Local History

“Local History” brings together rarely seen early works of the 1950s through early 1970s by Enrico Castellani, Donald Judd and Frank Stella, and juxtaposes them with important later examples that reveal each artist’s distinct evolution and the varying degrees of reverberation from their brief aesthetic collision in the 1960s.

The exhibition takes as its starting point Judd’s effort to formulate what he dubbed a “specific object” — an artwork that was neither painting, nor sculpture but something beyond the confines of those existing categories — and spotlights the surprising impact upon his quest of Castellani‘s and Stella‘s early experiments with radical painting.

“Local History” will take place concurrently in London and New York.

The exhibition takes its title from a passage in an essay Donald Judd penned in 1964, examining some of the best art being shown in New York City at the time. Ostensibly an exhibition review, Judd’s text in fact was a manifesto calling for a new kind of art freed from the concerns of expressionism and medium- specificity, ideas he elaborated more fully in his better-known ‘Specific Objects’, which followed soon after. Enrico Castellani, whom Judd regarded as father of the style that came to be known as Minimalism, and Frank Stella were both championed in these texts, and their experiments exerted strong influence on Judd’s own. “Local History” at Dominique Lévy revisits the cornerstone objects of this transformative period, testing Judd’s hypotheses in physical form.

Among Castellani’s works in “Local History”, three in particular stand out. In New York City, the tempera painting ‘Superficie Nera’ (1959) is a precursor to the manipulated, dimensional canvases that the artist eventually articulated more precisely with his ordered arrangements of nails beneath and above the canvas;‘Superfice rigata bianca e blu’ that Castellani actively transforms painting into a sculptural object and an exploration of architectural space. And in London, the exhibition presents Castellani’s magnificent ‘Superfice rossa’ (1964), made the same year that Judd published his ‘Local History’ and ‘Specific Objects’ essays.

Judd is represented “Local History with” works spanning three decades. In New York, the artist’s ‘Untitled (DSS 41)’ of 1963 gives viewers a look at an early, formative, articulated and now iconic Judd floor piece. In London, “Local History” includes two of Judd’s late “recessed” wall pieces — ‘Untitled, 1992 (recesses)’ — that evidence his on-going commitment to objects over sculpture, investigations of open volumes that are spatial in an architectural rather than pictorial sense, without being massive.

Among the masterworks by Frank Stella on view in the New York portion of “Local History” are ‘5 Eldridge Street (Blue Horizon)’ of 1958, and ‘Untitled’ (1959) — two paintings that reveal a young artist in rapid progression. ‘5 Eldridge Street (Blue Horizon)’ is an example of Stella’s initial explorations of the stripe as an incremental, structural element.

By 1964, Stella was confidently testing boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture, as evidenced in ‘Tetuan 1’ (1964), on view in the London portion of Local History. His material and structural manipulation — the painting’s fluorescent yellow alkyd and the dramatic misalignment of this diptych’s configuration — parallel similar experiments in both Judd‘s and Castellani‘s art at that moment. In this one powerful work, viewers can find evidence of a brief but powerful coincidence of intention and effort on the part of three great artists of the 20th century.

Location & Times:

– Dominique Lévy London,22 Old Bond Street, London | October 14, 2014 – January 24, 2015 | 13 Oct, Private view

– Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York, 909 Madison Avenue, New York | October 30, 2014 – January 3, 2015 | 30 Oct, Private view