Posts Tagged ‘Sprüth Magers’
Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany
Installation view: “All Light: Light and Space Yesterday and Today,” Kunsthalle Bielefeld 2025.
Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer
Installation view: “All Light: Light and Space Yesterday and Today,” Kunsthalle Bielefeld 2025.
Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer
We are very excited to see installation images from the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, for a show titled, “All Light: Light and Space Yesterday and Today.”
Over the past ten years, exhibits in Berlin, Paris, London and Copenhagen have broadened the audience for Kauffman’s work. Now, that European exposure continues at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany. This new and expansive show, in a museum designed by American architect Philip Johnson, includes contemporary European artists inspired by the original leaders in Southern California during the 1960s.
In 2016, Kauffman’s work gained visibility in Europe, with major exhibits in Berlin and Paris. Sprüth Magers, Berlin, presented Craig Kauffman: Works from 1962 – 1964 in Dialogue with Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, from April through June. Following that show, the Centre Pompidou in Paris included Kauffman in Beat Generation, June–October, 2016.
Returning to London after decades in 2018, with widespread notice and strong reviews, Kauffman was prominently featured at Sprüth Magers, London, in Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, January–March, 2018. Also in England, the Tate Liverpool presented a show titled Op Art in Focus, from July 2018–June, 2019. Kauffman’s 1967 Untitled wall relief from the Tate collection was included.
Constructed Paintings
Installation view of Craig Kauffman: Constructed Paintings 1973–1976, at Sprüth Magers in 2023.
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
During the 1960s, Craig Kaufffman gained significant recognition for several series of works, and investigated both form and coloration, challenging the medium of painted plastic while remaining in the conversation with both mainstream Minimalism and the artists associated with Light and Space. His works were wall-bound paintings, yet remained between low relief and sculpture, activating the wall and the environment.
Installation view of Craig Kauffman: Constructed Paintings 1973–1976, at Sprüth Magers in 2023.
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
By the early 1970s, Kauffman had completed a lengthy seven-year period of working with formed plastic, as well as experimentations with installations of light reflections. Kauffman made a conscious decision to leave the medium of painting on plastic and the installations to begin a new body of work. He moved away from his increasingly atmospheric plastic relief paintings to a new kind of painted construction. Rather than continuing to produce the luminous works that established his reputation, or to proceed with light installations that he had successfully begun, Kauffman realized that he wanted to return to the studio.
Installation view of Craig Kauffman: Constructed Paintings 1973–1976, at Sprüth Magers in 2023.
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
He began to use a lightweight but dimensionally stable wood called jelutong to form the structural elements and develop a vocabulary of shapes. Canvas and muslin were attached to the front and the back of these supports. He also made use of the wall and the open space between the painted areas. Drawing was incorporated in the work, as well. In an interview with Michael Auping in 1976, Kauffman stated “…the only way I can work my way back into painting is to really reconstruct painting for myself.” It is through the integration of color, linear structure and shape that he achieved the architectural presence of his Constructed Paintings.
Robert Morris and Craig Kauffman
Craig Kauffman and Robert Morris had a long friendship, dating back to April of 1958 when they both exhibited at the Dilexi Gallery, Opening Group Show, in the North Beach section of San Francisco. The two artists met up again several times, especially in New York during the late 1960s.
Their frequent discussions resulted in a short-lived collaboration for the exhibition Using Walls (Indoors) at the Jewish Museum in 1970, which remained open for only one day, and which Kauffman described as a combination of both of the artists’ ideas. Only a few years prior, Morris begun making process-oriented felt pieces, in which he hung strips of industrial felt on the wall and allowed gravity to determine their shape. This influenced Kauffman’s conception of his series of Loops, in which sheets of spray-painted Plexiglas seem to casually droop over a wire.
In Kauffman’s work, the environment constantly shifts as the viewer moves around each object. The light that moves across the curved edges of each piece facilitates the full comprehension of their forms. This draws comparisons to Morris’s own textual formulations in his influential Notes on Sculpture series, which advocated a phenomenological reading of the art object, how they change under varying conditions of light and space. The colored shadows of the hanging Loops and the cast plastic forms that project into space directly implicate both the viewer and their supports.
The photos above show the installation on the first floor of the exhibition curated by Frank Lloyd, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, Sprüth Magers London, January 19—March 31, 2018.
Installation views: Sprüth Magers, London, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, January 19–March 31, 2018.
Photo Courtesy Sprüth Magers
Photography by Stephen White
Craig Kauffman and Donald Judd
Craig Kauffman and Donald Judd met in the mid-1960s, when both had studios in Manhattan. They were friends and exchanged works, with Judd acquiring a 1967 translucent orange Plexiglas wall relief by Kauffman. Over the last 50 years, curators and critics have often noted the similarities in their use of industrial materials, serial imagery, with hybrid objects that present the relationship of sculpture and the wall.
Donald Judd used the phrase “specific objects” to describe his own work, a format which operated between painting and sculpture. Like the work of Judd, Kauffman’s three-dimensional plastic paintings occupy this liminal category. Their volume suggests that they are sculpture, but their presence on the wall reinforces their status as paintings. The unity of color and form, achieved through the use of industrial materials, is a point of similarity between the two artists’ objectives.
In the 2018 Sprüth Magers exhibit Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, Donald Judd’s work was contextualized by the inclusion of the stack piece Untitled (Bernstein 80-4) (1980) and the floor piece Untitled, DSS 234 (1970). In the same ground floor room, curator Frank Lloyd placed the 1967 Craig Kauffman, which Judd had owned, along with a 1969 Kauffman Untitled Wall relief. Writing for Flash Art, critic Alex Bennet noted:
“Kauffman’s work on show demonstrates an unchallenged desire for phenomenological observation, a project of formal pleasure that distends from concerns of figure and ground, wall and support, industrial procedure and material contingency. The ground floor features Kauffman’s bulging biomorphic and bullishly lusty vacuum forms, shellacked and uniform like candies in chronic tangerine or extravagant duotone: ridged carnation pink protruding from a lacquered jade. Each one has its own resolute charm.”
Installation view: Sprüth Magers, London, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, January 19–March 31, 2018.
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