Season Booklet.compressed (1)

Garth Greenan Gallery
2017–2018

As a gallery, we spend a great deal of time researching the past. Our 2017–2018
season, however, joyfully looks in all directions. It includes works from as early as
1954 and as recently as 2017. Iconic pieces hang alongside newly discovered, lesserknown
examples by gallery artists, enriching and expanding our understanding of
their work, and embracing the totality of their achievement.
The authenticity, humor, and above all, beauty of these objects are welcome
reminders that, even in uncertain times, art has the power to bring people together.
This is not just a season brochure—it is an invitation to join our gallery in a year
of emotional engagement through looking.
We look forward to seeing you soon.
—Garth Greenan and Bryan Davidson Blue

September 7–October 21, 2017
Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard
Occupational Hazard is the first presentation of Rosalyn Drexler’s work since her
recent retrospective at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Ten of the artist’s
bold, psychologically complex paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of rare
works on paper.
The show will focus on Drexler’s work since 1986, a remarkably prolific yet
underappreciated period in the artist’s oeuvre. In these paintings, while favorite
themes from her sixties repertoire persist, her subjects/compositions are more
surreal and open-ended. Frequently, the figures wear masks or face away from
the viewer. For Drexler, masking underlines the interchangeability of her cast
of criminals, businessmen, and politicians, and further dramatizes their menace.
Artists, whether friends (such as Andy Warhol) or not (such as Jean-Michel
Basquiat), and artworks by herself and others, also figure into these paintings,
echoing the intensification during the 1980s of Drexler’s reflexive preoccupation
with the art world. In an homage to Henri Rousseau, Sueño Revista (Rosalyn and
Sherman in a Rousseau) (1989), Drexler inserts herself and her late husband, the
artist Sherman Drexler, into an emulation of The Dream (1910).
One of the most significant works in the exhibition, Portrait of the Artist (1989),
underlines the importance of both painting and writing to Drexler’s creative persona.
It features a masked figure in a painterly frame with brush in hand and a “beanie with
an airplane at the top.” The airplane symbolizes the “traveling mind of a writer,” the
artist explains. In particular, the mask highlights Drexler’s association with theater;
it also points to the hide-and-seek/hide-to-reveal game so fundamental to her work
since the sixties, as well as to her lifelong role-playing as both a woman and an artist.
Its “useful clothes” effect a potent cross-dressing that echoes the artist’s generous
embrace of all kinds of difference, as often revealed in her plays and novels.
Rosalyn Drexler, Glasnost, 1988

September 13–17, 2017
Expo Chicago, Richard Van Buren:
Bennington
For the 2017 edition of Expo Chicago, the gallery will present Bennington, a solo
exhibition of works by Richard Van Buren. Six of the artist’s densely layered abstract
sculptures will be on view, including Strata (1977) and the monumental floor piece
Bennington (1970). The latter consists of multiple brightly colored polyester elements
cast from Mylar sheets buried in a snowbank. It is a seminal work that marks the
beginning of the artist’s career-long fascination with the relationship between natural/
organic forms and man-made/inorganic materials, especially their ability to mimic
each other.
Rather than modeled or constructed, works like Bennington seem to emerge
as residue from two ends of time that seldom conjoin. Folded, twisted, sharp, and
lumpy—the forms are shot through with colors that are simultaneously toxic and
beautiful. In each element, the artist embedded milled glass, plaster, paper, glitter,
and dry pigment. At times, the semi-transparent forms resemble crumpled pieces of
space junk that have been frozen in order to encase other pieces of trash for forensic
reference. Viewers both look at and into Bennington.
Van Buren’s understanding of time is what sets him apart from his peers. His
early sculptures are not about the timeless present (Donald Judd and Dan Flavin)
or the body (Eva Hesse), nor do they reference art history—Jackson Pollock’s
poured paintings, for example. Rather, they acknowledge that time shapes matter
into forms that people might not recognize, which, as critic John Yau writes, “is a
rather disquieting perception of infinity.” With his embrace of disparate, seemingly
incommensurable materials, and his invention of new creative processes, Van Buren’s
achievement is more timely than ever.
Richard Van Buren, Bennington VIII, 1970

