I'm really excited about this exhibition...
Thursday, January 15, 6-8pm
8071 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048
Michael Kohn Gallery celebrates the opening of SHE : Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince Thursday, January 15, 6-8pm. The opening will mark the beginning of a groundbreaking seven-week exhibition exploring the commonalities between Berman’s and Prince’s work.
Wallace Berman
Considered by many to be the father of the assemblage movement, Wallace Berman (1949-1976) was born in 1926 in Staten Island, New York. He began his career making sculptures from unused scraps and reject materials while working in an antique furniture factory. By the early 1950s, Berman had become an artist and active figure in the beat community in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Moving between the two cities, Berman devoted himself to his mail art publication, Semina, which contained a sampling of beat poetry and images selected by Berman. In 1963, Berman moved to Topanga Canyon in the Los Angeles area, and began work on verifax collages (printed images, often from magazines and newspapers, mounted in collage fashion onto a flat surface, sometimes with solid bright areas of acrylic paint). He continued creating these works, as well as rock assemblages, until his death in 1976. Berman’s work is included in public collections at numerous institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince first gained critical attention in the early 1980s when his photographs of magazine advertisements redefined the autonomies of authorship and ownership and the very nature of representation. Prince’s best-known work about women is the Nurse series. Begun in 2002, and taking the covers of pulp novels as their point of departure, the Nurse paintings are studies in a contained sexuality that leaks out and stains the entire canvas. In addition to Nurses, Prince’s Girlfriends exude a raunchy power so extreme that it verges on the comical, though it is anything but funny. Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and most recently at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
SHE: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince, guest curated by Kristine McKenna, features exciting pieces never shown before. The exhibit will highlight previously unseen works by Berman single-image Verifax collages and the debut of No New Next-—a 1986 El Camino automobile with images from his Girlfriends series superimposed on the car’s body.
A comprehensive catalogue of the works designed by Lorraine Wild of Green Dragon Office will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue will include an essay by Kristine McKenna and an interview with Richard Prince. The catalogue is published by Michael Kohn Gallery.
According to the NY Times:
As artists’ biographies go, those of Wallace Berman and Richard Prince could hardly be more different. Berman, who died at 50 in 1976, the victim of a drunken driver, was a kind of Beat guru flying just below the radar, showing his work in only one conventional gallery exhibition during his lifetime and popping into rare view in strange places: a cameo in “Easy Rider”; the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” where his face is wedged next to Tony Curtis’s, just below Jung’s.
By contrast Mr. Prince, 59, labored in obscurity for years but not exactly by choice: he wanted a larger audience and found it. For more than two decades he has been one of the most influential contemporary artists, and his work — paintings, photography, car-centric sculpture — has sold for many millions of dollars, allowing him to create an impressive studio complex in Rensselaerville, N.Y., in Albany County.
But Berman’s eccentric, highly personal art and career has long fascinated Mr. Prince, who has painstakingly collected copies of his signature work, Semina, a kind of early California zine that Berman made with — and mailed only to — his friends, from 1955 to 1963. For Mr. Prince, a bibliophile with a special love for the Beat years, the fascination stems partly from Berman’s Zelig-like connections in those years: his circle included Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Hopper and Henry Miller. One of Berman’s collaborators was the artist known as Cameron, whose first husband, Jack Parsons, as Mr. Prince notes, was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
But these days Mr. Prince seems to be drawn to Berman as much for what his life represented, an almost ascetic pursuit of art for art’s sake that seems increasingly distant from today’s art world. Berman’s work “was very word-oriented and a lot of it was free,” Mr. Prince said in a recent telephone interview. “It had nothing to do with the market, and it had to do with a lifestyle that was very anti-establishment.”
For the first time Mr. Prince’s work will appear alongside Berman’s in a show called “She” opening Jan. 15 and running through March 8 at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition focuses on a common subject where the two artists overlap in odd and unexpected ways: women...
For Full Article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/design/23prin.html
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