About Sol Lewitt (American, b. 1928):

“Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, LeWitt moved to New York in 1953, just as Abstract Expressionism was beginning to gain public recognition and was dominating contemporary art. He found various jobs to support himself, first in the design department at Seventeen magazine, doing paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats, and later, for the young architect I.M. Pei as a graphic designer. This contact proved formative, for as LeWitt would later write, ‘an architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He’s still an artist.’

LeWitt is one of the key artists of the 1960s. His work bridges Minimal and Conceptual art, movements that abandoned the emphasis on psychological content and gestural form typifying Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. In a seminal text in written in 1967 titled ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,’ LeWitt emphasized his view of art: ‘No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea,’ and, ‘When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

About Robert Natkin (American, B. 1930):

Robert Natkin was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. The print in this exhibition is a wonderful example of Natkin’s ability to make color the subject of his work. “Robert Natkin creates images of tantalizing, subtle beauty. From the early days of his career he has found his own path, diverging from the angst-ridden, raw power of much post-war abstract art. Natkin has cited Paul Klee as perhaps his greatest inspiration.” (from the Pace Gallery)

Robert Natkin’s work “presents a compellingly complex and lyrical emotional landscape. His seductive, ethereal colors at play in an atmospheric space convey a mood of elation and active reflection…As a colorist, given to formal intimacy…Natkin makes soft, geometric, and occasionally biomorphic forms that are inextricably bound to color, rather than having color appear subservient to form.” (Robert C. Morgan, Artnews, June 2004)

His work is included in the collections of many public and private institutions, including, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Guggenheim Museum.

About Brice Marden (American, b. 1938):

Brice Marden was born in Bronxville, New York in 1938. He received an M.F.A. at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where “he developed the formal strategies that characterize his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality.

In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth… His first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.” He gained wider recognition through the now defunct Bykert Gallery in New York during the seventies as a leading minimalist. He maintains a national and international presence. His works on paper and his paintings are in major private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Gallery. (from the Guggenheim Museum)

About Chuck Close (American, b. 1940):

“Raised in the state of Washington, Chuck Close demonstrated a precocious talent as a draftsman from an early age. In 1964, he received his M.F.A. from Yale University, where he served as an assistant to the master printer, Gabor Peterdi. By 1970 he had captured the attention of the art world with a series of nine-foot-high, hyper-realistically painted canvases of himself and his friends. Since then his art has focused on larger-than-life images of the human face. Reflecting the artist’s fascination with reality, illusion, and forms of visual perception, these ‘heads’—as Close calls them—are typically conceived as a series of gridded abstractions that, when assembled in the eye of the viewer, coalesce into a representational whole.

Since 1972 printmaking has been an integral part of Close’s artistic output. However, far from serving as a mechanical means to replicate his painted work, his prints—even more labor-intensive and time-consuming than his canvases—have been an important proving ground for his artistic activity as a whole. As Close has asserted, ‘Virtually everything that has happened in my unique work can be traced back to the prints.’” (from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994)

About Joel Shapiro (American, b. 1941):

 “Born and raised in New York City, the sculptor Shapiro earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the latter in art, from New York University. Since his first one-person exhibition at a New York gallery in 1970, he has held more than 125 solo exhibitions in galleries, museums, and public gardens in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. He has also been commissioned to make publicly sited sculpture for the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the Cologne Sculpture Park in Cologne, Germany, and the city of Orléans, France. Shapiro lives and works in New York City and the Adirondacks. He is married to the painter Ellen Phelan.” He exhibits regularly with Pace Gallery in New York and is most noted for his abstract, large-scale sculptures that utilize a figurative dimension. (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

About David Halliday (American, b. 1958):

“David Halliday’s still lifes are made up of objects he culls from ordinary life, fruits, flowers, statues, and artifacts. When Halliday combines objects they become eccentric, joyful arrangements that reference masculine or feminine personalities, as well as sexuality. All of Halliday’s photographs are sepia tones silver prints. The toning gives them a vintage quality that can give off the impression that Halliday’s exploration could have taken place at the turn of the century as easily as it has this past year. David Halliday lives in New Orleans.” (from Blumenfeld/Lustberg Gallery, New York, NY)

About Meagan Shein (American, b. 1969):

Meagan Shein received her Bachelor of Art at the University of Chicago, her Master of Art History at Williams College, and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Hunter College. Her most recent solo show took place at the Buffalo Arts Studio in Buffalo, NY.

“My work is concerned with transparency, fragmentation, and fragility. My fascination with transparency evolved from a repeatedly futile attempt to see beneath the surface. These drawings explore the authority or authenticity of image and memory and our notions of the past. The Trees After Bruegel Series are evocations of a distant, imaginary past; in contrast, the Suburbia, Houses, and Telephone Poles are drawn from contemporary life. These drawings function the way a memory works, distorted and distant, yet colored by emotion.” (from Meagan Shein, Artist Statement)

About Amy Cutler (American, b. 1974):

Amy Cutler is a young artist who has catapulted into the New York art scene. A graduate of Cooper Union, she was included in this year’s Whitney Biennial. She has also recently exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. Her engrossing images and spare backgrounds speak with an incisive, powerful voice.

“In her finely crafted, highly detailed drawings, Amy Cutler creates surrealistic worlds where girls roost in trees like birds and women have tea kettles for heads.  Floating in the midst of crisp, white paper, Cutler’s scenes resemble children’s illustrations that hark back to the Brothers Grimm.” (from Elyse Gonzales, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA)

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