Marlborough is pleased to present Expanding Perceptions, an exhibition with works by Jack Goldstein, Beverly Pepper and Deborah Remington organized by artist and curator Andy Onderdonx.
This exhibition brings together the work of Deborah Remington, Jack Goldstein and Beverly Pepper, three visionary artists whose featured work spans three decades beginning in the 1960s. Pepper’s sculptures, along with Remington and Goldstein’s paintings emanate a mysterious aesthetic. Their work contains elements of illusion and spectacle that provoke the imagination. At the time they were produced, these works transcended the art world and shared an inventiveness that expanded perceptions of our visual experiences in the natural world.
Deborah Remington is one of most interesting yet lesser-known artists that came out of the San Francisco scene in the 50’s and 60’s. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute which was also the stomping grounds for artists Clyfford Still and Richard Diebenkorn. Remington’s work plays with our perception of gravity and form. Layers of visually heavy structures, and semi-symmetrical objects fill her paintings and seem to hover in the center of the canvas, evoking an illusion of weightlessness. Her masterful use of painted gradients was decades ahead of its time. Her use of a distinct color palette and incorporation of gradients illuminated the forms in her paintings. The results are visually intriguing and appear as multi-faceted as contorted steel or shards of reflectiveglass.
Early in his career, Jack Goldstein’s performance works often involved disappearing acts. His knack for sparking imaginations and playing with perception was apparent in his sound and video work as well. When Goldstein began painting in the 1980s his work mesmerized in a similar way. His large, deep canvases portray scenes of natural and unnatural phenomena like sun flares, lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, eclipses, exploding stars and portals to other dimensions. He only increased the mystique of these works by primarily concerning himself with “surface incident”. His use of spray guns left no distracting brush strokes that would infer human touch. Goldstein painted the types of atmospheric spectacles that have captivated humans for thousands of years with each work creating a new experience for our imagination and introducing a new way to perceive the visual world.
Both the Remington and Goldstein paintings are complemented by Beverly Pepper’s highly polished stainless steel sculptures. Pepper said of these works that she wanted to create sculpture with “simple relationships that were, at the same time, beyond the viewer’s grasp.” Pepper strove to make “experience sculpture rather than object sculpture.” Her reflective surfaces of heavy, staggered steel generate a feeling of weightlessness and transparency in a viewer. Originally displayed outdoors in open fields, these pieces are reminiscent of ancient stone megaliths. In the same way that those standing stones conjure mysteries of the past, Pepper’s monoliths seem to do the same of the future. Her work encourages an acute awareness of the expansion of our senses.
—Andy Onderdonx
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