Richard Serra Drawings és Patrick Caulfield Paintings (Serpentine Gallery, 1992)/1993

RICHARD SERRA: Drawings 3 October -15 November 1992 The drawings are always based on a thorough understanding of the gallery’s architectural situation: their size and shape is determined by the specifics of floor, wall, corner or ceiling of the space in which they are placed. Serra visited the Serpentine Gallery on several occasions throughout the last year, each time carefully inspecting and recording the spaces. Subsequently, the canvases were prepared in his New York studio, After the formal simplicity of his works from the 1960s such as Pony and Window at Night, the end of the next decade saw works of increasing spatial and stylistic complexity. Still Life: Autumn Fashion, Town and Country and Still Life: Maroochydore are cleverly crafted Top: Richard Serra Equal Size, Unequal Weight, 1988. Kunsthalle Basel. Photo: Christian Baur Below: Richard Serra Equal and Opposite Comers, Diagonally ( for Samuel Beckett) 1990 (destroyed) Courtesy Galerie Yvon Lambert. Paris PATRICK CAULFIELD: Paintings 1963 -1992 24 November 1992 -17 January 1993 left: Patrick Caulfield Portrait of Juan Gris, 1963 right: Patrick Caulfield Reception, 1988 Drawing is a concentration on an essential activity, and the credibility of the statement is totally within your hands. It’s the most direct, conscious space in which I work. I can observe my process from beginning to end, and at times sustain a continuous concentration. It's replenishing. It’s one of the few conditions in which I can understand the source of my work. Richard Serra (born San Francisco, 1939) is one of America’s most celebrated and controversial contemporary artists. Best known for his monumental, site-specific steel sculptures - notably the spectacular Fulcrum at London’s Broadgate - this exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery focuses exclusively on another part of his oeuvre, hitherto unseen in this country: the installation drawings. The drawings appear to confound our expectations by reinventing the medium: executed on canvas rather than paper, they take the form of ‘imageless’ and decidedly anti­ornamental monochrome shapes, enveloping whole walls. Their thick black surface is achieved by covering the canvas with several layers of paint-stick - a waxy, oil-based crayon which is heat­­softened for the process. by priming them with glue and gesso. The final coating and cutting into shape, however, takes place on site in the gallery. Once positioned, the inherent structural principles of each drawing affect the entire space around them: the dense, elemental black is perceived as mass, interacting with the formal characteristics of a room - de-stabilising or re-ordering it. The various geometric shapes of the drawings can be aligned with different weights, i.e. a rectangle lying horizontally appears ‘heavier’ than one standing vertically. By counterbalancing the volume of a room with the ‘weight’ of his drawings, Serra is able to alter our understanding of a site, even defy our sense of balance. Richard Serra has been making installation drawings for over twenty years. They exist as an independent body of work, although their concept is closely related to his sculpture - both share the preoccupation with site and context. The exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery has been mounted in tandem with a major new sculpture Weight and Measure, by Richard Serra at the Tate Gallery (30 September 1992 - 17 January 1993). This exhibition has been generously supported by the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. For catalogue details, see BOOKSHOP. Front cover: Richard Serra working on installation drawing Photo: Ulrich Baatz, Essen Since the 1960s, when he made his name as a youthful protagonist of Pop Art, Patrick Caulfield (born London 1936) has continued to produce some of the most memorable and lasting images in British painting. This survey offers audiences an opportunity to see Caulfield’s paintings - recently included in the Royal Academy’s Pop Art Show - in his first major solo exhibition since the Walker Art Galleiy/Tate Gallery retrospective of eleven years ago. For the past three decades Patrick Caulfield’s work has focused on the genres of interior and still-life. He is a master of the ordinary, prosaic and unheroic side of urban life, and his familiar restaurant, pub and domestic scenes can be read as icons of the artificiality of modern living. Although he single-mindedly concentrates on places of conviviality, his bars and cafés are generally devoid of human presence. Office Party depicts a scene of celebration after all the guests have left - a lighted lamp, an empty glass and a plate full of food make this absence even more poignant. Caulfield trained at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, at a time when Andy Warhol had just painted his first Campbell Soup Cans and Roy Lichtenstein was experimenting with his appropriations of the comic strip. Like the early Pop artists in America, Caulfield was strongly influenced by the strategies of advertising and the language of contemporary design. In both style and subject matter, his paintings echo and explore the relationship between fine art and mass culture. The style of Caulfield’s early work is marked by large expanses of solid bright colour, and images often starkly defined in black outline. Inspiration for these works came not only from Léger and Matisse, but also from postcards of Minoan wall-paintings, brought back from a first trip to Crete in 1961. However, it was the precise and detached language in the work of the Spanish Cubist Juan Gris, that would have a lasting influence on Caulfield’s own work. His Portrait of Juan Gris is a testimony of his admiration: I made it brightly coloured, in contrast to his name, because I felt he was a very brightly optimistic painter. His paintings architecturally are so strong, without feelings of doubt. collisions of patterns, paintings styles and clashing colours. In work of recent years, Caulfield has dispensed with the black outline altogether. In his most radical compositions to date, such as Buffet, Reception or Lounge he combines trompe­­l’oeil realism with highly stylised objects and sharply defined areas of flat colour, referring to the spatial effect of lighting. The highlighting of objects and textures of the familiar urban landscape continues in these works, but the rigour of their construction and the assured and impeccable deployment of colour, gives them an extraordinary vitality and freshness. Based on an acute sense of observation, a fine undercurrent of subversive humour and irony runs through all of Caulfield’s work. Although Caulfield might occasionally work from photographs or from life for particular elements in his work, it is important to note that the final composition is always entirely imaginary: I create a non-existent space and give it a feeling of reality. For catalogue and limited edition print details, see BOOKSHOP.

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