Stanley Rosen “Beginnings”
steven harvey fine art projects
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Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Beginnings, the first one-person exhibition in a New York City gallery of sculptor Stanley Rosen. This exhibition includes a group of his ceramic sculptures and drawings spanning over forty years. Rosen, a 91 year-old artist, was an influential teacher of ceramics at Bennington College for 31 years (1960-1991). In 2016, at the age of 90, he had his first solo exhibition at The Bennington Museum.
Rosen creates haptic, archetypal forms in clay. Intimate in scale, they can appear like artifacts from an ancient culture. He often draws his imagery from architecture, including the Parthenon, Roman aqueducts and the Coliseum. Rosen’s work considers what the arch means, it’s usefulness and universality. His sculptures are handmade primary forms, at once mysterious and accessible, embodying the qualities of the clay he uses.
Karen Gover wrote for an upcoming issue of Ceramics Monthly, “Rosen’s works are non-functional, yet often contain enigmatic interior spaces. Rather than using the wheel, Rosen’s pieces are hand-built, often by means of a meticulous accumulation of small hand-rolled cylinders pinched together into strangely evocative forms.” Rosen’s intimate vision was unique for the 1950s, during the period of large-scale gestural abstraction.
Stanley Rosen was born in Brooklyn in 1926. His family came from Poland and sold kosher chickens. At the age of 18, he served in the Navy during World War II, where he was posted to Japan and China. There he had his first experience of “a consuming beauty: mountains coming down into the bay, foliage, and Shinto markers.”
On the GI Bill he attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Gilbert Franklin and Lyle Perkins. Rosen began to work with clay there and afterwards attended Alfred University College of Ceramics for his MFA.
After graduating in 1956, Lyle Perkins introduced him to Greenwich House Pottery in New York City, where he took a job as studio manager. At Greenwich House, Rosen met and traded work with Peter Voulkos. Greenwich House helped prepare him for teaching at Bennington College.
Arriving at Bennington in 1960, with artists present including Anthony Caro, David Smith, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Paul Feeley, Rosen found himself at the center of a profound conversation on abstraction. Karen Gover wrote, “In some ways, Rosen’s ceramic sculptures can been seen as a modernist investigation of the relation between medium and form.”
Jamie Franklin, curator of Rosen’s Holding the Line exhibition at the Bennington Museum stated, “Rosen can say without an ounce of irony in his voice, ‘I am always at the beginning.’ As a result of this attitude of childlike innocence and wonder, tempered by a deep commitment to material and process, we can sense the powerful aura of possibility in everything he makes.”
An exhibition of works by artist Stanley Rosen (b. 1926), titled New Acquisitions, is currently on view in New York City at the Museum of Arts and
Design, and will run through October 15, 2017. Rosen’s Holding the Line exhibition travels to the Alfred Ceramic Museum at Alfred University, where it opens on October 19, 2017. It will be on view through the remainder of the year.
Media
Schedule
from October 18, 2017 to November 26, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-10-18 from 18:00 to 20:00