NYAB Event - Richard Van Buren "New Sculpture"

Richard Van Buren "New Sculpture"

Garth Greenan Gallery

This event has ended.

Gary Snyder Gallery presents Richard Van Buren: New Sculpture, an exhibition of new works in thermoplastic. The exhibition is Van Buren’s first in a New York gallery in almost ten years. Eighteen of the artist’s swirling abstract sculp- tures will be on view, including a thirteen-foot wall piece, Botticelli’s Revenge (2011), and Walking with Garth (2011), a twenty-four-foot floor piece—Van Buren’s largest and most ambitious works to date. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Klaus Kertess.

The exhibition and its accompanying publication offer an in-depth look at the artist’s work over the past three years—Technicolor biomorphs in thermoplastic and acrylic paint, adorned with natural materials. Works in the exhibition such as Rogue Bluffs (2010), Gatekeeper (2011), and Olongapo (2011) illustrate Van Buren’s continued fascination with the relationship between natural/organic forms and man-made/ inorganic materials. For decades, this has proven fertile terrain for Van Buren. His densely layered sculptures of cast fiberglass resin impregnated with various materials were fixtures of the late-twentieth- century New York art world.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1937, Richard Van Buren studied painting and sculpture at San Francisco State University and the National University of Mexico. While still a student, Van Buren began exhibit- ing his work at San Francisco’s famed Dilexi Gallery, alongside artists as diverse as Franz Kline, H.C. Westermann, Ron Nagle, Ed Moses, and Robert Morris. In 1964, Van Buren relocated to New York.

From 1967 to 1988, he taught in the Sculpture Department at the School of Visual Arts. In 1988, he began teaching at the Parsons School of Design. He remained at Parsons until September 2001. Van Buren lives and works in Perry, Maine.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Van Buren had solo exhibitions at many of the most influential and pres- tigious galleries, including: Bykert Gallery (1967, 1968, 1969, New York), 112 Greene Street (1972, New York), Paula Cooper Gallery (1972, 1975, 1977, New York), and Texas Gallery (1974, 1976, Houston). During this period, his work also figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Primary Structures (1966, The Jewish Museum), A Romantic Minimalism (1967, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), A Plastic Presence (1970, Milwaukee Art Center), and Works for New Spaces (1971, Walker Art Center), among others. In 1977, the City University of New York, Graduate Center mounted a retrospective exhibition of Van Buren’s work. More recently, his work appeared in Pastorale, a group exhibition at New York University’s 80 Washington Square East Galleries, curated by Klaus Kertess.

Van Buren’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and the Walker Art Center.

[Image: Richard Van Buren, "Rogue Bluffs" (2010) thermoplastic, acrylic paint, and shells, 28 x 33 x 28 in.]