NYAB Event - "New Materials, New Approaches" Exhibition

"New Materials, New Approaches" Exhibition

D. Wigmore Fine Art

This event has ended.

The gallery is pleased to announce "New Materials, New Approaches," an exhibition of 1960s-1970s works in plastics by Julian Stanczak, Mon Levinson, and Leroy Lamis. The exhibition focuses on the extension through plastic of abstract investigations of color, light, and line demonstrated in Lamis’s sculptures, Levinson’s constructions, and Stanczak’s unique series of oil on plastic works created for a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1972.

Over the past five years, the gallery has researched artists investigating new materials in the 1960s, a period that saw both enthusiasm for technology brought on by the Space Race and a renewed interest in the Constructivist and Bauhaus artists of the 1920s. For the exhibition "New Materials, New Approaches," Mon Levinson (b.1926), Leroy Lamis (1925-2010), and Julian Stanczak (b.1930) were selected as each artist re-purposed industrial materials in innovative ways to create art that rewarded the engaged viewer with shifting imagery of line, color, and reflection. Plastic was first incorporated into art in Europe by the Constructivist and Bauhaus artists of the 1920s. In the United States, Alexander Calder and Charles Biederman incorporated plastic into their sculpture and reliefs in the 1930s. The exploration of plastic in art went into a hiatus through the war years. It was not until the 1960s that artists again looked to plastic for its malleability as well as its smooth surface, luminosity, and ability to be opaque, clear, or colored. By the end of the decade artists working in plastic received attention in focused museum exhibitions like A Plastic Presence at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1969.

[Image: Leroy Lamis "Construction No. 110" yellow, green, blue, and white Plexiglas construction 26 3/8 x 13 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.]