Robert Slutzky: Fifty Years of Painting
April 18 - May 31, 1998
Untitled D
1997
acrylics, 66x66 inches
As
a student in the late 1940s, Robert Slutzky encountered an American art
scene in ferment as thirties-style social commentary painting, European
modernism imported by wartime refugees, and an emergent New York school
of Abstract Expressionism all vied for primacy. Entering Yale School of
Art in 1952, Slutzky encountered Joseph Albers and Burgoyne Diller. These
masters - one from the Bauhaus, the other a proponent of the Neoplastic
aesthetics of Mondrian - inculcated rigorous lessons in interactive color
and geometric abstraction, pointing Slutzky in a direction to which he
has since adhered. At the same time, he has continuously charted new territory,
expanding the legacy of modernist painting in richly heterodox ways.
 1996 acrylics, 54.5x54.5 inches
|
The works displayed in this retrospective exhibition trace Slutzky's evolution from hard-edge compositions of basic elements in the primary palette of red-yellow-blue-black-white, to intricate and systemic geometric configurations that implicate the entire spectrum, to calligraphic and poetical figure/field structures in colors ranging from exquisitely subtle and "subdermal" to brilliant and clarion-like. His painterly strategies frequently involve inversions of centrifugal and centripetal space, and chromatic variations on the theme of complementary pairs. Painter and educator, Slutzky has also been close to architectural theory and practice over the years. Two seminal articles written in 1956 with architectural historian Colin Rowe, entitled "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal," served to redefine the aesthetics of Cubism and Neoplasticism with application to architecture. Included in this exhibition is a diamond canvas from "The Diamond in Painting and Architecture" (1967, with architect John Hejduk). Another architectural collaboration is represented by a model for a unique project entitled "CUBE/cHrOME," undertaken with two young Swiss architects and presented at the Architektur Museum in Basel in the late eighties although never before seen in the United States. In this, a system of color relationships derived from Goethe's Farbenlehre was used to generate a series of conceptual models of architectural space. |
| In a series of paintings begun in 1996, shown here for the first time, the artist revisits some of his early preoccupations. Color and structure are now destabilized through a complex oscillation of diagonal and orthogonal grids. Gyroscopically calibrated, as if from the vertiginous vantage point of a tightrope walker, these new paintings vividly extend a career of aesthetic speculation on the possibilities of the abstract and ambiguously structured picture plane. |
 Untitled M 1998 acrylics, 60x60 inches |
 Source - Hollandays 1958-74 acrylics, 66x66 inches |
 Spectral Emanations 1978 acrylics, 70x70 inches |
 Untitled L 1997-98 acrylics, 60x60 inches |