A Postmodern Minimalism
John Haber
HarberArts.com
Roland Gebhardt and Carl D'Alvia
When I think of art today, I think anything but minimal. Sure, galleries have shut the doors since the pandemic, although whole neighborhoods had already come and gone. Still, enough remain in the material world and online to challenge anyone to keep up.
Art itself speaks of eclecticism and excess. Sticking to one style already marks you as blind to the diversity of peoples and cultures—or so it often seems. If the same time artists have to leave their signature just to stand out in a crowded market, that, too, takes dancing around. Who wants to be just another painter or sculptor, mired in imitations of the past? For all that postmodern dance, though, late modern art refuses to let go, in and out of quotation marks. Roland Gebhardt and Carl D'Alvia find a less impersonal side to Minimalism and its rigor.Roland Gebhardt's Untitled (0296) (David Richard gallery, 2020)
Cutting corners
Part of the pleasure in catching up with Roland Gebhardt is in seeing how he does it—and part, too, is in how little he hides. No doubt all art has its touch of black magic, and Minimalism simultaneously intensified and dispelled the sleight of hand by making everything explicit. (Not a bad trick at that.) Gebhardt does so to this day, with regular shapes and repeated patterns in two and three dimensions. Part of the pleasure, too, is watching where one dimension leaves off and another begins.
Not that he spells everything out in words, like Sol LeWitt in the titles of his wall drawings. (Try to reconcile LeWitt's trust in words with late Modernism's insistence that everything is what it is, not a sign of something else. It can be done, and it says a great deal about the time.) Rather, Gebhardt trusts to simple shapes and shifting patterns. They can march across a surface or in a sequence of identical objects. He is simultaneously carving and painting in space.
The show, "Diverse Vocabularies," accepts the priority of words while making them hard to pin down. Verticals in unpainted wood stand side by side, no higher than one's waist. Shorter and thinner models painted white gain in height as they cross a table. The first bear identical cuts, interrupting the solidity and lightness of poplar. They ascend from one beam to the next, much as black accents on the painted wood rise closer and closer to eye level. The cuts also reach around the corner of the beam, until at last the part to the side reaches past the top and is gone.
Works on the wall have their sequences, too, of short black diagonals on white. They, too, can turn the corner only to disappear. They have crossed the line to panel paintings, but they may also pair with a version closer to sculpture, with the diagonals as cuts. One might be a study for the other or a playful alternative. The play on deletion and drawing also appears on paper, where a black trapezoid slides out and to the right from a white diamond, daring you to recognize what it left behind. It might tempt one to think not of Minimalist sculpture, but of Ellsworth Kelly and shaped canvas.
Galleries during the pandemic can seem like little more than pop-ups—all the more so with short runs for summer closings. And Gebhardt has been around, from his birth in Suriname in 1939 to studies in the Netherlands and Germany, but he is not just preserving the past. The light, polished wood has its appeal to craft and to the eye, quite different from industrial materials for Carl Andre or Donald Judd. It also shares the gallery with an artist closer to the eclecticism of contemporary abstraction. Galen Cheney has two bodies of work, one with a collage of fabric and Flashe, a rubber-based paint that has caught on in just the last few years. Yet she, too, speaks to what remains and what is left behind.
Cheney 's combination of materials allows for the play of reflective and opaque colors. It also gives the series new energy, as long curves and dense overlays radiate outward from a painting's center. If the colors are bright, the white within them is brighter still. The other series, in turn, roots her Cheney in an earlier generation, when abstraction in America had its triumphs and slow burn. Their thicker surfaces, broad strokes, colliding or overlapping rectangles, and use of black recall Clyfford Still and West Coast art of the 1950s. Here, too, though, her lighter touch and color justify the show's title, "Slow Burn."
Bending over backward
Carl D'Alvia would bend over backward for you. These are big works, in eye-catching colors that owe more to industry than the rainbow. While they include bright red, yellow, blue, and green, I am still reaching for names for a few. D'Alvia works most often in aluminum and auto paint, with thick slabs that can rise eight feet or more. Still, they can never get all that far without bending. They will not stay put.
