Gary Kuehn: In Situ

From January 24 to March 7, 2025, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College will present the first local exhibition of prominent American Postminimal sculptor Gary Kuehn in nearly 40 years. Titled Gary Kuehn: In Situ, the exhibition is curated by Sid Sachs, who served as the head curator at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, both at University of the Arts, for more than 20 years. The exhibition includes 20 of Kuehn’s sculptures and works on canvas created between 1962 and 2016.

Kuehn received his MFA from Rutgers University in the early 1960s, where he studied under eventual colleagues like Roy Lichtenstein, Alan Kaprow, Robert Watts, and Robert Morris. It was at Rutgers that he was introduced to the Fluxus movement and attended the very first happenings on his mentor George Segal’s New Jersey farm. His experiences at Rutgers and his work as a roofer and iron worker informed his relationship with the workaday materials—straw, twigs, tar, and plaster—that are prevalent in his work.

Reacting against the prevailing rigid trends in Minimal sculpture, Kuehn developed innovations with fiberglass and wood that sag and respond to gravity and experience. Sections of some of his sculptures are overtly secured by large bolts, while others seem to extrude flowing liquids. In creating such situations, Kuehn’s works subliminally produce a visceral sympathetic response in the viewers.

“At the beginning of his auspicious six-decade career, Gary Kuehn quickly established himself as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. However, today he is arguably more recognized in Europe than the United States, where art dealers and curators sought to establish a progressive new post-war vernacular,” says Sachs. “The radical ideas he was exposed to at Rutgers facilitated his assimilation into avant-garde practices. To view Kuehn’s work today is to gaze into a portal that reveals the origins of both Postminimalism and Postmodernism.”

Kuehn’s extensive exhibition history begins in 1964, and more than 90 one-person exhibitions around the world have followed. In seminal exhibitions, such as Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966, he was associated with Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, and Louise Bourgeois. Eccentric Abstraction was the first presentation of what critic Robert Pincus Witten termed Postminimalism. Immediately he was represented in Europe at Galerie Ricke, shown in American Sculpture of the Sixties, which traveled from Los Angeles to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall of 1967 and was included in two Whitney Biennials, and Harald Szeemann’s 1968 exhibit When Attitudes Become Form in Bern, one of the most important sculpture exhibits of the decade.

Across the years that followed, Kuehn’s sculptures became less formal and more involved with subtle forms of personal mythology. Gary Kuehn: In Situ, the largest American exhibition of his work since 1985, showcases the breadth of the artist’s varied output over decades.

Kuehn has been a recipient of grants and awards from Art Omni, Fellowship-DAAD, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Council on the Arts, National Endowment on the Art, and the Governor’s Purchase Award from the New Jersey State Museum.

Exhibition programming includes an opening talk with Sachs and the artist beginning at 4:30pm on January 24. A reception will follow. The exhibition and opening and free and open to the public. More at exhibits.haverford.edu/garykuehn.

Contact: Matthew Callinan, Associate Director, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, VCAM, and Campus Exhibitions - mcallina@haverford.edu