Malevich and the American Legacy

Malevich

View of Serra prop piece on the left

View of Grotjahn on the right

View of Carl Andre floor piece

You have ample time to go check out another museum-caliber exhibition at Gagosian (this time at the uptown space - make sure you go to all three floors or you will miss out!!) titled, Malevich and the American Legacy, which is up for the next two months.  Malevich, who can be considered one of the fathers of abstract painting, was one of the founders of a Russian art movement called Suprematism in the early 20th century, whose main goal was non-objective painting and sculpture as the purest form of art.  In this show, there are six fabulous examples of Malevich's work, in pristine condition that have just be acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago.  Just going for these works alone is worth it!!!  The colors of the planes and geometric shapes are saturated and vibrant and the white of the background almost glows from within.  They are small and feel like little jewels.

Walking around the rest of the exhibition, at first the theme seems contrived - that the works only seem to have in common the use of planes, geometry and play on perspective and surface - and it can be a little bit.  The crux of the exhibition is that Malevich's paintings that were exhibited in New York, primarily in 1936, 1939 and 1973 and also through publications that promoted his work, influenced modern and contemporary American artists.  But after a while,  it's not just about the artists' use of boiling down the work in geometric forms, but also the conceptual argument that pure art should be about the non-objective.  Whether this is true or not, is not the issue.  Its interesting to see the minimalists such as Ellsworth Kelly and  Donald Judd as an extension of this idea rather than a movement that just came out of a reaction to Abstract Expressionism.  Its great to see that American artists weren't just influenced by the art of their own country, but influenced internationally as well.

Also, in this context, I found that I was looking at the works in the show, such as Ed Ruscha, who focuses on text, and John Baldessari, who usually appropriates film stills into his works, with new eyes after focusing on the more abstract, geometric forms in their works.

Many of these works are fantastic to view on their own outside the idea of the show.  After the Malevich paintings, the highlights of the show are for sure the Richard Serra prop pieces.  I could stare in a amazement at these all day (a three-dimensional realization of Suprematist painting!!) as these heavy slabs of steel seem to defy any sort of physics.  Also, there is a Sol Lewitt wall drawing that must have been extremely time consuming and labor intensive to recreate for this exhibition - it is dizzying!  The Dan Flavin work on the 5th floor is just beautifully placed in a corner of a room by itself and feels like a tribute or memorial, which is exactly what it is.  The whole room just glows with a somber blue.  And it's always fun to be able to walk on a Carl Andre floor piece - you feel like you are getting away with something.  And the Mark Grotjohn works are exceptional - especially the oil on linen on the 6th floor which you don't get to see that often - I usually see the colored pencil drawings. 

Enjoy!!  Make sure you see it, because many of these works were lent by museums, private collectors and the artists themselves and it will be difficult to see them again.

See more images on the gallery website (for some reason the images were not reading well when I tried to post them)  See below.


Link to the exhibition