October 4–8, 2017
Frieze Masters, Nicholas Krushenick:
Inventing Pop Abstraction
For the 2017 edition of Frieze Masters, Spotlight, the gallery will present Inventing
Pop Abstraction, a solo exhibition of works by Nicholas Krushenick. The three
paintings included provide an overview of Krushenick’s work from 1965 to 1967,
a time of intense formal as well as technical innovation for the artist. During this
period, Krushenick developed a distinctive style that straddled Op, Pop, Abstract
Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field Painting. Juxtaposing broad black
lines with flat Liquitex colors, the artist created bold, energetic compositions that
combine the graphic clarity of Pop with nonfigurative shapes and forms. Works like
Flying Circus (1965) demonstrate Krushenick’s deliberate caricature of painterly
“drips” or “skeins” into what more closely resemble details from cartoons—“like
close-ups of Superman’s hair follicles,” as critic Robert Rosenblum once wrote.
Krushenick relished his equivocal status: “They don’t know where to place me. Like
I’m out in left field all by myself. And that’s just where I want to stay.”
The presentation will also include a custom vitrine featuring a selection of rare
preparatory drawings. Throughout his career, Krushenick was secretive about his
work as a draftsman, in part because of the unfinished quality and “lack of precision”
in much of the work. Regardless, the drawings provide a unique opportunity for
viewers to understand another aspect of the artist’s process.
In 2015, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore
College, hosted a full-career retrospective of the artist’s work. Frieze Masters will
be the first time, however, that Krushenick’s paintings have been displayed in the
United Kingdom. They were last shown in Europe in 1973.
Nicholas Krushenick, United Color Kit, 1967

October 26–December 16, 2017
Howardena Pindell: Recent Paintings
Howardena Pindell: Recent Paintings, an exhibition of mixed-media paintings and
collages, is the artist’s second with the gallery. Not since 2006, however, has Pindell’s
recent work been displayed in a commercial setting. Eight of the artist’s large-scale
abstract paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of intricately detailed collages,
all created between 2014 and 2017. The exhibition opens in advance of Pindell’s
upcoming retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen at Chicago’s
Museum of Contemporary Art (February 23–May 20, 2018), curated by Naomi
Beckwith and Valerie Cassel-Oliver.
The exhibition offers a detailed view of Pindell’s recent work, covering an
innovative time for the artist in which, after a long hiatus, she reengaged with abstraction.
In paintings such as Nautilus I (2014–2015) and Night Flight (2015–2016), Pindell
continues a metaphorical process first begun in the mid-1970s. She deconstructs/
reconstructs her work, cutting the canvas into complex “maze patterns” and sewing
them back together, then building up the surface in elaborate stages: painting or drawing
onto a sheet of paper, punching out dots from it, dropping them onto her canvas,
and finally squeegeeing acrylic through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she
had punched the dots. Recently, sequins, glitter, foam circles, vinyl text, powder,
string, printed numbers, and even hair have become part of the artist’s labor-intensive,
process-oriented approach to painting. As always, her constructed canvases are
installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails.
Currently, major paintings by Pindell are included in the Brooklyn Museum’s
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017–2018), Magnetic
Fields: Expanding American Abstraction (2017–2018) at the Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
(2017–2018) at the Tate Modern. Her work will also figure prominently in Lynne
Cooke’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art, opening at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., in January 2018.
Howardena Pindell, Songlines: Cosmos, 2017

