Fourth Dimension
ISBN: 978-1-955260-69-5
Front Cover: Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery
Title Page: Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery
Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery September 20 - December 2, 2022
Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9E, New York, NY 10001 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555 DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery
Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers
All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC.
Artwork: © 1964 - 1965 - Dean Fleming Catalogue: © 2022 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Artwork © Dean Fleming Images by Yao Zu Lu
DAVID RICHARD GALLERY
Drawings: Graphite on Paper, 1960s through 2000s
DEAN FLEMING Fourth Dimension
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Fourth Dimension, a solo exhibition by Dean Fleming (born 1933, Santa Monica, California) focused primarily on seminal paintings from 1965 that evoked myriad changes in not only the artist’s approach to painting, including the scale, compositions, and pallets, but also where he produced and exhibited these works. This is the first presentation of these important paintings in over fifty years, all sourced from the artist’s studio, and a rare opportunity to map the artist’s thinking and progression toward a possible Fourth Dimension. Artworks from the prior year, 1964, are presented as a reference and contrast to emphasize the aesthetic and conceptual shift in Fleming’s studio practice by 1965.
The transformative change in Fleming’s aesthetic during 1964 and 1965 is best characterized as a move from rigorously geometric tessellations and colorful patterning to more reductive, hard edge compositions with minimal palettes and extreme vector angles rooted in both formal and conceptual concerns noted herein.
The current presentation includes ten canvases from 1965: five large (mostly 70 x 90 and 65 x 100 inches in horizontal orientations) and five smaller (32 x 32 inches square) as well as six representative artworks from 1964: two paintings on canvas (82 x 82 and 44 x 44 inches installed on the diagonal as diamond shapes) and smaller gouache paintings on paper (roughly 4.5 inches square to 4 x 6 inches) as a comparison and contrast between each year.
The paintings from 1965 were originally presented in New York at Park Place Gallery in lower Manhattan in a two-person show with Dean Fleming and Tony Magar that inaugurated the gallery’s new location on West Broadway. Fleming’s very large painting, 2 V Dwan 2, 1965-66, an orange, blue, black, and white acrylic painting comprised of three canvases, each 99 x 66 inches with overall dimensions of 66 x 297 inches, was presented in the exhibition Systemic Painting, organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1966 and published in the corresponding catalog. The painting was named for Virginia Dwan, an early enthusiast, patron and supporter
of Fleming and other founding members of the Park Place Gallery. That same painting was then exhibited in 1967 at the Friends of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado and purchased by a Denver collector. The painting is now in the collection of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A subset of Fleming’s paintings from 1965 were also presented in 1973 in a solo exhibition at Wilamaro Gallery located in Denver, Colorado. The gallery was run by Carol Schwartz-Steinberg, the daughter of Vera List, an art collector, who alongside Virginia Dwan, Allen and Betty Guiberson, J. Patrick Lannan, and John and Lupe Murchison, fi nanced Park Place Gallery in exchange for receiving artworks annually from each of the founding members. List acquired one of Fleming’s paintings from that Denver exhibition, which eventually ended up in the collection of the The New School in New York City.
Many of the paintings from this series of works from 1965 were acquired and placed in museums and signifiant private collections. Snap Roll, 1965, originally acquired by James Michener, along with another painting acquired by Betty Blake, are both now in the collection of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Larry Aldrich acquired two of the paintings for his museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Other notable collectors of Fleming’s artworks include: Arthur Ashman, Paula Cooper, Mark diSuvero, Carl Groos, Jack Stuart Kern, Frank Sinatra, among others.
The inspiration for Fleming’s move to the open, hard edge and minimalist compositions in 1965 had been brewing for quite some time. He had a deep interest in understanding the complexities of, and picturing, space in multiple dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas, and was fascinated by the concept and potential of the Fourth Dimension. Both concepts were also long held interests of the founding artist members of the Park Place group, which brought the group together initially in California and later when they formed the collective and exhibition space in lower Manhattan.
Fleming’s Artist Statement Published in the Systemic Painting Catalog:
After considering Fleming’s inspiration for the important series of paintings produced in 1965 as well as the aesthetic and conceptual influences on the compositions, it is interest-
ing to look back at his artist statements from 1965 and 1966 published in the catalog for the Systemic Painting exhibition, and specifically noting the following (Alloway, Lawrence, Systemic Painting, 1966, Guggenheim, p23 ):
I am working in the area of the totally primal and available. Geometry, optics, science and psychology are here used only as tools and, therefore, have only a relative bearing on the significance of the work. [. . .]
