Iconic Ad Reinhardt exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery NY
Art is art
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After Art Basel Miami art fair everyone must be feeling literally drunk of art and artists, but we’d like to pay tribute and review some of the best shows happened during 2013.
Ad Reinhardt‘s at David Zwirner Gallery on 20th Street, New York is definitely one of them.
© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London
This is a major exhibition on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Ad Reinhardt’s birth, curated by art critic Robert Storr. The show comprised works never showed before in this depth, of an artist that is still a mystery for the general public. Ad Reinhardt‘s works were in different media: art cartoons, photography, writing and painting. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to understand his work as a whole and the complexity of it.
© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London
The art cartoons are institutional critiques, very sharp but funny and beautifully drawn. He played with language and images, using them as intellectual weapons and in-jokes.
The slideshow in the show is of Ad Reinhardt‘s photographs, images that he took during his travels during many years to Europe and Asia, supplemented with some images from magazines and museum collections. He often presented them in lecture-format slideshows, or, as he referred to them, “non-happenings.” The spectator would immediately start comparing formal qualities to their meaning, cultures, past and present, and realizing that what is perceiving is pure art history.
Then you would encounter a room of thirteen black paintings. Ad Reinhardt’s “ultimate” black paintings to be seen in New York since the 1991 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He describes them as:
“A square ( neutral, shapeless ) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms ( not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no-contrasting(colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand, painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard-edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings—a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art ( absolutely no anti-art).”
© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London
This room is an extraordinary accomplishment, not just because of the great condition of them, and the quantity of them, but for having this chance of seeing these living entities. As he said: “I’m simply making the lasts paintings that anybody could make”. And they look rigorous, strict and severe, but they have subtleties in terms of color that will come up slowly. They are meant to be experienced.
For Ad Reinhardt art was sufficient by itself, and it didn’t need to mean anything.
“Art is art. Everything else is everything else”. Ad Reinhardt
Photo by Marvin Lazarus
© 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.