December 6–10, 2017
Art Basel: Miami Beach, Another Aspect of Pop:
D’Arcangelo, Drexler, Krushenick
For the 2017 edition of Art Basel: Miami Beach, the gallery will present an exhibition
of five signature works by three gallery artists: Allan D’Arcangelo, Rosalyn Drexler, and
Nicholas Krushenick. Throughout their careers, the trio exhibited together widely—
first during the late 1950s in New York’s Tenth Street artists’ cooperatives (March,
Brata, and Reuben)—and later at the Fischbach and Kornblee galleries. Most notably,
however, their paintings appeared in countless historic group exhibitions, many of
which problematized the characterization of their work as Pop.
The presentation will include two paintings by Allan D’Arcangelo—The Rheingold
Girls (1963) and Untitled #2 (1965). The Rheingold Girls is the first in a series of four
works by the artist portraying women and girls with blank, featureless faces—almost
like paper dolls. Each year saw the coronation of a new “Miss Rheingold,” as well as
the publication of a calendar. Politically involved throughout his career, D’Arcangelo in
this work deliberately comments on the inequality and commodification of women
in American society.
Also featured will be two paintings by Rosalyn Drexler—The Lesson (1962)
and Candy and Mel (Two Hearts Beat as One) (1966)—both quintessential examples
of the artist’s early work. They expose not only the underside of the American Dream
but also a vision of America as the violent and self-violated world of white males. In
The Lesson, the artist celebrates what she describes as the “concentration of men at
work.” The painting also seems to embody a Nietzschean view of the machine as an
attribute of the masculine conquest for power.
Finally, the presentation will include Nicholas Krushenick’s Son of King Kong
(1965), one of the artist’s most iconic works. In the painting, two bulbous orangeand-blue-striped
shapes, like the heads of giant snakes, approach each other from
above and below on a horizontally bisected background of diagonal red and yellow
stripes. Whether they will kiss, bite, or explode when they meet is unclear. The
gregariousness and overt sexuality of this painting is a pointed critique of “art for
art’s sake” and its high earnestness and lack of humor.
Allan D’Arcangelo, The Rheingold Girls, 1963

January 11–February 17, 2018
Victoria Gitman: Taktisch
Victoria Gitman: Taktisch, an exhibition of paintings and drawings, is the artist’s first
since her recent retrospective at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Eight of Gitman’s
astonishingly naturalistic paintings will be on view, in addition to a selection of
drawings, all created between 2016 and 2017.
The exhibition focuses on Gitman’s recent paintings—meticulously rendered
abstractions based on the supple fur surfaces of vintage handbags. Gitman works
in oils, hair by hair, creating surfaces that are delicately painted from close, direct
observation. Many of the paintings feature abstract patterns evocative of early
and mid-twentieth-century stylistic traditions. Evoking modernist compositional
techniques, Gitman’s new works are resolutely frontal, their imagery extending
edge-to-edge. Each composition is tightly cropped, further intensifying both the
haptic quality and the inherent sensuousness of the artist’s chosen subjects.
The title of the exhibition is a neologism introduced by Vienna School art
historian Aloïs Riegl to describe a kind of close-up perception or “visual touching.”
Taktisch can at once signify “tactile,” “tangible,” “palpable,” or “textural,” as well as
“tactical.” It implies an intimate exchange with art objects, an intermingling of the
experiences of seeing, feeling, and knowing through sensory perception.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1972, Victoria Gitman immigrated to the
United States in 1987. In 1996, she graduated from Florida International University
with a BFA in painting. She has had solo exhibitions at Daniel Weinberg Gallery
(2004, 2006, 2009, Los Angeles), David Nolan Gallery (2006, 2011, New York), and
Tomio Koyama Gallery (2014, Tokyo). In 2005, the Bass Museum of Art, Miami,
mounted On Display, Gitman’s first museum exhibition. Three years later, Looking
Closely, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings, opened at the Las Vegas
Art Museum.
Victoria Gitman, Untitled, 2016

February 27–April 7, 2018
Paul Feeley: The Other Side
The Other Side, an exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and drawings, is Paul Feeley’s
third with the gallery. Nine of the artist’s brightly colored abstractions will be on view,
as well as a selection of related watercolors and drawings.
The exhibition provides a detailed view of Feeley’s work from 1954 to 1959—
the period during which he created what he considered his earliest “professional”
paintings. In fall 1955, Feeley had his first solo exhibition at New York’s Tibor de Nagy
Gallery. Works on display dealt primarily, as art critic Lawrence Campbell wrote, “with
struggling complexes, blobs elbowing each other and being rained on.” One painting
in the exhibition, Red Blotch (1954), stood out as something distinctly different.
What was the “strange red blob” surrounded by verdant green? And what about the
silhouetted black forms along the painting’s lower edge? With its inherent quietude
and interlocking colors, Red Blotch set the tenor for the artist’s mature pictorial
sensibility—one that balanced Dionysian extravagance with Apollonian restraint.
The Apollonian character of the paintings created for Feeley’s follow-up
show in 1958 would have been hard to miss. Begun in 1956 and loosely titled
after islands of the Cyclades, the series, completed in 1959, explores the terrain
of organic abstraction through the most reductive of means. Muted reds and
yellows, or yellows and blues, with occasional passages of bright orange and pink,
distinguish the somatic nature of Tenos (1956), Sterope (1957), Syphos (1958),
and Melos (1958), as well as contemporaneous works such as Kilroy, The Other
Side, and Between the In and the Out, all 1957. The critic Dore Ashton, covering the
show for the New York Times, observed the paintings’ “erotic sinuousness—great
curving bottomless shapes like chemists’ retorts, or slithering, wasp-waisted forms
embedded in blue ether,” and their “obscure symbolism.” To Feeley, a shape was a
living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome
feelings he felt before the “terror of the unknowable.”
Paul Feeley, Red Blotch, 1954

