Art Basel 39
Hall 2/Booth W7
Art Unlimited
Hall 1/Booth D
http://www.kohngallery.com
Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce this year’s participation at Art Basel 39 and Art Unlimited.
At Art Basel 39, Michael Kohn Gallery will be exhibiting work by Minimalist painter John McLaughlin (1898 – 1976) and two sculptures by Carl Andre. Considered part of the West Coast Hard Edge style, McLaughlin stands out as an important American artist whose minimalist abstractions helped to forge a new territory for American painters beginning in the 1950s and onward. Rooted in Eastern philosophy and composed of geometric forms, his paintings were created as a space in which to explore the aesthetics and materiality of paint and to contemplate nature. Similarly, Carl Andre’s sculptures emphasize material and special specificity. As one of the most important innovators of this medium in the second half of the 20th century, Andre mastered and redefined sculpture in its most fundamental features: material, mass and space, volume and gravity. Together, these two works of symmetry and geometric form create a dynamic space of abstraction
and exploration.
Premiering at Art Unlimited will be Easter Morning, a new film by San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner. A celebrated, multidisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, assemblage, photography, printmaking, collage and film, Conner emerged in the late 1950s among the San Francisco Beat generation and quickly came to prominence for his quasi-erotic sculptures, nylon assemblages and found footage films culled from a variety
of sources.
Easter Morning (2008) was originally shot with a regular 8mm camera in 1966 on a spring morning around San Francisco. All the multiple exposures and editing was achieved in camera. The original film was then step printed, repeating each frame five times, and blown up to 16mm film. This silent film was recently rediscovered by Conner and transferred to digital video in preparation for the completion of the piece. For the soundtrack, Bruce turned once again to longtime collaborator Terry Riley whose seminal composition In C mirrored the rhythmic and meditative quality of the film. A recording performed by the Shanghai Film Orchestra performed on ancient Chinese instruments was selected.