S E I DAR
N U O B O N
SCULPTURES BY THIRTEEN WOMEN
Magdalena Abakanowicz Alice Aycock Lynda Benglis Deborah Butterfield Petah Coyne Lesley Dill Louise Nevelson Michele Oka Doner Beverly Pepper Judy Pfaff Davina Semo Kiki Smith Ursula von Rydingsvard
S E I DAR
N U O BO
N
SCULPTURES BY THIRTEEN WOMEN MARCH 8 - APRIL 1, 2017
Marlborough Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of thirteen women sculptors entitled No Boundaries, with works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis, Deborah Butterfield, Petah Coyne, Lesley Dill, Michele Oka Doner, Louise Nevelson, Beverly Pepper, Judy Pfaff, Davina Semo, Kiki Smith and Ursula von Rydingsvard. These thirteen artists are recognized for the independence and singularity of their respective visions. Each artist has produced bodies of work that have broken new aesthetic ground while categorically redefining the per missible boundaries of sculptural experience and creative expression. The collective artists’ oeuvre spans a significant portion of 20th and 21st Century sculpture; the exhibited works through their diverse character exemplify the individual artist’s shared commitment to the object, physicality and the challenge of overcoming for malized esthetic boundaries. In furtherance of the No Boundaries exhibition title this catalog does not offer an essay or other third party interpretations of the artists’ work. Instead please find an array of artist quotations addressing subjects specific to the artists’ perspectives of their own work, creative processes and world views.
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MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ b. 1930
“Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.” “It is easy to follow, but it is uninteresting to do easy things. We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question.” “Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.”
Born in Falenty, Poland, Magdalena Abakanowicz studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1950 to 1954. Over the course of her fifty-year career, Magdalena Abakanowicz has developed a number of site-specific sculpture installations that incorporate multiple figures and elements of increased scale. She has had over 150 solo exhibitions in Europe, North and South America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia with major solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Jardins du Palais Royal, Paris, France; and Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan, ´ Poland. Abakanowicz has won numerous awards throughout her artistic career including Grand Prix São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo, Brazil (1965); Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts, World Cultural Council, Mexico City, Mexico (1997); Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, Rome, Italy (2000); Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Republique francaise, Paris, France (2004); the Lifetime Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, NJ (2005); and the Das Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin, Germany (2010). In addition to these awards, Abakanowicz holds seven honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the United States. Abakanowicz’s work can be found in many public international collections, which include Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, Italy; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France; Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw, Poland; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
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War Games “Marrow Bone”, 1987 wood and iron, 59 x 137 3/4 x 31 1/2 in, 149.9 x 349.9 x 80 cm 3
A L I C E AY C O C K b. 1946
“How incredible it is, now, young women go to school, and they have female role models….There’s this knowledge pool out there that we can all take part in.…Now that science has allowed us not to be at the mercy of our biological fate. To me it’s really more about being a role model for younger women, and that should speak for itself. I hope so. Just like Louise Nevelson was a role-model for me.” “It seems possible to imagine a complex [sculptural assemblage] which exists in the world as a thing in itself, generating the conditions of its own becoming, and which exists apart from the world as a model for it, exposing the conditions of its own artifice, a complex which undercuts its own logic by exposing the premise on which it was built, underpinning and undermining, drawing in and then distancing the spectator from the work in a theatre of theatre which is both true and false.”
Alice Aycock’s works can be found in numerous collections including MoMA, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; Omi International Arts Center, Ghent, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and The Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany. A traveling retrospective was organized by the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany (1983) and a retrospective was held at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY (1990). In 2013, a retrospective of her drawings and small sculptures was exhibited at Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York coinciding with the Grey Art Gallery retrospective in New York City, NY. She has major large-scale works throughout the country, including East River Roundabout adjacent to the FDR, New York, NY; JFK Airport, Queens, NY; San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA; the waterfront in Nashville, TN; and Dulles International Airport, Dallas, TX. Recent major installations include Coral Gables, FL and MGM National Harbor, MD. A series of sculptures were installed on Park Avenue, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase in 2014. MIT Press published the artist’s first hardcover monograph, entitled Alice Aycock, Sculpture and Projects, authored by Robert Hobbs in 2005. The artist lives and works in New York.
