Regina Bogat “The New York Years, 1960-1970”

Zürcher Gallery

poster for Regina Bogat “The New York Years, 1960-1970”

This event has ended.

Zürcher Studio re-discovers the work of Regina Bogat, who was born 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. This exhibition must be considered as the first chapter of a larger retrospective. The New York Years will show paintings, paper works and sculpture from 1960 to 1970.

Influenced early on by the theory of the Aesthetic Realism, during the 1960’s Bogat leaves the group to regain her independence and continued developing her own, unique style of hard edge abstraction. From 1962 to 1981 Regina worked in a close, synergistic relationship with Alfred Jensen, who she married in 1963. She played an active part in New York art scene of the 1960’s, frequenting 10th Street openings and the famous Cedar Bar with her close friends: Elaine de Kooning, Eva Hesse, Cy Twombly, Sam Francis, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko.

With Jensen she shared an interest in symbolic geometries like Pythagoras’ treatises on the laws of numbers, Mayan hieroglyphics, and the I Ching, a treatise on Chinese Cosmology representing a world in constant change based on the principle of duality and polarity. These principles comes into works created by both Jensen and Bogat in their use of black and white mosaic, colored forms mirroring one another, positives and negatives, opposite colors and geometrical structures. With Eva Hesse, Bogat shared her inventiveness in using unconventional materials, working with segments of wood, dowels and other untraditional materials in her paintings and objects. This approach becomes more apparent in the later half of the decade. For example, Bogat, who also admired Joseph Cornell, produced Cigar Box (1969), Galaxy (1970) and Holy Terror (1970), constructions that push the frontiers of sculpture.

Regina Bogat’s approach is concrete and abstract. She took the step of “materializing” separations between colored planes, by placing them in relief, using segments of wood. In 1967, with her painting Aster, Bogat began to utilize the star motif, which reappears in her later works, such as Heptadic #3 (2006). Her work has undergone profound changes since the 1960’s and she continues to work and evolve today. She has gradually loosened her paint surface into a more fluid medium with open brushworks while reopening an extended exploration of her emblematic star imagery. But that will have to be the subject of another exhibition.

[Image: Regina Bogat “Aster” (1967) acrylic, wood on canvas, 72 x 60 in (183 x 152.5 cm) Photo: Adam Reich]

Media

Schedule

from September 25, 2013 to November 02, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-09-24 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Regina Bogat

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