Three Singular New York Painters on View in Solitaire

Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Joan Semmel Featured in Three Retrospectives in One, Offering New Historical Perspective

Exhibition Accompanied by Fully Illustrated Catalogue

Columbus, OH—This winter, the Wexner Center explores the work of three New York painters in the form of three small retrospectives bound together in one exhibition—Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel. On view February 2–April 13, 2008 and organized by the Wexner Center, the exhibition offers fresh historical and critical perspectives on these important but relatively underrecognized American artists, while at the same time offering a snapshot of painting in New York in the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond.

Lozano, Plimack Mangold, and Semmel each painted large, ambitious canvases at a time when the very activity of painting was coming under fire from the New York art world. Although these three artists worked in the same city at the same time, they didn’t know each other and worked in relatively solitary conditions. Featuring about 15 to 20 works by each artist, the show will trace the extraordinary development of each artist’s oeuvre, including fairly recent work by Plimack Mangold and Semmel.

Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin notes, "In bringing together these artists’ boldly virtuosic paintings—at once lush, radical, and rigorous—Solitaire takes its place within a strong lineage of Wexner Center exhibitions that seek to challenge various orthodoxies of recent art history, while introducing the public to significant but perhaps lesser-known artists.”

All three artists were born in the 1930s (Plimack Mangold and Semmel are still living), and all three came of age aesthetically in the 1960s and ’70s. Each painted in a representational style and depicted the content of her daily life—not representing the world as it is, but how it appeared to her; the exhibition thus also offers a new look at realism in painting. In Lozano’s paintings from the ’60s, everyday objects—watches, hammers, screwdrivers—are rendered so anthropomorphic as to appear to be in sexualized motion. Plimack Mangold has painted the boundaries of her studio and home, such as where floorboards meet the wall and the wall meets a mirror, or, more recently, tightly cropped images of trees outside her window. Semmel’s work is equally circumscribed, as the paintings bear witness to solitary nude women or heterosexual couples in post- or pre-coital arrangements. In these works, the bodies’ heads are radically cropped out of the picture. In later years, she painted a series of disturbing images of female mannequins; recently, Semmel, now in her 70s, has been painting herself nude as reflected by an unstinting mirror.

Notes Helen Molesworth, the show’s curator, “This exhibition reveals the fierce individuality that is the hallmark of each artist’s work, while at the same time bringing to light their commonalities. It also offers an unusual perspective on feminism, focusing on three artists who were ambivalent about the very term.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Wexner Center and distributed by Yale University Press that features essays by Molesworth (former chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center and currently the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard University Art Museums); New York-based art historian and critic Johanna Burton; and Richard Meyer, associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California.

An event called “Double Solitaire,” featuring Plimack Mangold and Semmel and moderated by Molesworth, will be held Wednesday, March 26 at 4:30 pm in the Film/Video Theater. This artists’ talk is free.

Also on view in winter 2008: Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart and Adi Nes: Biblical Stories. An Opening Celebration for all exhibitions will be held Friday, February 1, 5–8 pm.

Gallery admission is free. Visitor info: www.wexarts.org/info/visit/. 

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION AND SUPPORT

Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University.

The exhibition is presented with major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Dorothy Lichtenstein.