ART CITIES:N.York-John McCracken

John McCracken is noted as one of the founders of the West Coast Minimalist Movement that occurred in the late ‘60s. While the Minimalist Movement was primarily centered in New York, McCracken and his colleagues were in Los Angeles creating highly pared down works, soon established a specific West Coast aesthetic. Because McCracken and his fellow artists were based in Los Angeles, the car and media culture of the city helped to define the high-gloss, monochromatic finishes that came to be known as Finish Fetish.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

The exhibition of works by John McCracken at David Zwirner in New York, draws primarily from the last decade of the artist’s career, the works on view explore varying articulations of seriality within the artist’s diverse oeuvre, and the way in which he engaged formal concerns, such as verticality, surface, and particularly color, as a means of composing simple, but deeply resonant sculptures and installations. McCracken classifies his works as a bridge between painting and sculpture. This is due to the fact that his planks are made from paint, wood, and canvas, like a painting, and because they lean against the wall, they simultaneously occupy the space of sculpture and the space of paintings. The form that McCracken is best known for takes the plinth or structural base of a sculpture and creates it into the sculpture piece itself. In his own words, McCracken stated “”With the plank you have an angle that in a way really screws a space up, because it’s completely different from the space- it doesn’t line up with the world anymore, or line up with the man-made world. It’s at odds with it, or it crosses through at an angle, almost like a phenomenon that’s not expected to be there. Or it’s somewhat disorienting, or reorienting sometimes”. The exhibition presents key examples from three discrete groups of work: leaning multi-part wall pieces, wall-mounted multi-part reliefs, and freestanding columns, that McCracken created outside of his iconic “Planks”. On view is a selection of the artist’s “Beam” works, each comprising multiple tall narrow components that lean against the wall, first exhibited in his 2008 solo presentation at David Zwirner, but illuminated in his sketchbook as early as the ‘70s. Some multi-part works, such as “Space” (2008), consist of a rhythmic combination of an array of colors, here blue and green, while in “Song” (2008) the artist explores tonal, more subtle variations within a single color, in this case red, still others like the all-white work “Chakra” (2008) are monochromatic. Titles are likewise employed as a pictorial metaphor in McCracken’s lesser-known wall reliefs, such as “Fire” (2007), created for documenta 12 in 2007, and “Light” (2004), which exist in the interstices of painting and sculpture. Finally, a grouping of four 240 cm tall freestanding columns, arranged in a configuration similar to the artist’s 2004 exhibition at the gallery, explores the phenomenological relationship between work, viewer, and architecture through their outsized stature.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 24/2-15/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com