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The Riddle of the Flying Saucer #1, 2015 aluminum, 24 x 23 x 22 in., 60.1 x 58.4 x 55.9 cm edition of 3
LY N D A B E N G L I S b. 1941
“I certainly don’t think of myself as anything in particular, except as an artist or sculptor expressing ideas. I’m certainly riding different waves and trying to be more acquainted with the different kinds of ideas that confront me in our moment of history and society. But you can’t please everybody all the time, and I don’t even try. I try to please myself, within the situation, or the idea, or the material or the context.” “I’m making the bones; the material is the flesh. Or I could say I’m making the surface that the skin rests on. I’m beholden to gravity so I have to work over several days, constantly turning the form in the air, in space. Then I hang it on the wall according to how I like to look at it—the form tells me which are its front, back, and sides.” “Well, I became the material—much like Pollock or Frankenthaler described it, or any of the artists who were physically involved with the viscosity of their materials and how they went onto the surface. My surface was the floor, or the wall, or the room. The ritual happened through knowing a lot about my material, and how I was to display it within the space and context offered to me, whether it was a gallery or a museum.”
Lynda Benglis was first recognized in the late sixties for her poured latex and foam works. Benglis’s work created a perfectly timed retort to the male dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen. Lynda Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe and Ahmedabad, India. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s work is in extensive public collections including: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San MN and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
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© Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Figure 5, 2009 bronze, black patina, 74 x 99 x 39 in, 188 x 251.5 x 99.1 cm edition of 3 7
DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD b. 1949
“The first time I saw a horse—I don’t think I could talk yet—it filled my eyes and my heart, and spoke to me without language. I have tried to explain this, but words fail me. I hope that by standing next to my work you can feel the calm I feel around horses, the power and order through your skin and in your belly. The horse has been my focus and artistic practice for more than 40 years; my conversation with horses has lasted just as long. Vicki Hearne in Animal Happiness states, ‘There are people who describe training as a process of discussing with animals the attributes of God, a discussion in which the human listens as much as she talks.’ I find the progressive training of a horse so similar to studio work: There are questions, struggles, repetition, and hopefully resolution and satisfaction. Hearne also said, ‘I never encountered a horse in whose soul there was no harmony to call on.’ I have used different materials in my work to invoke different states of being, both physical and mental. Steel, copper, lead, bronze, driftwood, hardwood, burned wood—all have different character, strengths and weaknesses, and line quality. Finding my way in the studio is like dealing with different personalities. I love the variety and expressiveness of different materials and horses, and hope that my work transmits this joy.”
Deborah Butterfield first began creating sculpture in the form of a horse in the 1970’s using mud, clay and sticks. In 1977, she moved to a ranch in Montana and in 1979 began using scrap metal and found steel. For the past decade, she has been making bronze work, cast from “stray, downed pieces of wood.” Born and raised in San Diego, Deborah Butterfield received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Davis. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, she taught sculpture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at Montana State University, Bozeman. Since 1976, she has exhibited extensively with solo shows at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL; Madison Art Center, Madison, WI; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT; The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, HI; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Tucson Museum of Art, Tuscon, NM; and Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, among
Her work is included in numerous public collections including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; Cincinnati Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Walker Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
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© Deborah Butterfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
others.
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Rosey, 2016 found steel, 39 1/2 x 48 x 14 in, 100.3 x 121.9 x 35.6 cm
P E TA H C O Y N E b. 1953
“It’s the same thing with the work, and this is where I differ from a lot of other sculptors, I do not separate the piece from the space. It is one and the same to me. Sculpture is about that space. I have to place my work. Where it’s placed is imperative to everything, and the scale and whole space are involved… But if you’re always trying to control your vision, which is what you’re trying to do, or always inflicting your passion on that vision, on that piece, it is a huge job. I’ve done incredible note taking of every piece, every place, the height of the ceiling, where we hung it, so that people can get a sense of it, because I need to have this piece be in your face, be aggressive, but at the same time extremely vulnerable. That’s part of the process of making it.” “All of my pieces seem fragile. But that is deceiving, because they’re all begun with steel understructures. Yet I want each one to look incredibly delicate and to have that feminine sense of appearing soft and seductive. But as any number of women have shown, we have an internal strength and drive that is hard to fathom.”
Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Described as the “queen of mixed media” in Artforum magazine, she interweaves disparate and unorthodox materials—trees, human hair, scrap metal, silk flowers, religious statuary, and taxidermy— to create sculptures that are both precise in their attention to detail and baroque in their emotional range. Literature, film, art history and the depths of an individual’s soul are all springboards for Coyne’s incessant and unrelenting imagination. In Coyne’s hands, materials, like our lived experiences, are endlessly re-purposed and reborn into something new. She is the past recipient of grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Coyne’s sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions. Her work resides in numerous permanent museum collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki, Finland, and many others. The artist lives and works in New York City.
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Untitled #1378 (Zelda Fitzgerald), 1997-2013 specially-formulated wax, silk flowers, candles, acrylic paint, pigment, white pearl-headed hat pins, artificial pearl strands, cast-wax statuary figure, cast-wax hand sculptures, ribbon, knitting needles, steel rods, chicken-wire fencing, washers, fabric, thread, wire, horse hair, Masonite, plywood, drywall, plaster, glue, filament, rubber, steel, wood and metal screws, maple, laminated LuxarÂŽ 81 3/16 x 35 3/4 x 35 3/4 in., 206.2 x 90.8 x 90.8 cm 11
LESLEY DILL b. 1950
“I thought, “You know, I can make clothing that is delicate and fragile and still have a feeling of strength for sculpture.” And it wasn’t a thought, it was like an, ‘ah ha!’ moment – you know and you just do it, you don’t think of the answer.”
Lesley Dill is recognized for using a variety of media and techniques to explore themes of language, the body, and transformational experience through sculpture, photography, and performance. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Drawing Award in the Printmaking Category, and a National Endowment for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship. Dill has had solo shows at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, NY, CU Art Galleries, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; Scottsdale Museum for Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; and Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC. In addition to her sculpture and works on paper, Lesley Dill is also known for her performance work and public projects. Most recently, in 2015, Dill’s Drunk With the Starry Void was performed by Pamela Ordonez and animations by Laura Oxendine as part of the exhibit Lesley Dill: Performance as Art at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibit included 20 years of performance works, costumes, videos and, imagery. She is currently working on a second opera for 2018 with The New Camerata Opera. Her work can be found in the collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others. Dill lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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Wonderstruck, 2006 cast bronze, unique, 36 x 13 x 11 in., 91.4 x 33 x 27.9 cm
LOUISE NEVELSON 1899 - 1988
“I think art is tough and naturally an artist is sensitive and tough all at once. It’s like a beautiful instrument that has the fortissimo and the pianissimo. You can’t be shouting all the time; you can’t be whispering all the time. Man has that range and I think that the more magnificent the range and the bigger the range, the more you get the extreme that there is where great art would lie.” “Well, let’s begin first to say that in birth a male has his not only sensibility but a male has what constitutes a male. A female has what constitutes a female. So let’s accept that and from that premise state that a female cannot work like a male, and a male does not work like a female. But that does not reduce the preconceived idea that we are in a society and have been for thousands of years where there is male dominance and consequently that is just a cliche that the world has superimposed that a female cannot produce or have visions of grandeur and greatness, that nature never meant that anyone who has a brain in their head that they should be reduced because of the sex.”
Louise Nevelson moved to New York City in 1920, where she later studied at the Art Students League (1929–30) under the tutelage of Kenneth Hayes Miller. She continued her education by studying with Hans Hofmann in Munich and working as an assistant to Diego Rivera prior to participating in her first group exhibition organized by the Secession Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum in 1935. As a part of the Works Progress Administration, Nevelson taught art at the Education Alliance School of Art and received her first solo exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York City. During the mid-Fifties she produced her first series of black wood landscape sculptures. Shortly thereafter, three New York City museums acquired her work: Whitney Museum of American Art purchased Black Majesty (1956), Brooklyn Museum purchased First Personage (1957), and Museum of Modern Art purchased Sky Cathedral (1958). Her work is in many public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The Netherlands; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
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Untitled, 1976 - 1978 wood painted black, 72 x 48 x 8 1/2 in., 182.8 x 121.9 x 21.6 cm
MICHELE OKA DONER b. 1945
“People say sometimes, with surprise, ‘You use so many different materials, you make so many different things… Well, of course. Why wouldn’t you? Why do people feel they need to stake a claim in a small arena?” “For me, it’s the idea and the application that are important—I’m not devoted to one material. Materiality is very fluid, it’s very flexible. And it does take a long time to master materials, but I have been working a long time, and it keeps expanding.”
