Rachel Whiteread, YELLOW EDGE, 2007–08, plaster, pigment and resin (four units), 7 11/16 × 15 3/16 × 18 1/2 inches (19.5 × 38.6 × 47 cm) © Rachel Whiteread. Photo by Mike Bruce
‘Plane.Site’: inaugural exhibition at Gagosian SF Gagosian Gallery presents ‘Plane.Site’, a cross-generational exhibition of modern and contemporary artists organized by Sam Orlofsky to inaugurate the San Francisco gallery. May 18 – August 27, 2016.]]>
Source: Gagosian Gallery
“Plane.Site” explores the dynamic exchanges between drawing and sculpture, in the work of artists from the modern post-war period to the present day. To that end, each participating artist is represented by a work in both two and three dimensions.
In an essay to accompany the exhibition, John Elderfield observes “Moving from the boundaries of two dimensions into free space, artists may feel an obvious thrill of escape,” while noting that there is also “the less obvious but equally liberating escape from open space, with its grip of the literal, for the spontaneity of movement and freedom of illusion attainable in the haven of the two-dimensional.” Consistent with his observation, many modern and contemporary artists have evaded the dictate of the rectangular frame, allowing the drawn line to exist on different planes, and eventually, to descend from the canvas into three dimensions. In stepping away from the drawn line on paper and into the heft and mass of three-dimensional sculpture, such artists continued to negotiate the rectangular plane, even when composing in open space.
Spanning multiple generations, “Plane.Site” reveals the shifting grounds of correspondence between two and three dimensions. Duchamp’s readymade strategy by which an everyday object can attain the status of art object predicates Joe Bradley’s life-size cast-bronze vintage television set (2016) and Jasper Johns’s lumpen “Flashlight II” (1958) modeled in papier-mâché and glass, one of nine iterations of a single motif that he generated using approaches as diverse as bricolage and bronze-casting. In contrast to the deadpan quiddity of their sculptures, both artists exhibit a vivid quickness of touch in their drawings.
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