ART CITIES:San Francisco-Plane.Site

Left: Cy Twombly, Untitled (Lexington), 2009, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Rob McKeever, Gagosian Gallery Archive. Right: Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Deco Pink and Lemon Yellow Butterfly 45.95), 2016, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive
Left: Cy Twombly, Untitled (Lexington), 2009, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Rob McKeever, Gagosian Gallery Archive. Right: Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Deco Pink and Lemon Yellow Butterfly 45.95), 2016, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive

 

“Plane.Site”, is the title of a cross-generational exhibition of Modern and Contemporary artists to inaugurate the Gagosian Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibition explores the dynamic exchanges between drawing and sculpture, in the work of artists from the Modern post-war period to the present day. Each participating artist is represented by a work in both two and three dimensions.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Spanning multiple generations of artists, the exhibition focuses specifically on sculpture and works on paper by Modern and Contemporary gallery artists, with one two-dimensional and one three-dimensional piece by each artist.Many of the works on paper resemble blueprints for the sculptures that are installed beside them. For the curator of the exhibition, Mark Grotjahn and Richard Serra, both artists who make, in his words, “Very direct works on paper as well as sculpture”, serve as the jumping-off point for a show that “Excludes painting on canvas in favor of the leap between drawn marks on paper and sculptural work in three dimensions”. Marchel Duchamp’s readymade strategy by which an everyday object can attain the status of art object predicates Jasper Johns’s “Flashlight II” (1958) modeled in papier-mâché and glass, one of nine iterations of a single motif that he generated using approaches as diverse as bricolage and bronze-casting. Cy Twombly’s “Untitled, (Lexington)” (2009) represents perhaps the most intimate, intuitive aspect of his oeuvre. Composed with a painter’s eye, the sculpture compresses thousands of years of dialogue between the object and its drawn representation. Twombly employed found materials in his three-dimensional work. The exhibition maps some of the mutually generative interactions of drawing and sculpture, as lines drawn on paper extend to touch those described in space. The exhibition features works by: Louise Bourgeois, Joe Bradley, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Grotjahn, David Ireland, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Richard Serra, Robert Therrien, Tatiana Trouvé, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Whiteread.

Info: Curator: Sam Orlofsky, Gagosian Gallery, 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration: 18/5-17/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2003, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Rob McKeever, Gagosian Gallery Archive
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2003, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Rob McKeever, Gagosian Gallery Archive

 

 

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Deco Pink and Lemon Yellow Butterfly 45.95), 2016, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Deco Pink and Lemon Yellow Butterfly 45.95), 2016, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive

 

 

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Yellow Walkaway Mask M32.b), 2015–16, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Yellow Walkaway Mask M32.b), 2015–16, © Mark Grotjahn, Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Gagosian Gallery Archive