Gary Kuehn. Practitioner’s Delight
The first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of the American sculptor Gary Kuehn (Plainfield, New Jersey, 1939), which pays homage to the novel artistic curriculum of the artist, whose raw, radical language developed from an initial reflection on the physicality of materials and played a significant role in the birth of a new conception of sculpture, equidistant from the subjectivism of Expressionist abstraction and the objectivity and geometric rigor of minimalism.
The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, will comprise four sections, hosted by the museum’s display areas and Palazzo della Ragione’s prestigious Sala delle Capriate, in Bergamo Alta’s medieval heart. The show explores a multidirectional path that aims to review the evolution of Gary Kuehn’s artistic language and highlight the surprising relevance of his work.
It will present a significant core of about 70 works, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations, among the most important in the artist’s corpus, dating from the early 1960s to the most recent pieces, with a series of new items specifically made for this occasion.
The entire historical series – from the Wedge Pieces to the Bolt Pieces, from Melt to Mattress Pieces, and the Pedestal Pieces – will be represented in Bergamo’s Palazzo della Ragione –built in the late twelfth century –, affording the visitor an exhaustive overview of the first, fundamental, creative decade, and an introduction to the second part of the exhibition, hosted in the GAMeC rooms.
The first floor of the museum will house three sections, corresponding to some of the fundamental “contrasts” investigated by Kuehn during his artistic career: deformation/adaptation, connection/separation, freedom/limitation.
Progressing from the first post-minimalist sculptures, now internationally famous, through graphic works, two-dimensional zinc and copper works, and the Black Paintings of the 1970s and also those of more recent production in the Noughties; the Twist Pieces and Berliner Series of the 1980s and 1990s; then the resin sculptures and the Stencil Drawings of recent years, as well as the Gesture Projects that the artist has produced since the 1960s, throughout his career to the present time.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Mousse Publishing in collaboration with GAMeC Books, includes texts by Alex Bacon, Lorenzo Giusti, David Komary, and a conversation between Gary Kuehn and Sara
Fumagalli.