March 8–11, 2018
The Independent, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith:
I See Red
For the 2018 edition of The Independent, New York, the gallery will present I See
Red, a solo exhibition of works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The three paintings
in the exhibition provide an overview of the artist’s work between 1989 and 1993,
an important period in the artist’s practice. During that time, Smith began her
famous series “I See Red,” further extending and elaborating her assertion of red
as a signature of Native American identity. The saturated red of paintings such as
Gifts of Red Cloth (1989) and The Red Mean (1992) performs simultaneous acts of
affirmation and resistance, as in her earlier self-portraits.
In a manner similar to the one that she uses in The Red Mean, Smith deploys
a complex mix of image and text across the canvas of I See Red: Snowman. In sharp
contrast to the painted red ground, the center portion of the snowman is collaged
with black and white commercial text and advertising images. The words “simply
red” are applied over the painted surface where we expect to see a smiling mouth
of stones. The surrounding phrases “Bitter Medicine” and “Seeking Respect”
complicate and refute the possibility of “simply red,” as the artist transforms the
statements into difficult questions. By altering the characteristics from snow white
to red, Smith reframes the context of the casual use of banal mass media labels
and exposes the contingent subject position of the viewer from one who labels to
one who is labeled. The artist visualizes the effect of unequal power and prejudice
as she asserts the role of a Native American viewer bombarded by the incessant
appropriation and misuse of indigenous imagery for commercial profit. By reframing
a dominant cultural metaphor—white innocence—Smith’s “I See Red” series
activates a specific aesthetic and political critique within the larger discourse of
race that might otherwise go unquestioned.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Target, 1992

April 12–May 19, 2018
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Making Medicine
Making Medicine, a solo show of recent paintings and drawings by Jaune Quick-to-
See Smith, marks the artist’s premiere exhibition with the gallery. Nine of the artist’s
thickly impastoed, mixed-media paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of
related watercolors and drawings. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the
show, with an essay by Lucy Lippard.
Works in the exhibition depict Smith’s passionate concerns about climate
change, the survival of our environment, and the economic fallout from government
and corporate decisions made in recent decades. Many of the paintings also comment
on everyday Native American life and its paradoxical relationship to American
consumerism. In Sissy and the Plutocrats (2012), for example, a female Sisyphus
pushes her shopping cart up a mountain that is laden with elegant foodstuffs. Here,
Smith explores the widening gap between rich and poor using her signature mix of
pointed humor and cleverly constructed symbolism.
Born in 1940 in St. Ignatius, Montana, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an enrolled
Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. In 1980, she earned
an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Over the past forty years, Smith has had
more than 100 solo exhibitions, curated over 30 exhibitions, and given more than
200 lectures at museums and conferences internationally. The artist has also completed
several collaborative public works including the floor design in the Great Hall
of the new Denver Airport, a site-specific sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Park of San
Francisco, and a mile-long sidewalk “history trail” in West Seattle.
Smith’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the
Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum for Ethnology,
Berlin; the Museum for World Cultures, Frankfurt; the Museum of Modern Art; the
Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Walker
Art Center; the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade Canoe for the North Pole, 2017

