PAST EXHIBITION
Robert Motherwell
October 15, 2008—November 22, 2008
Press Release
Robert Motherwell - Open
15 October – 22 November 2008
From October 15th Bernard Jacobson Gallery will stage the most significant exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s work in England since his 1978 Royal Academy retrospective, organised by Norman Rosenthal. The show will feature rarely seen key works from the late Abstract Expressionist’s Open series.
The Open paintings represent one of the two major series on which Motherwell worked over the course of his career. At the start of the series, in 1967, the canvases consisted of singular planes of colour, broken up by minimally rendered lines in loosely rectangular configurations. As the series continued, the works became more complex and more obviously painterly, as Motherwell worked through the possible permutations of such reduced means. The paintings remain suggestive and affective in spite of their simplicity, setting up a play between the dualities of content and absence, spatial recession and the assertion of surface, and yet also providing an arena for the artist to work through what he described as more, “strictly artistic problems, in the viscosity of paint, of color fields, of the skin of the world highly abstracted".
Motherwell had a rare intellectual ability, which not only underpinned his work as a painter but also led him to become one of the leading writers, theorists and advocates of the post-war movement which he named the New York School. Through his interest in philosophy, literature and poetry Motherwell was also able to forge close friendships with the Surrealists and thus, through his art and writing, establish a bridge between the pre-war European avant-garde and the post-war Americans. In so doing, he proved pivotal in establishing key concepts such as automatism and psychoanalysis at the heart of the discourse surrounding American abstraction.
On Motherwell’s death in 1991, Clement Greenberg, the great champion of the New York School, left in little doubt his esteem for the artist, commenting that, "although he is underrated today, in my opinion he was the very best of the Abstract Expressionist painters". This exhibition will reveal Motherwell as one of Abstract Expressionism’s greats, alongside Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning.
In conjunction with the exhibition, 21 Publishing shall be releasing the definitive book on Motherwell’s Open Paintings, with extended essays by leading international critics from both sides of the Atlantic: John Yau, Matthew Collings, Robert Hobbs, Robert Matteson, Donald Kuspit, Mel Gooding and Saul Ostrow.
For images or further information please contact the gallery.
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Bernard Jacobson Gallery
6 Cork Street
London
W1X 3NX
tel +44 (0) 20 7734 3431
fax +44 (0) 20 7734 3277
mail@jacobsongallery.com
www.jacobsongallery.com
Co reg no 0962605
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