While pairing Richard Artschwager's Southwestern landscapes with Semmes’ large fabric sculpture may initially strike viewers as incongruous, further investigation reveals layers of affinity. Artschwager is well known for paintings and sculpture that turn the commonplace decidedly uncommon. Semmes' work in fabric and ceramics likewise operates in the realm of the uncanny, though generally considered within the context of feminism and craft. Surprisingly, as this show highlights, landscape deeply informs the work of both. The two artists share a personal and idiosyncratic approach to the subject, using strong, clear color to define and describe space.
Richard Artschwager’s paintings and pastels from the mid-2000s depict the Southwestern topography of his childhood home in New Mexico. The not quite habitable vistas are flattened and reformed into elements that are simultaneously grounding and disorienting. The moon in Artschwager’s Blue Sky with Green Moon (2007) is a mystical hovering potato. In the ripples of Semmes’ On the Lake (2002), a fluorescent red/orange knee-high ceramic basket becomes a free-floating island. Semmes’ dress sculpture suggests a seascape with waves, wind, and weather emerging from chiffon.
Richard Artschwager was born in Washington, DC. He was included in the 1995 Carnegie International curated by Richard Armstrong and won the Carnegie Prize in Sculpture. Artschwager’s first exhibition took place at the Art Directions Gallery, New York, in 1959, and was followed by the first of many exhibitions with Leo Castelli in 1965. Solo exhibitions include Up and Across, Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna; Kunstmuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland; Painting Then and Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Up and Down/Back and Forth, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Hair, Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis; Richard Artschwager!, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Punctuating Space: The Prints and Multiples of Richard Artschwager, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. He died in 2013 in Albany, New York at the age of 89. The Gallery is grateful for the cooperation of the Richard Artschwager Estate, represented by David Nolan Gallery and Gagosian Gallery.
Beverly Semmes was also born in Washington, DC. She has a large installation in the current 2018 Carnegie International curated by Ingrid Schaffner. Her first major solo exhibition in New York took place at Artists Space in 1990. Additional solo exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, D.C.; the ICA Philadelphia; the MCA Chicago; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Frances Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga. Last year, Semmes exhibited Bow, a fabric and ceramic installation at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York and FRP at NYU’s Stern Windows Project (2017). Her room-sized work Buried Treasure (1994) will be on exhibition as part of The Fabric of Felicity at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow through January 2019.