Michele Oka Doner is inspired by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world from which she derives her formal vocabulary. She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Zeitgeist Award, Design Triennial, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (2006), and Honorary Doctorates from New York School of Interior Design and University of Michigan. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; Nymphenburg Palace, Munich, Germany; Christofle, Paris, France; Studio Stefania Miscetti, Rome, Italy; and Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Oka Doner’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; Centre Pompidou Library, Paris, France; Les arts decoratifs, Le Louvre, Paris, France; Simone Handbag Museum, Seoul, South Korea; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. The artist lives and works in New York.
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Without the Reef, 2016 wax to be cast in bronze, 80 x 28 x 32 in., 203.2 x 71.1 x 81.2 cm
B E V E R LY P E P P E R b. 1922
“I go to my studio every day. Some days the work comes easily. Other days nothing happens. Yet on the good days the inspiration is only an accumulation of all the other days, the nonproductive ones” “I don’t believe that you cannot put content into art. The content is in yourself.” “Many people think my work is very spiritual. Many people. Most people who think about it. And I remember my first show of the Moline Markers. Pincus Whitten, Robert Pincus Whitten, came to the gallery, and we were alone. And he said to me, ‘Beverly, where’s the organ music?’ It took me two beats to figure out what he was talking about. Because there isn’t—I’m not only not religious, I’m anti-religions. I’m not anti-spiritual. And people ask how I get that spiritual effect in my work. I haven’t any idea. I know I work until I feel the space outside the sculpture exists. My sculpture might be like this. But I’ll keep going until there’s something I can’t explain that’s there. But I have no idea how you put it in. I have no— But I don’t think content is something that you can—that’s mental achievement. It’s something— I think it comes from—these auras come from someplace else. I haven’t any idea how it works.”
Beverly Pepper has created numerous site-specific sculptures, sculptural environments, and major commissions for both public and private spaces, beginning with Icarus, Festival dei Due Mondi, Spoleto, Italy (1962); Messenger Series for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York, NY (1983); Sol y Ombra Park, Barcelona, Spain (1986); Cleopatra’s Wedge, Battery Park, New York, NY (1993); Denver Monoliths, permanently installed at the entry plaza of the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (2006); and Galileo’s Wedge, Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2009). Her works can be found in major museums throughout the world including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Galleri Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in Todi, Italy and New York, New York.
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Octavia, 2014 Cor-Ten steel, 30 1/2 x 26 x 24 in., 77.5 x 66 x 60.1 cm edition of 4
J U D Y P FA F F b. 1946
“The drawings, sculptures, and installations develop over time. Installations evolve over months. They tell different kinds of stories, so they’re not so much one moment. They’re a sequence of moments."
Judy Pfaff was born in London, England, in 1946. She received a BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis (1971), and an MFA from Yale University (1973). Additionally, Pfaff is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Richard B. Fisher Professor 1994 -2017. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including the Academy Member Fellowship, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2013); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2013); MacArthur Fellowship (2004); Guggenheim Fellowship (1983); and National Endowment for the Arts grants (1979, 1986). Her work has been widely exhibited in solo exhibitions and group shows in major galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. Commissions of her work include the Pennsylvania Convention Center Public Arts Projects, Philadelphia, PA; large-scale site-specific sculpture, GTE Corporation, Irving, TX; installation: vernacular abstraction, Wacoal, Tokyo, Japan; and set design, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY. Pfaff also represented the US. at the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale. Judy Pfaff ’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum
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© Judy Pfaff/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
of Art, Brooklyn, NY; and Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; among others.
Lillium, 2016 melted plastic, paper, pigmented expanded foam, acrylic, resin, 46 x 52 x 18 in., 116.8 x 132 x 45.7 cm 21
D AV I N A S E M O b. 1981
“I don’t know the extent to which my work is affected by the urban surroundings, but it probably factors in more than I realize, if only for making me feel unsettled. My experience living in New York is dominated by being pushed out further and further, feeling less and less secure, moving every few years to a new neighborhood. Though it can still be described as a struggle, I don’t think the generation of artists that inspired us younger ones to move to the city were facing the same kind of bleakness.” “This dialogue is simply the human condition. It’s hard to say what my work is about. I find writing press releases to be times of reflection, where I look back and ask myself, what have I been thinking about? What is this work about? It’s not that there is no answer, but it’s an answer unsuited for language, or at least difficult to sum up into a few sentences. The best answer I come back to is that artworks are the aftermath of experiencing and feeling and thinking. When I try to explain to someone else what my work is about, it reminds me that there is this distance between my feelings and thoughts, and those of other people.”
