Fool’s House
Curated by Nora Griffin (’11MFA Candidate)
LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University School of the Arts
310 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street), (212) 854-7641
Artists: Becky Brown, Peter Gallo, Ron Gorchov, Nora Griffin, Josephine Halvorson, Jim Lee
Opening: Friday, October 15, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: October 11-29, 2010
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 10am - 5pm
The sign then makes us forget the thing signified
Joseph Joubert, 1798
Fool's House takes its title from a 1962 Jasper Johns painting – a worn studio broom hooked to a jubilantly gray shaded canvas. Other “real life” studio objects are gathered below the broom: a folded towel, a stretcher and a teacup. Two forms of text appear in the painting. Johns’ signature stencils spell out the title across the top and painted arrows with handwritten words defines the four objects. Youthfully energetic in its execution, the painting has the majestic breadth of a Duchamp joke dilated in oil. It is a painting and at the same time it is more than a painting. In no particular order it is: representation and embodiment, studio portrait, the gathering silence of an omen, the artist/fool’s work tools, and movement at a standstill. Fifty years later, Johns’ painting keeps posing fresh questions of limits, vision, touch, frames, and characters.
The six artists featured in Fool’s House are engaged in an endless conversation, answering questions by posing new ones through their artwork. There are paintings that speak in the one thousand tongues and dusty metallic of New York City, (Becky Brown, Jim Lee) that are as rainy and controlled as a Simenon mystery and as a circularly luminous as a Borges parable (Ron Gorchov). Or as brightly realized as light on a wall, captured as solidly as the first photograph (Josephine Halvorson). And painting as day-to-day studio alchemy, turning words into images, and canvases into edgeless objects (Peter Gallo, Nora Griffin). For each artist there is a desire to personalize the limits of painted abstraction without sacrificing a shared belief in the integral art object and the felt experience of art history. Feelings become as real as facts. Facts become as real as paintings. Painting moves towards infinity.
Review of Fool's House in The New York Sun
LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University School of the Arts
310 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street), (212) 854-7641
Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri, 9am to 5pm
Closed on Saturday and Sunday
For information on past exhibitions please visit:
The LeRoy Neiman Exhibition Archive
