Dia Art Foundation to Present Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015
The first major retrospective of Andre’s work in the United States since the late 1970s debuts at Dia:Beacon and then tours internationally
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dia Art Foundation to Present Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010
May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015
The first major retrospective of Andre’s work in the United States since the late 1970s debuts at Dia:Beacon and then tours internationally
Andre’s signature floor-bound sculptures will be presented with the artist’s “typewriter drawings” and rarely exhibited objects known as Dada Forgeries
New York, NY–Tracing the full evolution over five decades of the thinking of Carl Andre, a crucial figure in the redefinition of contemporary sculpture, Dia Art Foundation will present Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 from May 5, 2014, through March 2, 2015, at Dia:Beacon. The retrospective will include approximately 50 sculptures displayed in Dia:Beacon’s main galleries; over 200 poems and works on paper presented in wooden vitrines designed by the artist; a selection of rarely exhibited assemblages known as Dada Forgeries; and an unprecedented selection of photographs and ephemera. This will be the first survey of Carl Andre’s entire oeuvre by a museum, and the first retrospective in North America since 1978-80.
After premiering at Dia:Beacon, the retrospective’s only venue in the United States, it will travel to museums in Europe, including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (May 7–October 12, 2015); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (May 7–September 25, 2016); and Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 20, 2016–February 12, 2017).
The retrospective will represent all major historical and aesthetic shifts in Andre’s considerable oeuvre, including the artist’s signature works made out of unaltered building and industrial materials such as brick stacks, metal squares, slabs, and timber blocks. One of Andre’s landmark ephemeral works will be refabricated and installed on the grounds of Dia:Beacon for the duration of the retrospective, and an unparalleled display of Andre’s poems and typewriter works will examine the pivotal role of language in his practice. Highlighting the richness of the artist’s work—from his early exercises to his latest productions—the presentation at Dia:Beacon will also offer an opportunity to examine concerns shared by Andre’s work and artists in Dia’s collection, such as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Richard Serra.
“Carl Andre’s work not only challenges traditional notions of technique, composition, and placement. It also redefines the role of the spectators, and their experience as part of the art work,” stated Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Andre summarized his drastic evolution in the late 1960s as a passage from sculpture as form to sculpture as structure to sculpture as place, a motto that he revisited and reformulated numerous times throughout his career. The title of Dia’s retrospective is an acknowledgement of the impact that Andre’s statement still has in contemporary art history. By presenting such a rich overview of his work as a sculptor and poet, the retrospective will provide a chance to assess the critical and radical influence Andre had in the development of key notions such as site specificity or post-studio art.”
“The simplicity of Carl Andre’s work conveys a striking complexity; it naturally reveals the multiple ‘conditions’ that determine not only the artwork as such, but also the material itself in relation to historical and economic conditions. Andre’s long-lasting impact on contemporary art is often reduced to the realm of sculpture, when in fact his process and methodology are palpable across various disciplines and generations of artists. Working with Carl over the past three years, we’ve had the privilege of experiencing his unique precision, his intense understanding of his vocation, and his courageous attempt to rewrite the status of a work of art,” said Yasmil Raymond, Curator, Dia Art Foundation.
Co-curated by Dia director Philippe Vergne and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond, in close collaboration with the artist, the retrospective will bring together works from renowned collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, Dallas Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Tate, Addison Gallery of American Art, and Wexner Center for the Arts.
Exhibition Highlights
Dia will present both historical and recent sculptures by the artist. The earliest stages of his production will be emphasized by the presence of seminal series and exercises, while the main stages of Andre’s mature oeuvre will be represented by a large selection of metal, wood, and brick works. In addition, Andre’s crucial contribution to the inception of earthworks will be highlighted by Joint (1968), an ephemeral hay sculpture that will be refabricated for this important occasion.
Andre’s poems, presented in neighboring galleries, will provide a strikingly intimate perspective on his visionary approach to concrete poetry. These typewritten sheets, which include early notes and studies, progressively cohere into a highly systematic style, comprising found language and historical references, patterned combinations of everyday speech and lexicon, obscure epigrams, and abstract, geometric typewriter drawings. This vast survey of Andre’s poems, the largest to date, will be presented in two consecutive cycles during the retrospective at Dia:Beacon.
