CURATED BY KLAUS OTTMANN
RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING
Thursday, September 14, 2006
6 – 8 pm
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks Projects
535 West 22nd Street, 6th floor
New York, NY 10011
212 255 8450
http://www.tonkonow.com
Leslie Tonkonow and Spring Publications, Inc. invite you to celebrate the exhibition The Materialization of Sensibility: Art and Alchemy, curated by Klaus Ottmann, and the publication of Ottmann’s new book, Thought Through My Eyes: Writings on Art, 1977–2005.
The exhibition explores the intrinsic relationship between art and alchemy.
Among the works on view, ranging from the 1960s to the present, will be John Chamberlain’s #33 (1966), a rarely exhibited sculpture made by cutting, folding, and tying polyurethane foam; Man Ray’s gilded book object Lèvres d’or (1967); Yves Klein’s Table bleue (1961/2006), filled with blue pigment; Andy Warhol’s Silver Cloud (c. 1966); Walter De Maria’s stainless-steel High Energy Bar (c. 1966); works by Roberts Watts, including a 1977 lead box entitled Radioactive Substance and Chromed Stones (1963); James Lee Byars’s gilded Philosophical Nail (1986); Teresita Fernández’s Burnout (2005), an amorphous configuration of small glass cubes; a drawing from Spencer Finch’s Studies on Alchemy (1997); and a 2006 painting by Dean Byington, entitled Tourmaline, an imaginary landscape of prismatic crystals.
Klaus Ottmann is an independent curator and scholar based in New York. His most recent curatorial project, Still Points of the Turning World, the Sixth SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, remains on view through January 7, 2007. He has also curated major retrospective surveys of Wolfgang Laib and James Lee Byars. Ottmann recently translated Gershom Scholem’s book Alchemy and Kabbalah into English and is the author of Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition; James Lee Byars: Life, Love, and Death, as well as many other books, articles, and essays on art and philosophy. He is Chairperson of the Department of Cultural Studies and Søren Kierkegaard Professor of Media and Communications at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe, Switzerland.
