On the Surface: Alexander Calder, Carmen Herrera, Polly Apfelbaum

A concert of flat colored shapes can reference a riot of associations, humidities, memories of rooms, textiles, the silhouettes of flowers and birds, and the trajectories of ships and jets. Even the perpendicular planes of seemingly reductive abstract painting draws us into a dance between distance and proximity.
– Stephen Westfall, artist and curator of A Planar Garden

 

A blank canvas, a blank page, a slab of marble, a piece of metal… they are the flat planes that artists transform, using a language of their own.

 

 

A Planar Garden, at the Alexandre Gallery in New York, explores the way in which modern and contemporary artists have used the plane in their works.

 

Included in the exhibit, which runs through February 1st, are the works of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) and Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955), whose works are available at VFA.

 

Alexander Calder was able to take his works of paper and transform those works into mobiles and stablies from flat sheets of metal. 

 

 

Calder was born in Pennsylvania. His father was a sculptor, his mother a portrait artist. The Calder Gardens, a site dedicated to Calder’s art and ideas, is scheduled to open in September 2025, across from the Barnes Foundation.

 

Carmen Herrera had an extraordinary life and an extraordinary career. She was born in Havana, the youngest of seven children. Her parents were journalists. Herrera studied art and architecture in Cuba. She met and married Jesse Lowenthal, an American teacher from New York, who was traveling through Cuba as a tourist. The couple moved to New York, where Herrera continued her studies at the Art Students League.

 

Herrera’s minimalist style was way ahead of its time, and she had several unseccful shows. In 1985, at the age of 70, Herrera had her first major solo show, at the Alternative Museum in New York-a great show, but not a great success for her. It was only in 2004, at the age of 89, that she sold her first painting and began to get the recognition that she deserved.

 

Her husband died in 2000, at the age of 89. In 2016, the Whitney Museum hosted a retrospective of Herrera's work covering the period 1948-78, with other galleries across the world following suit. Herrera died in 2022, at the age of 106.

 

Polly Apfelbaum was born in Pennsylvania in 1955. She is best known for her bold use of colors in her drawings, sculptures and fabric floor pieces that she calls fallen paintings. Apfelbaum received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Whitney, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and other major museums.

 

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 I can’t think of anything more exciting than just the surface of things. Just appearance.

– Alex Katz

 Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world, including a career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2022. He was the recipient of the 2023 National Medal of Arts.

 

 

Alex Katz (b.1927) collaborated with and painted dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor in 1959 and has continued to paint dancers for more than sixty years. Alex Katz: Theater and Dance, a traveling exhibit of those works, are currently on view at the The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida through February 2nd. The exhibit will travel to the  Frye Museum in Seattle and be on view there from February 22, 2025 from June 8, 2025.

 

Works that Katz made between 2021 and 2022, and were shown in Venice during the Biennale last year, will be shown at the Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin in Paris from

February 15, 2025  through April 12, 2025.

 

Paintings from Katz’s White Lotus series will be on exhibit at the Gray Gallery in Chicago in July 2025. 

 

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January 29, 2025