Lines and Planes and Space

“One day, I asked Judd if he had a project he wanted to do, and he said, ‘Yes, a piece that is simple but complex — no screws or bolts, just a single piece of metal…’
But he immediately warned me: ‘…it is expensive to do; we need to order 200 meters minimum of extruded aluminum.’ This did not frighten me at all, quite the contrary. I was thrilled to undertake this adventure with Don. And so it happened. The process took two years to finish. The result was a wonderful piece conceptually condensed into a typical Judd.”
Jörg Schellmann

“Judd sought explicitness and intelligibility, not content. The intake of clear vision would be content enough, could it be achieved. And that experience would not exclude perceptual illusion, contrary to what some critics have said, but would set illusion plainly against the stable background that supports it.”
Kenneth Baker

In 1991, Donald Judd created a series of works in aluminum. As opposed to his other works (often constructed from multiple elements of wood, metal, and/or acrylic sheeting that were attached together), this piece was created by pressing heated aluminum through a die (a process called extrusion) to create a specific form, with the dimensions of 15 x 105 x 15 centimeters. This extruded aluminum form was then anodized. Judd chose the anodizing process as opposed to other painting methods because he liked “the color to be in the material” and that, “Anodized aluminum, even though it’s a surface, too, is a little better to me, because at least a little layer of it is color in the material” (from an interview by Angeli Janhsen for “Donald Judd,” Kunstverein St. Gallen, Switzerland, 1990). Judd considered color, material, and space to be the main aspects of visual art. In this 1991 work, these elements (and their processes of fabrication) have been chosen carefully so as to create a specific and unified experience with light, openness, shadow, and solidity.

“Gego’s art is less transformation than salvation, both mechanical and sublime.”
Roberta Smith, New York Times, October 8, 2015

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), born in Hamburg, Germany in 1912, graduated from the University of Stuttgart in 1938 with two degrees: engineering and architecture. Forced to flee with the advent of World War II, she moved to Venezuela, settling in Caracas in 1939. Afters years of working in design, Gego committed fully to her artistic career by 1953. At that time, geometric abstraction was becoming a sign of artistic modernity in Venezuela, as evidenced by the growing international reputations of a number of now famous Venezuelan artists. Gego quickly found success both in Caracas and internationally: MoMA purchased a work in 1959 [with numerous other purchases to follow], she exhibited at Betty Parsons, starting in 1960 and exhibited throughout Europe.

“Relations of lines created neither from the reality of seeing nor from the reality of knowing.”
Gego

Gego developed a signature approach to art-making primarily through the use of a single element: the line. With an engagement of repetition and disruption, along with the use of the space between lines not as a background but as an active place, Gego made the work currently on exhibit by making simple linear marks to create a composition that, with no actual borders, contain a semi-spherical volume and yet it has more of a presence than a defined shape. The artist’s work can create illusions, similar to the dynamism in the work of Bridget Riley or Jésus Rafael Soto and also keeps a quiet delicacy, like that in Agnes Martin’s work (n.b.: Riley and Soto were, in fact, younger than her and Martin was older, but by mere months). Gego spent a lifetime exploring the potentials of arranged, assembled and juxtaposed lines in space.

“Gego: Measuring Infinity” opens at the Guggenheim in New York on March 31 and runs through September 12.

Sol LeWitt hand-worked the large-scale copper plates for his 1973 seven-part etching project, “Straight, Not-Straight and Broken Lines in All Horizontal Combinations (Three Kinds of Lines & All Their Combinations).” On one plate, he drew straight horizontal lines, on the second, not-straight lines, and on the third, dashes (broken lines). The density/frequency of lines is consistent across all three elements. While the last four pieces in the work have all the combinations of these three types of lines (single types, combos of two types, and one with all three types), LeWitt kept the density consistent and so no sheet or line-type calls out for more attention than another. When hung sequentially, the seven elements are discrete, interchangeable, personal, and universal. LeWitt’s line quality is anonymous to many and yet entirely particular to others. All these combinations, juxtapositions, contradictions, surprises, variations, etc., point towards a central tenet of LeWitt’s work: informed equality.

