“The Primitives” Exhibition
Van Der Plas Gallery
This event has ended.
The Primitives : These four artists represent one of the most primordial moments of art history. Bob Dombrowski, Scot Borofsky, Ken Hiratsuka, and Kevin Wendell (FA-Q) all worked outdoors as street artists during the early 1980’s. As the inheritors of Modernism’s search for the inner human soul, at a moment when art was liberating itself from the gallery and moving into the environment, they each looked back to a time at the beginnings of human art-making to find their individual conceptual footings.
Using only his hands, Kevin Wendell reproduced a myriad of examples of the most recognizable image to all humans – another human face. Wendell achieved an almost incomparable expressive state of ecstasy in the acts of painting he performed on different surfaces. Fingerprints connect the work with human artistic endeavors going back to Greek works in clay and more ancient ceramic faces and figures. Angst driven color and obsessively made marks posit Kevin Wendell as a modern Van Gogh. And, as an artist his heated and brief life also compares, on a tragic level, to the life of that founder of modern art. In studying Kevin’s paintings, one cannot find a single moment of hesitation in the execution of any one of his distinct and original faces.
Stone carver, Ken Hiratsuka has called himself “the last stone-age man”. Ken’s work can be described as being both contemporarily executed, but timeless, stone petroglyphs. Examples now decorate large and formidable rocks in countries all over our planet Earth. The Sculptor first began chiseling his endless line in the sidewalks of New York City in 1982. No artist’s work could be more aptly described as “street art”. Ken tattooed his ancient and universal designs directly into the cement and stones we walk on. The line that he draws in stone never crosses itself and is made of design elements taken from all cultures at the point of their earliest artistic expression. It is in the use of these culturally-common configurations that he finds his own universal type of visual language.
Artist Scot Borofsky uses the same types of ancient human expressive lines. His language is one of symbols made with stepped lines, interlocking spirals, horizontal patterns and “stick-configurations”. Borofsky used spray paint on the surfaces of abandoned, broken down and burned-out buildings, on the Lower East Side, to create the impression of ancient ruins in a modern city. Large figurative symbols and long horizontal patterns were executed in the middle of the night in a Krylon spray-paint pallet of contrasting complimentary colors. The artist created a one block sized outdoor installation called “The Pattern Walk” in the East Village, on both sides of Avenue C, between East 4th and East 5th Street. The outdoor installation was begun in 1982 and completed in 1985. Ancient symbols, spray paint and site-specific installation describe Borofsky’s early conceptual approach to street art.
Bob Dombrowski, who came to street art after working as a political activist and as a performance artist brought painting and sculpture together in the installations which he created (along with the help of his partner, Mary Petrushka). These were done on sign poles in mid-town Manhattan, in the Financial District and as an installation entitled “The Faery Ring”, on street poles surrounding Tompkins Square Park, during the early and mid 1980’s. They worked illegally out of a rented limousine during mid-day traffic. A few of these two dimensional gargoyles still exist in their original positions in Manhattan to this day. Dombrowski’s expressive, angular figurines look down from high on their street poles, their expressive vocabulary recalling images of animals, golems and totemic guardians. Truly defying traditional definitions, (and instinctively), the painter-sculptor expresses himself in two/three-dimensional forms and in an abstract-figurative language.
At a time when art was becoming more a part of the environment and less of a commodity, these conceptual artists took to the ancient roads and footpaths of human history to find innate and universal expressive language elements, with which to execute their art on and in and over our modern streets. Their work is important in understanding a moment between the Modernist epoch and the beginnings of Post-Modernism.
Media
Schedule
from October 23, 2019 to November 08, 2019
Opening Reception on 2019-10-30 from 18:00 to 20:00