Marlborough is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Red Grooms, entitled Torn from the Pages II. This will be the artist’s second Torn from the Pages exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, a continuation of the first exhibition which took place from October to December of 2012. Red Grooms came to international attention through his early Happenings, like Burning Building (1959), and his famed three-dimensional constructions, such as Ruckus Manhattan, which was exhibited at Marlborough Gallery in 1976. He has worked in a variety of media, including film and theatrical performances. This exhibition comprises 19 small mixed-media constructions that explore and delve into the creative realms of other artists including Joseph Cornell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yayoi Kusama, Paul Klee, Edward Munch and Francis Picabia.
In a new take on his hallmark three-dimensional constructions, which compound painting and sculpture, Grooms incorporates an element of collage into the works in this exhibition, integrating pages from magazines with watercolor, acrylic, ink, and other media, creating perceptive portraits of other artists and placing them within the environment of their own works. For example, in Galactic Orbs (Yayoi Kusama), 2013, Kusama appears three times as if receding into a portal of her iconic dotted dimensions. Edward Hopper sits upon a bed in one of his own compositions, and Titian paints one his famous figures in plein air near a sign reading “Portraits, $1.00.”
John Ashberry, the renowned American poet and critic, wrote the following on Groom’s work on the occasion of his 1985 retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts:
“... Grooms had no difficulty avoiding being drawn into the cogs of this Manichean struggle between the forces of light (the ‘heroic’ generation of Abstract Expressionists) and darkness (anybody who tried to challenge them)... at a time when art seems to waver between extremes of homiletic purity and an impurity that also wants to see itself as somehow exemplary, Grooms offers a salutary third alternative: formalism and psychology, the pure and the impure, the raw and the cooked, all ingeniously layered in a hero sandwich...”
Red Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937 and has lived and worked in New York since 1957. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School for Social Research in New York City and at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, MA.
Grooms’ art has been the subject of many retrospective shows, among them: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 1985, an exhibition that traveled to the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles and Tennesse State Museum; a comprehensive retrospective in 1987 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; in 2000, the National Academy of Design in New York held an exhibition of Groom’s graphic work which traveled to 5 other venues in the United States through 2004, including the Lowe Art Museum in Miami and the Chicago Cultural Center. Grooms has been honored with several important survey exhibitions, most recently at the Hudson River Museum in 2007, the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York in 2005, The First Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York, in 2003. Grooms has received numerous awards and commissions throughout his career, including the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Academy of Design in 2003, and was an Open House New York honoree in 2011. Last year, the Yale University Art Gallery held an exhibition of the artist’s large-scale paintings and films entitled Red Grooms: Larger than Life. Marlborough will hold a simultaneous exhibition entitled Beware a Wolf in the Alley at our Broome Street location, which showcases an immersive installation entitled, The Alley (1984-85) and Little Red Riding Hood (1978), a 16-minute film.
Grooms’ work can be found in over forty public institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Denver Art Museum, CO; Fort Worth Art Museum, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
A fully illustrated catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition.
Works