“Marden’s idea was to create a very physical print, one which had body, substance, and an intensity of colour comparable to his paintings. By referring to the plates on which they were made, the title of the series emphasizes the objectness of the images.”
Jeremy Lewison

Brice Marden’s untitled work from 1973 is from his project collectively titled, “Five Plates.” The largest editioned work the artist had made up until that point, the “Five Plates” are, while monochromatic, Marden’s most painterly prints. While this may seem surprising given the seemingly bold, and rectilinear imagery, the actual texture of the ink shows intense variation, much akin to Marden’s paintings of the time, yet thoroughly engaged with the printing process (as opposed to trying to mimic the texture of paint on canvas).

The three ”sections” of the composition in “Untitled” each have a distinct weight to them and by juxtaposing these variations, a viewer is able to explore and thus appreciate the different amounts of “work” done to each section. The three parts together make the dynamic and powerful work that is on view.

Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in isolation. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the busy city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art that was imbued with beauty, openness and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were “On a Clear Day.” Shortly after finishing the project, she resumed her painting practice, which she continued until she passed away in 2004.

In 2008, the curator, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair & Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote the following about Martin and this project:

As with all of her mature work, the prints of “On a Clear Day” take as their subject matter the grid, rendered with an astonishing diversity of expression, focused with severe rigor yet compositionally and interpretatively open. About her grids, Martin famously said, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles . . . . When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Elsewhere, she explained that the grid came to her as an inspiration. “I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind—that grid . . . . So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent.” Martin’s grid of rectangles, as one critic noted, “eradicated the hierarchical balancing of parts. The effect was not only a surface in perfect equilibrium, but one that epitomized unity and wholeness.” While her grid was early on interpreted as a purified analog of nature, Martin vigorously rejected this reading. “My work is anti-nature,” she declared. “[It] is about emotion—not personal emotion [but] abstract emotion. It’s about those subtle moments of happiness we all experience.” She succinctly defined art as “the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its individual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.

Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in isolation. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the busy city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art that was imbued with beauty, openness and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were “On a Clear Day.” Shortly after finishing the project, she resumed her painting practice, which she continued until she passed away in 2004.

In 2008, the curator, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair & Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote the following about Martin and this project:

As with all of her mature work, the prints of “On a Clear Day” take as their subject matter the grid, rendered with an astonishing diversity of expression, focused with severe rigor yet compositionally and interpretatively open. About her grids, Martin famously said, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles . . . . When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Elsewhere, she explained that the grid came to her as an inspiration. “I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind—that grid . . . . So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent.” Martin’s grid of rectangles, as one critic noted, “eradicated the hierarchical balancing of parts. The effect was not only a surface in perfect equilibrium, but one that epitomized unity and wholeness.” While her grid was early on interpreted as a purified analog of nature, Martin vigorously rejected this reading. “My work is anti-nature,” she declared. “[It] is about emotion—not personal emotion [but] abstract emotion. It’s about those subtle moments of happiness we all experience.” She succinctly defined art as “the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its individual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.

<p align=”justify”>Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in isolation. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the busy city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art that was imbued with beauty, openness and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were “On a Clear Day.” Shortly after finishing the project, she resumed her painting practice, which she continued until she passed away in 2004.

<p align=”justify”>In 2008, the curator, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair &amp; Curator of Prints &amp; Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote the following about Martin and this project:

<p align=”justify”><em>As with all of her mature work, the prints of “On a Clear Day” take as their subject matter the grid, rendered with an astonishing diversity of expression, focused with severe rigor yet compositionally and interpretatively open. About her grids, Martin famously said, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles . . . . When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Elsewhere, she explained that the grid came to her as an inspiration. “I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind—that grid . . . . So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent.” Martin’s grid of rectangles, as one critic noted, “eradicated the hierarchical balancing of parts. The effect was not only a surface in perfect equilibrium, but one that epitomized unity and wholeness.” While her grid was early on interpreted as a purified analog of nature, Martin vigorously rejected this reading. “My work is anti-nature,” she declared. “[It] is about emotion—not personal emotion [but] abstract emotion. It’s about those subtle moments of happiness we all experience.” She succinctly defined art as “the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its individual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.</em>