The gallery is pleased to present a new wallwork by Peter Wegner. Running the full length of the main gallery’s 80-foot wall, Adrift extends Wegner’s interest in color, language, mapping and the fragmentary nature of perception. The painting, rendered almost entirely in a single shade of blue, resembles an icepack breaking up. With this epic piece, Wegner sets his familiar grid construct adrift across the vast wall of the gallery. In a statement related to the piece, Wegner writes: “What we take to be still is in motion. What we take to be whole is in pieces: the ice in the river, the sky in the window, the silence surrounding the color, the words dividing the silence, the light that puts each thing in its place.”
Major wallworks by Peter Wegner were recently exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the
Dunedin
Public
Art
Gallery in. In the fall, SFMOMA will exhibit another of Wegner’s wallworks incorporating neon text. Concurrently,
GRIFFIN will open an exhibition of Wegner’s photo-based and collage works. A monograph on Wegner’s work, P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R, was released this spring and is currently available at Printed Matter in New York, SFMOMA, Art Catalogs in Los Angeles and the gallery.
A Tall Glass work by James Turrell is exhibited in the West Gallery. In his Tall Glass series, Turrell adds a temporal element to his perception-altering oeuvre. The work consists of a core of LEDs individually programmed by Turrell to carry out a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. However, these works’ careful construction insures that the viewer will see only a large floating, subtly changing field of light – a revelatory experience of photons as tangible entities and physical presence.
James Turrell was born in 1943 in
Los Angeles. Since his first solo exhibitions at the
Pasadena
Art Museum in 1967 and the Stedelijk in 1976, Turrell has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide. He has received numerous awards in the arts, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984. He currently resides in
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Expanded Willow Blatt, a neon work by Keith Sonnier, is exhibited in the project room. This work from 2000 exemplifies Sonnier’s signature free-form style. The sculpture is composed in a in a lyrical manner with blue and green neon tubes climbing and leaning against the wall. The necessary cords and transformers remain visible and intentional formal elements in Sonnier;s sculptures.
Keith Sonnier was born in
Mamou, Louisiana in 1941 and presently resides in
New York. His work has been exhibited in major institutions throughout the world, including The Museum of Modern Art,
New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Venice Biennale, and the Smithsonian Institute in
Washington D.C.