Tag: Nicholas Robinson Gallery

Donald Judd

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In 1968, Donald Judd purchased 101 Spring Street, a 5-storey cast iron building, which today remains the only single-use cast iron building in SoHo. The premises was a home for Judd and his young family, provided a studio for him to work in, and also provided a forum for him to begin his process of installing his work and the work of others in a permanent fashion.

In the Summer of 2010 the house will close for 3 years for a major restoration, and in commemoration of this Nicholas Robinson Gallery and Maurice Tuchman will curate an exhibition of artworks by those artists whose works formed the permanent installation at the time of the artist’s death in 1994. Including examples by Hans Arp, Larry Bell, John Chamberlain, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters and Frank Stella, and archival material from the Judd Foundation the exhibition seeks to celebrate the house as both a home and a vital meeting place and conduit in the lives and works of these seminal artists.

Judd’s concept of “permanent installation” centered on the belief that the placement of a work of art was as critical to its understanding as the work itself. His first applications of this idea were realized in his installation of works throughout 101 Spring Street. His placement of artworks, furniture, museum-quality decorative objects, and the accoutrements of domesticity in this historic building illustrate specific and careful choices, highlighting the attributes of the fine structure and innovating a mode of living that is still considered today to be the archetype of loft habitation.

Through his succinct writings Judd precisely elucidated his ideas about his own work and what he considered the principal responsibilities and function of the art object. From 1959 to 1965 he was also a prolific critic, hired by Hilton Kramer to write reviews for Arts (and from January 1962, called Arts Magazine), in which he applied his rationalist thinking to the works of others, the manner in which they were displayed, and what he considered to be both the relevant and redundant aspects of modernist artistic practice, thoughts which presumably informed his own collecting tastes.

In his essay ‘101 Spring Street’ Judd had the following to say about the building:

Nicholas Robinson Gallery

JASON DUNGAN

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JASON DUNGAN

DOT DASH

Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present Dot Dash, a new single channel video by filmmaker Jason Dungan.
Filmed entirely on the islands of Tanna and Efate in Vanuatu, Dot Dash articulates a version of island life, greatly informed by the legacy of Post-colonialism. The video opens with a long, non-narrative sequence of still imagery, each depicting various natural and man-made objects on the island: a hand holding a yam, a satellite dish, tree roots, a man repairing a car, palm fronds, men raising an American flag on bamboo poles in uniform. Throughout the film, Dungan overlays both sequences of Morse code and as his own voice-overs to investigate how language is complicated by different cultures. The film presents an anti-narrative of local life: American and local flags are raised and lowered, yams are cultivated in a lush tropical garden, billboards illustrate people in “traditional” dress speaking on a cell phone.

Dungan weaves together images to suggest words or sentences, a private language known only perhaps to the film itself. Some scenes reveal muted conversations, but we are unable to hear what is being said. In other sections, voiceovers move from a matter-of-fact description of yam cultivation to a fanciful idea about running film up a flagpole, or burying a can of celluloid in the earth. Could a film be made about a place without the use of a camera, simply by letting the film “soak up” or experience the environment? If the film is suggesting that objects themselves are informed by language, it is also implies that the objects will go on communicating whether there is someone to hear it or not.

Nicholas Robinson Gallery

Florian Süssmayr @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery

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Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of new paintings by Florian Süssmayr.

The current exhibition, entitled Interieurs, focuses both the artist’s and viewers’ attention on various iterations of interior spaces, one of the traditional genres of art history. Frequently de-populated and executed with the artist’s characteristic somber palette of monochromatic dark browns, Süssmayr’s interiors create an evocative atmosphere that is simultaneously disquieting, banal, and even, on occasions, gloomy or sinister. His fleeting glimpses of these spaces are often ambiguous – both artist and viewer participate in the viewing of the scene and yet are somehow also clearly excluded from belonging in them.

A number of the paintings tackle another traditional genre – that of the self-portrait. The artist is depicted either as a reflection in a surface in which he is photographing himself, or as part of a pin-board collage containing an image of himself and other biographically relevant images or references. The depiction of self is thus never direct, and continues the theme of detached observation and exclusion.

Florian Süssmayr has his roots in the social and political subculture pervasive in Germany in the 1980s. Originally a musician in the leftist post-punk scene, he has also been a film cameraman, and began painting in the late 1990s.

Süssmayr has had a solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and has participated in numerous other important gallery and museum exhibition in the last five years.

Florian Süssmayr was born in 1963 in Munich, Germany, and lives and works in Munich.

Nicholas Robinson Gallery