Back to the Present

In the 1960s and 70s, many artists stripped down their works to austere compositions and spare geometric forms. The new art was ambitious and powerful, at times confrontational. It rested on a paradox: the simpler the object, the more complex the viewer’s encounter with it. Purged of any ornamentation or reference, every work in Back to the Present asserts its own physical presence in the here and now. Each one prompts the viewer to take note of the most fundamental elements of art - specific choices of material, form, color, order, and scale - while seeing the object (or series of objects) as a unified whole.

This exhibition brings core members of the Minimalist group together with others who have also taken a reductive approach. Among the Minimalists represented here are Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken, and Fred Sandback. Beginning in the 1960s, these artists sought an antidote to the heroic, spiritual overtones conferred upon individual style and creative spontaneity by the Abstract Expressionists who preceded them. By contrast, Minimalist works were generally preconceived and made from industrial materials, in order to avoid emotive expression. John McCracken’s plank sculpture - a piece of wood coated with fiberglass and resin and then sanded, polished, and waxed to a flawlessly smooth finish - is a clear example. The manual effort that went into its creation is belied by the absence of any trace of the artist’s hand, and hence, of his personal feeling or identity. Nothing detracts from the sculpture’s physicality: its saturated color, rectangular shape, and pristine surface; and, importantly, its relationship to the wall, the floor, the room, and the viewer’s body.

Dan Flavin takes a different approach, using colored fluorescent light to articulate the gallery space, making it almost tangible. Flavin never masks the common, store-bought nature of his materials, leaving cords, bulbs, and outlets exposed. This forthrightness brings the viewer back to the work’s physical qualities without contradicting its ethereal impression. Fred Sandback uses even humbler means to create tension between material and the immaterial, employing colored thread and wire to divide negative space into planes and shapes.

The modular structure of Sol LeWitt’s Inverted Six Towers creates an optical effect that collapses the boundaries between the object and the space around and within it. Composed of cubes arranged in columns and rows, the work allows the viewer to gain a conceptual as well as visual appreciation of the form by breaking it down into its discrete parts. LeWitt’s Four Color Composite screenprint offers another engaging experience. The artist defines a set of variables according to the color (black, yellow, blue, and red) and type of line (vertical, horizontal, diagonal right, and diagonal left), then lays them out in a sequence that seems to end when every combination is exhausted.

Similarly, in Frank Stella’s Multicolored Squares Portfolio, the bands of color extending out from each square’s center create two levels of experience: the overall aesthetic effect, and the recognition of underlying patterns. The print portfolios of Robert Mangold and Brice Marden also involve a dynamic relationship between the single image and the series as a whole. Mangold’s subtly distorted polygons placed within circles disrupt expectations of geometric perfection. In Marden’s Ten Days Portfolio, the individual images are at once independent and loosely related, simultaneously rough and elegant.

Robert Ryman and Richard Tuttle take reduction to extremes. Ryman has restricted himself to all-white compositions since the early 1960s. Contrary to what appears at first to be negation of imagery, he presents a wealth of visual information. The viewer must assess the specific qualities of each particular whiteness: the density of the pigment, how it was applied, the grain and texture of the paper, and so on. The slightest variation becomes meaningful. In Tuttle’s Portland Works, the images are so lightly drawn that they practically vanish from the page. The artist describes these shapes as the concrete persisting in the face of emptiness - a reference to life and death. Both Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman use reduction and light to embody a vision of spiritual transcendence. Conceptually rigorous and replete with fascinating contradictions, the works in Back to the Present offer time and space for focus and contemplation.