Davina Semo makes sculpture that is shaped by questions about self-awareness and relationships in a world of hustle, desire, isolation, technology, speed, survival, discipline and love. Using concrete, glass, and metal, Semo has developed a formal syntax that is imbued with narrative. In her hands, these materials suggest autobiography; they become emblems of power and control between populations, lovers and enemies. Emphasized by her distinctive titles, the artist employs poetics as pneumatics—inflating Minimalism’s deliberate remove with a rugged humanity. Davina Semo received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego (2006) and a BA from Brown University, Providence, RI (2003). In 2005, she received a grant from the University of California Institute of Research in the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY; Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland; CAPITAL, San Francisco, CA; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Rawsom Projects, Brooklyn, NY; White Flag Library, St. Louis, MO; Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Shoot the Lobster, Miami, FL; and Martos Gallery, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in New York and San Francisco.
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I Smiled, But Stopped When That Seemed to Make Him Uncomfortable, 2016 powder coated stainless steel chain, diameter: 76 in., 193 cm 23
KIKI SMITH b. 1954
“I put my hand in the water and it lets me pass through. Today I have seen five beaver dams.”
Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing and textile. Smith has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions worldwide including over 25 solo museum exhibitions. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the recipient of several awards including the 2012 National Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, among others. In 2006, Smith was recognized by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” She is an adjunct professor at New York University and Columbia University. Smith’s work can be found in more than 30 public collections around the world, including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Gallery, London, England; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
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The Visitor Arrives, 2017 bronze with silver leaf, 27 x 24 x 13 in., 68.6 x 61 x 33 cm edition of 3
U R S U L A V O N R Y D I N G S VA R D b. 1942
“Almost all my sculptures are made in an instinctive way. When I am making them, I do not think of specific things. I am guided by my instincts and my dreams.” “People think that when I’m building my sculpture I know with accuracy just where I’m going, and I don’t. What I’m focusing on is looking to see what I have done, what is down there, or what is evolving as I’m working on it, and what else it needs. It’s a process that even though I have some idea as to what I need to do, there’s never a model, there’s never a drawing. There’s simply some idea, like an image in my head that I follow, but the process itself influences what comes after. I’m going to be seeking what you call the intermediary space that really has no answers, that really has no specific goal, yet no sooner do I say that than there is a goal, even though I don’t know what that is and I wouldn’t know how to describe it. I want to feel in a place that’s more vulnerable, that’s more volatile... that isn’t so certain.” “I feel the fact that I’m a woman has influenced the look of my work. But I dread the thought of it being thought of as work that could only belong to a woman, that it doesn’t have the strength of what was usually thought of as the man’s work.”
Ursula von Rydingsvard creates sculptures that are tactile, quietly emotive and occupy their space with the authority of an imposing natural form. She has had solo exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, England; the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Kloster Schoenthal, Langenbruck, Switzerland; Sculpture Center, Queens, NY; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; Madison Square Park, New York, NY; and Zamek Ujazdiwski - Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw, Poland. Her work can be found in the collections of The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. The artist works in Brooklyn, NY.
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tak, 2015 cedar, 62 x 50 x 26 in., 157.5 x 127 x 66 cm
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Important Works available by: Twentieth-Century European Masters; Post-War American Artists D E S I G N / Dan McCann, Dale Lanzone P H O T O G R A P H Y / Bill Orcutt, Erin Davis,
pg. 11: Christopher Burke Studio
E X H I B I T I O N C U R AT E D B Y Dale M. Lanzone & Nicola Lorenz P R I N T E D I N N E W YO R K B Y P R O J E C T
© 2017 Marlborough Gallery, Inc. ISBN 978-0-89797-498-1 Butterfield image: © Deborah Butterfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Benglis image: © Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Photo courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Coyne image: © Petah Coyne, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York Dill image: © Lesley Dill Nevelson image: © 2017 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Pfaff image: © Judy Pfaff/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Smith image: © Kiki Smith, image courtesy Pace Gallery and Art Workshop Fabrication, Kingston, NY Von Rydingsvard image: © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
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