“A Stone Left Unturned” at Yvon Lambert
Artist: William Anastasi, Harold Ancart, Carl Andre, Keith Arnatt, Richard Artschwager, Nairy Baghramian, Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, André Cadere, Detanico Lain, Jan Dibbets, Jason Dodge, Shilpa Gupta, Hans Haacke, Julieta Hanono, Jenny Holzer, Benjamin Horns, Bill Jenkins, Koo Jeong-A, Scott Keightley, Robert Kinmont, Esther Kläs, Gary B. Kuehn, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken, Jonathan Monk, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Charlotte Posenenske, Charles Ray, Fred Sandback, Gabriel Sierra, Keith Sonnier, Haim Steinbach, Sergei Tcherepnin, Richard Tuttle, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner
Venue: Yvon Lambert, New York
Exhibition Title: A Stone Left Unturned
Curated by: Simon Castets
Date: February 1 – March 9, 2013
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
- Sol LeWitt
- William Anastasi
- Sol Lewitt
- Shilpa Gupta
- Sergei Tcherepnin
- Scott Keightley
- Robert Barry
- Richard Tuttle
-  Nairy Baghramian
- Lawrence Weiner
- Keith Arnatt
- John McCracken
- Hans Haacke
- Hans Haacke
- Harold Ancart
- Harold Ancart
- Harold Ancart
- Gabriel Sierra
- Gabriel Sierra
- Gary Kuehn
- Fred Sandback
- Fred Sandback
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Dennis Oppenheim
- Charles Ray
- Julieta Hanono
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
- Benjamin Horns
Images courtesy of Yvon Lambert, New York
Press Release:
Borrowing its title from an eponymous piece by Lawrence Weiner, which was first presented at Yvon Lambert in 1970, A Stone Left Unturned presents a selection of works signaling the many overlaps between minimalism and conceptualism.
The exhibition, curated by Simon Castets, includes major historical pieces from the mid-to-late 1960s as well as recent works by contemporary artists channeling parallel questionings of the art object, the subversion of its supposed integrity and the geometrical canon’s legacy.
Minimalism and conceptualism appear to be polar opposites, with the passage from one to the other being, if not a reaction, the result of art history’s ineluctable progression. While the former insists on the physicality of the art object, the latter asserts the ascendency of idea over form, its execution being “a perfunctory affair.” (Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Sol LeWitt, Artforum, June 1967.) The art historical narrative presents minimalism as content-averse and conceptualism as refusing formal concerns.
The works in A Stone Left Unturned testify to both the more nuanced reality of artistic practices at the time and the continuation of similar interrogations to this day. They connect semiotics to geometry and formal rigor to unique ideas. They bring life to self-contained, dry objects, and give minimal shapes to conceptual enterprises.
In the introduction of her seminal volume Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), Lucy Lippard quotes Dennis Oppenheim, to whom the “displacement of sensory pressures from object to space will prove to be the major contribution of minimalist art.” Oppenheim’s statement could apply to his own work exhibited in A Stone Left Unturned. While eminently conceptual –a reproduction of tree growth patterns across the USA-Canada border, Annual Rings (1968) continues the minimal trajectory toward art’s open- endedness and signals conceptualism as evolution rather than revolution. Far from being mutually exclusive, formal gratifications and intellectual considerations imbue the history of both minimalism and conceptualism. Their complex intertwinement continues to inform the art of today, where object and idea remain gyrating touchstones.
An e-catalog will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Preface by Lucy Lippard, interviews with Harold Ancart, Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner by Simon Castets. The e-catalogue is available for free download at www.yvon-lambert.com