His sculptures may indeed bend back, to lean up against the wall, although I cannot swear that it is to get out of your way. With titles like Loaf and Loll, they could just be laid back. Other works bend forward, over themselves and back to the floor. Slabs can also accommodate one another. One in yellow runs flat along the floor, rising only to slip over another in industrial gray. The latter makes it part way up the wall, too. Where necessity is not enough, sculpture bunches up in tight, repeated curves on its own.
Motion is the order of the day, but so is that lazy rhythm. So, too, is mass. In a show called "Sometimes Sculpture Deserves a Break," you cannot demand that art gets off its butt, but you must also acknowledge its mass. When it reaches forward to the floor, it is doubling its footprint, the better to support itself. When it leans back, it is taking advantage of the wall. It builds on Minimalism, which made mass and space the order of the day, and a few additional works prefer steel, in a rust color closer to that of Richard Serra. Unlike Serra's Rolled and Forged or Reversed Curves, though, they will not force you out of the way.
D'Alvia may recall the West Coast Minimalism of John McCracken, who also leaned his slabs against the wall. Every so often the spray paint modulates to another color, for a touch of what California artists then called "Light and Space." Arbitrary outlines and solid colors may recall George Sugarman, and he looks further back as well. He cites Alexander Calder as an influence and indulges in Calder's red, while the steel rests on pedestals, where its curves may suggest early modern sculpture. He calls the series "Liths," as in monoliths from Stonehenge and beyond. They may be easy-going, but they take the long view.
More than that, they have their eclecticism, as the litany of names makes clear. In that, they belong to a moment around 1980 when Minimalism was starting to move every which way. Now in his fifties, D'Alvia must have had it on his mind when starting out. It included the leap of painting into the third dimension with Elizabeth Murray. It allowed for that overpowering sense of play. Slow meets fast, and mass meets motion.
John Chamberlain still has a near monopoly on automobile parts, although D'Alvia refuses Chamberlain's messy paint jobs out of Abstract Expressionism or crushed metal out of a car crash. Minimalism refused such matters of life and death, but then so for the most part does art now, apart from the turn to political art. These liths are too playful for a grander abstraction or for grief and grieving. When the yellow slab of Slowpokes crawls over its companion, it is taking its time. Still, this is fun stuff. With its simple paint jobs, it is closer than Chamberlain to the real auto industry as well.
Associated Artist
Associated Exhibitions
- Galen Cheney Slow Burn
July 21, 2021 - August 13, 2021
MORE INFO - Roland Gebhardt Diverse Vocabularies
July 12, 2021 - August 13, 2021
MORE INFO
Associated News
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July 10, 2023
Roland Gebhardt
Art Review City
Chunbum Park
July 10, 2023 -
April 18, 2023
Roland Gebhardt: Framing Perceptual Illusions: A series of wall sculptures examines presence, absence, and voids
GalleriesNow
April 17, 2023
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April 18, 2023
Press Release - Roland Gebhardt Framing Perceptual Illusions: a Series of wall sculptures examines presence, absence, and voids -
July 20, 2021
Galen Cheney: Slow Burn -
July 19, 2021
Press Release - Galen Cheney Slow Burn -
July 13, 2021
Roland Gebhardt: Diverse Vocabularies -
July 11, 2021
Press Release - Roland Gebhardt Diverse Vocabularies -
February 11, 2020
Cool Contemporary Art in Harlem and TriBeCa
New York Artscape
February 11, 2020
John Varoli
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February 3, 2020
Roland Gebhardt debuts new Minimalist work at David Richard Gallery, New York
ArtDaily.org
February 3, 2020 -
January 20, 2020
Roland Gebhardt: New Work - Floor and Wall Sculptures
GalleriesNow.net
January 20, 2020
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December 27, 2019
Press Release - Roland Gebhardt "New Work - Floor and Wall Sculptures" -
February 29, 2016
ROLAND GEBHARDT: A MINIMALIST’S TAKE ON IDENTITY
FrontRunnerMagazine.com
February 29, 2016 -
August 11, 2021
A Postmodern Minimalism
John Haber
HarberArts.com