of work that resulted captured an intelligent and soulful, yet wholly irreverent, view of the world. To survey the breadth of his career is to glimpse inside the mind of a tinkerer and thinker and to experience humor and pathos, provocation and invitation at every turn.
Myron Helfgott (1936-2020) was a professor in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. He joined the faculty in 1968, when Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia merged to become VCU, and taught until 2003, serving as the Chair of the Sculpture and Extended Media Department from 2001 to 2003. Before earning his MFA from Southern Illinois University, he studied architecture and worked with R. Buckminster Fuller. Helfgott was the recipient of a Pollak Award from Richmond Magazine, grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His work, which incorporates audio, kinetics, and photography, appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1998, he participated in the prestigious “Un/Common Ground” show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Helfgott exhibited internationally in Tokyo, Lima, and Glasgow, and his work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Longwood Center for the Visual Arts.
For more information, please visit 1708GALLERY.ORG
IMAGE CREDIT: Myron Helfgott, Courtesy of Al Calderaro.