Robert Courtright “Many Moons”
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
[Image: Robert Courtright "Untitled" (1989) mixed-media collage, 16 1/2 x 20 in.]
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Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents Many Moons an intimate survey of work by the late Robert Courtright (1926-2012), a pioneering artist whose mixed media constructions spanning some six decades made unlikely bedfellows of minimalist reductivism and collage. Starting with his early cityscapes of the 1950s, built from weathered paper fragments peeled from actual structures in Italy, we begin to see Courtright’s keen interest in architectonic form. These simplified representations would gradually lead to the artist’s signature gridded works, which he generically identified as “collage constructions.” Many Moons traces this evolution through a series of works that mark the artist’s gradual transition to seemingly pure abstraction, including a series of rarely exhibited totem-like reliefs made from monochrome stripes of collaged cardboard and text, further revealing Courtright’s sensitivity to texture, color and form. As J. Bowyer Bell has written, “There is nothing minimal, nothing cold, nothing as exercise in the ultimate image. Each is an adventure for the eye.”
Born in South Carolina, Robert Courtright studied at the Art Students League in New York during the 1950s and in 1952 he spent a formative year in Rome, where he fell in love with all things Baroque. He has exhibited widely in the United States and France. His gallery affiliations, included the New Gallery, Andrew Crispo Gallery, Gimpel Weitzenhofer Gallery, Kouros Gallery, Galerie Dutko, Paris, and since 2009, Pavel Zoubok Gallery. His work is in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), and The Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh, PA), among others. In 2009, Robert Courtright was honored with a major retrospective in his native South Carolina at the State Museum in Columbia.
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Schedule
from January 18, 2017 to February 18, 2017