In an effort to clarify the subject I have used only straight lines. Most of these paintings can objectively be defined by saying that they are composed of one or two points within the canvas and the connection of these points to the outer edg es.
This approach to the work yields nothing whatsoever and we must venture further to reach significant under- standing. [ . .]
I use color because of its relativity to the human eye and believe in color and not color dogma.
Formally they contain the tensions and lucid changes that exist between the diagonal and the horizontal and vertical. We are already aware of the passivity of the horizontal, the ascension and descension of the vertical, and the dynamics of the diagonal. [. . .]
The subject of art is ultimately spiritual. That vibrant aspect of the nature of existence which demands to be created though it is not called for. Still this new work is utilitarian in that it serves to extend the consciousness of space and time, a necessity for the psychic survival of every new society. Now, when basic forms and primary colors have the strength and velocity to communicate a new dimension, it is the spirit of our times an artist expresses rather than the fact.
David Eichholtz November 2022 New York
65 Green Red Yellow, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 32 x 32 inches
Dean Fleming
65 Black Blue Red White, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 65.5 x 99 inches
Dean Fleming
65 Black Yellow Red , 1965 Acrylic on canvas 66 x 98.5 inches
Dean Fleming 65 Black , 1965 Acrylic on canvas 32 x 32 x 1 inches
65 Green Mauve Black , 1965 Acrylic on canvas 31 x 31 inches
Dean Fleming 65 , 1965
Acrylic on canvas 66 x 98.5 inches
Dean Fleming
65 Black White Red , 1965
Acrylic on canvas 65.5 x 99 inches
Dean Fleming
65 Yellow White and Black, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 70 x 89.5 inches
Dean Fleming
Untitled (1965 Green ), 1965 Acrylic on canvas 34.25 x 34.25 inches
Dean Fleming 65 Purple , 1965 Acrylic on canvas 32 x 32 inches
Dean Fleming
Broome Street , 1964 Gouache on paper 4.125 x 6.125 inches
Orange Line , 1964 Gouache on paper 4.5 x 4.5 inches
Dean Fleming West Broadway , 1964 Gouache on paper 4.4 x 4 inches
Dean Fleming
Papados, Greece , 1964
Acrylic on canvas 82 x 82 inches
Dean Fleming Tunis , 1964
Gouache on paper 4.5 x 4.5 inches
Dean Fleming Djidjeli , 1964 Gouache on paper
Dean Fleming Serbija , 1964 Gouache on paper
5 x 5 inches
Dean Fleming Tangier , 1964 Gouache on paper5
Dean Fleming Oran , 1964
Gouache
on
paper 5 x 5 inches
About Dean Fleming:
Fleming studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. There, he met and developed life-long friendships with Peter Forakis, Leo Valledor and Mark di Suvero. He shared a studio with Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Bill Brown and Forakis and “poured” himself “into the West Coast version of abstract expressionism”. During that period he regularly exhibited at the Six Gallery and Batman Gallery in San Francisco.
Fleming moved to New York in 1961 and was a founding member of the Park Place Gallery, an important artist collective and exhibition venue for experimental art in New York in the 1960s. The founding members were interested in working in diverse materials and approaches in painting and sculpture to explore their mutual interest in literal and illusory space, music and social concerns. Fleming’s painting at that time was minimalist, hard edge and geometric with a reductive palette. In 1966, he was included in the important exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Systemic Painting”, organized by Lawrence Alloway.
Moving to the Rocky Mountains in 1967 and founding Libre, an artist community, Fleming started a new chapter in his career. His extensive international travels to Europe, Northern Africa, Latin America and Asia and fascination with diverse cultures and artistic practices continued to inspire and inform his artwork as he explored gestural abstraction, calligraphic and Zen-inspired gestures, and the symbology and natural dyes of Indigenous peoples in North and South America.
Fleming’s artworks are included in the collections of the following museums:
Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania
Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado
Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C
Denver Museum of Art, Colorado
Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana
J.P. Lannan Museum, Palm Beach, Florida
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California Nelson-Adkins Gallery, Kansas City, MO
The New School for Social Research, New York, New York Oakland Museum, California
San Francisco Art Institute, California
Tyler Museum, Tyler, Texas
