Blog

The Last Two Weeks

Mark Manders, Balancing Act, 1993-2009.

I’ve been productive in studio—no proof of this as of yet—but my upcoming exhibition is coming together.

Last week I went to San Francisco twice; once to speak to a graduate class at SFAI on my work on Tuesday and then again on Thursday to hear a lecture by Jan Verwoert at CCA, where he talked about Inspiration and its Pitfalls. Both were interesting and educational.

The following day I drove to Los Angeles to attend a catalog release party for Steven Criqui’s memorial exhibition that was held at UCI. While I was there, I was able to see Eva Hesse’s and Mark Manders’ exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Laura Owens, who I ran into at the curators walk-through, will be doing her own gallery talk/walk-through on the 24th of October for Hesse and Elliott Hundley on October 7th for Manders.

It is almost unnecessary to say the Hesse paintings (all from 1960 and her first year out of Yale) were quite nice. The “old” opinion was that these paintings weren’t any good. Which I think is the minority opinion now. *Note that the gallery walls are a light pink. Enough to activate the color in the paintings without over powering the work.

I am going to write about my experience with the Manders exhibition later, but will say now it is worth a trip west (still east of the 405 by a few blocks). the sculpture above is in the show, but most of the work was created on the occasion of the exhibition (that will later travel to the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN).