NYAB Event - Bill Bollinger "The Retrospective"

Bill Bollinger "The Retrospective"

SculptureCenter

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SculptureCenter hosts Bill Bollinger: The Retrospective. This exhibition, surveys the brief, yet historically significant career of Bill Bollinger, an American artist active in New York from 1966-72. Bollingerýs work made significant waves in contemporary sculpture of the late 60s, challenging its limits and expanding thought regarding concept, materiality, and commodity. Bollingerýs works were made from primarily pre-fabricated hardware supplies, such as sawhorses, oil drums, rubber tubing and cyclone fence. Focusing on the gesture of assemblage and the physical limits of material, Bollingerýs work addressed ideas of gravity, balance and material nature. Gravity and torque are constant presences, and Bollingerýs compositions force the viewer to be hyper-aware of their existence. Water is often seen in stasis, precariously kept in place by the deliberate and exact placement of the tubes, barrels and vessels that hold it. These hallmarks, coupled with the radical use of material, put Bollinger far ahead of his time.

Bill Bollinger (1939-1988) originally studied aeronautical engineering but turned to art when he moved to New York City in 1961. He had his first solo show at Bianchini Gallery in 1966. Over the course of the next five years, Bollinger was included in some of the most historically important exhibitions of the 1960s, including Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969); Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969); Nine at Leo Castelli (Castelli Warehouse, 1969); and Information (Museum of Modern Art, 1970).

Bill Bollinger: the Retrospective has been organized by Christiane Meyer-Stoll at the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, and has travelled to the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, UK. SculptureCenter is the only venue for the exhibition in North America. Bill Bollinger: the Retrospective is the first major presentation of Bollingerýs work since 1970, and the first retrospective. This exhibition will reintroduce U.S. audiences to the work of this artist, who was extremely influential in New York but has, until recently, been mostly forgotten by art history and audiences today.