May 24–June 30, 2018
Alexis Smith: Hello Hollywood
Alexis Smith: Hello Hollywood, an exhibition of collages, is the first presentation
of the artist’s vintage work in a New York gallery in more than 25 years. Five of the
artist’s meticulously crafted, mixed-media narrative collages will be on view, as well
as the monumental installations Hello Hollywood (1980) and Isadora (1980–1981).
Composed of thirteen distinct elements, the exhibition summarizes Smith’s
search during the 1970s for an American voice through the writings of early
twentieth-century authors. Architecturally scaled wall paintings enhance the mood
of many of the collages, including power lines, palm trees, and an ocean liner’s
smokestack. Isadora, taken from John Dos Passos’ The Big Money, chronicles
Isadora Duncan’s loss of innocence and dramatic death by strangulation—
infamously, the dancer’s scarf got caught in the wheel of a friend’s Bugatti.
The somewhat sparer Hello Hollywood enshrines the roadside advertisements
for Burma Shave that dotted America’s landscape until about fifty years ago. Each of
the five wood-framed parallelograms contains one line of a ditty presented much like
the sequential signs that characterized the Burma Shave advertisements. Installed
over three contiguous walls on top of two rows of palm trees of decreasing height and
proximity, Smith plays on the steadily receding perspective experienced in driving.
A bale of hay reinforces the rural setting of this kind of commercial “literature,” while
infusing the space with the evocatively rich aroma of dried grass—far from the stale
smell of the city.
In many of Smith’s works, the city of Los Angeles appears as part of the subject.
The artist exploits the universal allure and fascination around Hollywood as a
place where dreams are made, where imagination, hope, and illusion are realized.
According to Smith, this is an extension of the story of the West, that a move west
equals a better life. It is the quintessential American transformation myth, the
American Dream.
Alexis Smith, Masculine/Feminine, 1978

July 12–August 10, 2018
Three Gallery Artists
Three Gallery Artists, a group exhibition of paintings and sculptures, features a
selection of work by Mark Greenwold, Ralph Humphrey, and Roy McMakin.
Mark Greenwold’s meticulously detailed gouache paintings from 1988 are
multifaceted explorations of the issues and complexities of life. A self-proclaimed
“emotional cubist,” the artist revels in the blurred and fragmented narratives that his
paintings create. In works such as The House (1988) the artist asks us not to look at
the inside of his life, but at our own, warts and all. Greenwold’s famously laborious
process mirrors the psychological intensity of his paintings. The artist works under
magnification, like a jeweler, employing the tiniest of brushes. He builds up the
surfaces stroke by stroke. The result is a kind of delirious realism in which everything
portrayed, however realistic, is actually composed of thousands upon thousands of
beautiful abstractions.
Equally complex are Ralph Humphrey’s “Conveyance” paintings, a singularly
important, emotionally fraught body of work, created between 1974 and 1977. The
paintings—hulking masses of casein and modeling paste in blacks, blues, and
purples—often loosely resemble actual objects, like packages or containers. But,
what do they contain? Ostensibly, they are vessels for Humphrey’s emotions, life
experiences, and ideas about painting. Their textured surfaces simultaneously
attract and repel, even as their dimensionality literally forces viewers into the
objects’ space. Their actual content is perhaps not so easily read.
Roy McMakin’s aptly titled series of sculptures, “The Middle,” refers not only to
McMakin being the middle of three children, but also to the unifying strategy that
tempered his approach to working with each piece. The works have all been carefully
trisected, resulting in a group of objects that exhibit total disability. As Richard Klein
explains, “It might seem counterintuitive that radically altering something could act
to preserve it, but what’s being preserved in this case is not each piece of furniture’s
outward form, but rather its emotional reality in the context of a human life.”
Mark Greenwold, The House, 1988

Allan D’Arcangelo
Rosalyn Drexler
Paul Feeley
Victoria Gitman
Art Green
Mark Greenwold
Ralph Humphrey
Nicholas Krushenick
Al Loving
Roy McMakin
Gladys Nilsson
Howardena Pindell
Norbert Prangenberg
Alexis Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Richard Van Buren

© 2017 Garth Greenan Gallery
Edited by Garth Greenan and Bryan Davidson Blue
Copyedited by Michael Lacoy
Designed by Judith Hudson
Photography by Christopher Burke Studio
Printed in the United States by Meridian Printing

Garth Greenan Gallery
545 West 20th Street
New York, New York 10011
212.929.1351
www.garthgreenan.com