Michael Kohn Gallery
Art Basel Miami Beach 2008
Miami Beach Convention Center
Hall D/Booth G10
http://www.kohngallery.com
Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce this year’s participation at Art Basel Miami Beach. Michael Kohn Gallery will be exhibiting previously unseen works by Beat artist Wallace Berman, rare assemblages by Bruce Conner, the provocative work by emerging artist, Rashid Johnson, and paintings by Christopher Wool and John McLaughlin.
Considered by many to be the father of the assemblage movement, Wallace Berman (1949-1976), an active member of the Beat community in Los Angeles and San Francisco, began work on his verifax collages in 1963. These rare verifaxes are a solid example of the artist’s dedication to assemblage and showcase the many ways that Berman manipulated this medium to create different styles of collage. Similarly, Bruce Conner (1933-2008), who was part of Berman’s milieu in the Beat community, began creating assemblages in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Conner created his assemblages from scraps salvaged from abandoned buildings, nylon stockings, doll parts, and other found materials. Bruce Conner, a prolific and widely varied artist, died in 2008, leaving behind a legacy of great art historical importance.
Like Berman and Conner, Rashid Johnson (b. 1977)—an emerging artist who was born in Chicago and now lives and works in New York—combines and layers materials to create a culturally and racially coded body of work. Johnson deploys materials and textures that contrast sharply with one another: shea butter, wood, black soap, mirrors, wax, and steel. Rashid’s works are currently in the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg in Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
With Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) drip paintings from 1985-86, the physical properties of paint and techniques of reproduction underscore the artist’s practice. Crucial to Wool is his impulse to exploit the limits of painting. Inspired by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Wool would drip paint onto metal supports. In contrast to Pollock, however, Wool’s paintings do not evoke the chaos of Abstract Expressionism, but rather the arbitrary order of carefully achieved randomness.
Considered part of the West Coast “Hard Edge style”, McLaughlin stands out as an important American artist whose minimalist abstractions were rooted in Eastern philosophy and composed of geometric forms. McLaughlin’s paintings are in numerous museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
For further inquiries, please contact Laura Sumser at laura@kohngallery.com
