Michael Auping

This exhibition, with work by Jenny Holzer, was originally installed in the United States Pavilion at the 44th Venice Biennale in Italy in 1990. Chief Curator Michael Auping, as United States Commissioner, organized the exhibition, which won the Leone d’Oro (Golden Lion) award for Best Pavilion.

The Buffalo installation was the first United States presentation of Holzer’s recent work and included a number of works from the Biennale installation, as well as several new works designed for the Albright-Knox’s exhibition space.

Since her first series of public art texts, TRUISMS, appeared as broadsides throughout New York in 1977, Holzer has employed the medium of language in a variety of formats to convey her artistic messages. Her texts were inscribed on Italian marble tile floors as well as on a series of light-emitting dicode (LED) signs, the electronic message boards for which she is best known. The Buffalo installation was the first United States presentation of Holzer’s work. Following the 1990 Biennale, the exhibition traveled to Städtische Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, Germany, and to the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark.

Born in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1950, Holzer attended Duke University and the University of Chicago before completing a bachelor of fine arts degree at Ohio University in Athens. She entered the master of fine arts program at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, where she began her first work with language. She enrolled in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 1977, and then applied her words to such media as billboards, metal plaques, television spots, t-shirts and tractor hats. Each body of Holzer’s writing speaks in a unique voice, and the voice can run effortlessly from a graffiti-based harangue to elegiac narrative. The texts, as they evolved, include: TRUISMS, 1977–1979; INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS, 1979–1982; LIVING, 1980–1982; UNDER A ROCK, 1985–1987; and LAMENTS, 1987–1989.… (mais)

Philip Guston (1913-1980) had been a successful abstract painter for almost two decades when he boldly returned to figurative work in the late 1960s. His uncompromising late paintings, which broke taboos, baffled his admirers, and shocked the art establishment, ultimately inspired succeeding generations of artists, invigorating painting with a new sense of mission.

This book, the most comprehensive survey of Guston's art to date, was originally published on the occasion of a major international exhibition. It brings together for the first time the different bodies of the artist's work, exposing the connective threads between each of his developmental stages. In-depth essays by a noted group of critics and art historians explore Guston's early influences and the emergence of symbols that resurfaced and played prominent roles in his late work. They provide insight into Guston's philosophy regarding abstraction, his role within its development, and the social and art historical context from which his so-called "Klan" paintings emerged. 197 illustrations, 158 in color.… (mais)

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) wrote Religion of Love, a late statement on her work and thought, sometime in the 1990s. Composed of short, aphoristic statements and paragraphs, it lucidly states her art credo and life advice: "Love makes us want to do all the good things. Get up in the morning and work for life." "The part of the mind that's aware of perfection tells us everything that is good." "You can contact the mind by asking for help." Somewhat uncharacteristically, Martin asked her friend Richard Tuttle to illustrate it. As Tuttle writes in his introduction, "on the one hand, it reconfirms her most classical thought (Beauty is the mystery of life), and, on the other, adds new thought with an urgency only found in a mature artist of her age and persuasion." This beautiful, slim volume constitutes both an important artist's statement and a great collaboration.… (mais)

Since his first road trip in 1956, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, Ed Ruscha has continued to muse on America as seen from the road: "I like being in the car, and seeing things from that vantage point," he has said. "Sometimes I give myself assignments to go out on the road and explore different ideas. My books are an example of that." Consisting of around 75 works spanning the artist's entire career, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested includes many of the famous aforementioned artist's books, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Real Estate Opportunities, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirty-Four Parking Lots and the groundbreaking artist's book Every Building on the Sunset Strip; some of Ruscha's most iconic paintings, such as the "Standard Stations" and the "Hollywood Signs," as well as paintings inspired by street names and road signs; and his exploration of the topography of greater Los Angeles in paintings that depict aerial grids of the city, as well as various southern California horizons and sunsets. Also examined here is the rarely seen Ruscha film Miracle (1975), which tells the story of a mechanic whose obsessive repair of the carburetor on a 1965 Mustang dooms his date with a beautiful woman. The first-ever treatment of a primary theme in the artist's career, Road Tested at last gives Ed Ruscha his own road show.… (mais)