To supplement the presentation of sculptures and poems, Dia will offer a rare opportunity to view, for the first time in a museum context, a selection of Carl Andre’s Dada Forgeries—a legendary series of assemblages and ready-made-like pieces produced sporadically, but consistently, between the late 1950s and the early 2000s. Reinforcing Dia’s mission of pioneering art scholarship, this will be the first time that this series will be examined as a cohesive collection, whose quasi-confidential status and humorous absurdity has challenged Andre experts over decades. Andre’s Dada Forgeries will be installed in a special gallery that will also include ephemera and photographic documentation. This room will present a selection from Hollis Frampton’s documentation of Andre’s early works (1958–1961), along with other collaborations between Carl Andre and the photographers Gianfranco Gorgoni (1970) and Gordon “Diz” Bensley (1971). In addition, this room will also gather an assortment of postcard sets, demonstrating Andre’s sustained interest in postal correspondence as a poetic and artistic medium.
Publication
A clothbound, 400-page, full-color book accompanying the retrospective will offer original essays by co- curators Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond and contributions by internationally respected authors and scholars such as art historians Arnauld Pierre, Alistair Rider, Anne Rorimer, Phyllis Tuchman and Mika Yoshitake; poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff; curators Christophe Cherix and Manuel Cirauqui; classicist Brooke Holmes; and poet Vincent Katz. Co-edited by Michelle Piranio and Jeremy Sigler, the publication will also include a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and chronology. The book’s designer is the award-winning Purtill Family Business.
The book will be realized within the context of Dia’s larger publication program, which, since 1987, has produced a substantial body of scholarship surrounding Dia’s exhibitions, programs, and permanent collection.
Funding
Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 is made possible by major support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous support is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston and the National Endowment for the Arts; Glenstone; and Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann. Additional support is provided by Virginia Dwan; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency; the Marx Family Advised Fund at Aspen Community Foundation; Henry McNeil; and Emily Rauh Pulitzer. Generous funding for the publication is provided by Sadie Coles HQ, Paula Cooper, and Konrad Fischer Galerie. Additional support has been provided by Galerie Tschudi and Dominique Levy Gallery.
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974, is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico. Dia also commissions original artists' projects produced for the web and produces scholarly publications.
Dia currently presents temporary installations, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.
For more information please visit www.diaart.org.
Dia Art Foundation to Present Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010
May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015
The first major retrospective of Andre’s work in the United States since the late 1970s debuts at Dia:Beacon and then tours internationally
Andre’s signature floor-bound sculptures will be presented with the artist’s “typewriter drawings” and rarely exhibited objects known as Dada Forgeries
New York, NY–Tracing the full evolution over five decades of the thinking of Carl Andre, a crucial figure in the redefinition of contemporary sculpture, Dia Art Foundation will present Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 from May 5, 2014, through March 2, 2015, at Dia:Beacon. The retrospective will include approximately 50 sculptures displayed in Dia:Beacon’s main galleries; over 200 poems and works on paper presented in wooden vitrines designed by the artist; a selection of rarely exhibited assemblages known as Dada Forgeries; and an unprecedented selection of photographs and ephemera. This will be the first survey of Carl Andre’s entire oeuvre by a museum, and the first retrospective in North America since 1978-80.
After premiering at Dia:Beacon, the retrospective’s only venue in the United States, it will travel to museums in Europe, including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (May 7–October 12, 2015); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (May 7–September 25, 2016); and Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 20, 2016–February 12, 2017).
The retrospective will represent all major historical and aesthetic shifts in Andre’s considerable oeuvre, including the artist’s signature works made out of unaltered building and industrial materials such as brick stacks, metal squares, slabs, and timber blocks. One of Andre’s landmark ephemeral works will be refabricated and installed on the grounds of Dia:Beacon for the duration of the retrospective, and an unparalleled display of Andre’s poems and typewriter works will examine the pivotal role of language in his practice. Highlighting the richness of the artist’s work—from his early exercises to his latest productions—the presentation at Dia:Beacon will also offer an opportunity to examine concerns shared by Andre’s work and artists in Dia’s collection, such as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Richard Serra.
“Carl Andre’s work not only challenges traditional notions of technique, composition, and placement. It also redefines the role of the spectators, and their experience as part of the art work,” stated Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Andre summarized his drastic evolution in the late 1960s as a passage from sculpture as form to sculpture as structure to sculpture as place, a motto that he revisited and reformulated numerous times throughout his career. The title of Dia’s retrospective is an acknowledgement of the impact that Andre’s statement still has in contemporary art history. By presenting such a rich overview of his work as a sculptor and poet, the retrospective will provide a chance to assess the critical and radical influence Andre had in the development of key notions such as site specificity or post-studio art.”
“The simplicity of Carl Andre’s work conveys a striking complexity; it naturally reveals the multiple ‘conditions’ that determine not only the artwork as such, but also the material itself in relation to historical and economic conditions. Andre’s long-lasting impact on contemporary art is often reduced to the realm of sculpture, when in fact his process and methodology are palpable across various disciplines and generations of artists. Working with Carl over the past three years, we’ve had the privilege of experiencing his unique precision, his intense understanding of his vocation, and his courageous attempt to rewrite the status of a work of art,” said Yasmil Raymond, Curator, Dia Art Foundation.
Co-curated by Dia director Philippe Vergne and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond, in close collaboration with the artist, the retrospective will bring together works from renowned collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, Dallas Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Tate, Addison Gallery of American Art, and Wexner Center for the Arts.
Exhibition Highlights
Dia will present both historical and recent sculptures by the artist. The earliest stages of his production will be emphasized by the presence of seminal series and exercises, while the main stages of Andre’s mature oeuvre will be represented by a large selection of metal, wood, and brick works. In addition, Andre’s crucial contribution to the inception of earthworks will be highlighted by Joint (1968), an ephemeral hay sculpture that will be refabricated for this important occasion.
Andre’s poems, presented in neighboring galleries, will provide a strikingly intimate perspective on his visionary approach to concrete poetry. These typewritten sheets, which include early notes and studies, progressively cohere into a highly systematic style, comprising found language and historical references, patterned combinations of everyday speech and lexicon, obscure epigrams, and abstract, geometric typewriter drawings. This vast survey of Andre’s poems, the largest to date, will be presented in two consecutive cycles during the retrospective at Dia:Beacon.
To supplement the presentation of sculptures and poems, Dia will offer a rare opportunity to view, for the first time in a museum context, a selection of Carl Andre’s Dada Forgeries—a legendary series of assemblages and ready-made-like pieces produced sporadically, but consistently, between the late 1950s and the early 2000s. Reinforcing Dia’s mission of pioneering art scholarship, this will be the first time that this series will be examined as a cohesive collection, whose quasi-confidential status and humorous absurdity has challenged Andre experts over decades. Andre’s Dada Forgeries will be installed in a special gallery that will also include ephemera and photographic documentation. This room will present a selection from Hollis Frampton’s documentation of Andre’s early works (1958–1961), along with other collaborations between Carl Andre and the photographers Gianfranco Gorgoni (1970) and Gordon “Diz” Bensley (1971). In addition, this room will also gather an assortment of postcard sets, demonstrating Andre’s sustained interest in postal correspondence as a poetic and artistic medium.
Publication
A clothbound, 400-page, full-color book accompanying the retrospective will offer original essays by co- curators Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond and contributions by internationally respected authors and scholars such as art historians Arnauld Pierre, Alistair Rider, Anne Rorimer, Phyllis Tuchman and Mika Yoshitake; poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff; curators Christophe Cherix and Manuel Cirauqui; classicist Brooke Holmes; and poet Vincent Katz. Co-edited by Michelle Piranio and Jeremy Sigler, the publication will also include a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and chronology. The book’s designer is the award-winning Purtill Family Business.
The book will be realized within the context of Dia’s larger publication program, which, since 1987, has produced a substantial body of scholarship surrounding Dia’s exhibitions, programs, and permanent collection.
Funding
Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 is made possible by major support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous support is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston and the National Endowment for the Arts; Glenstone; and Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann. Additional support is provided by Virginia Dwan; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency; the Marx Family Advised Fund at Aspen Community Foundation; Henry McNeil; and Emily Rauh Pulitzer. Generous funding for the publication is provided by Sadie Coles HQ, Paula Cooper, and Konrad Fischer Galerie. Additional support has been provided by Galerie Tschudi and Dominique Levy Gallery.
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974, is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico. Dia also commissions original artists' projects produced for the web and produces scholarly publications.
Dia currently presents temporary installations, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.
For more information please visit www.diaart.org.