University of Michigan Museum of Art presents Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor an exhibition on view from September 21, 2013 through January 5, 2014.
One of the founding members of the Abstract Expressionists, Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) was an important presence in the artistic life of New York from the 1930s until his death. Artists in the United States working between the two World Wars found a striking variety of abstract approaches by both American painters as well as European artists whose work could be seen in the Museum of Modern Art and in a few commercial galleries in New York. This rich fermentation underpins the emergence of the New York School of painting in which artists created works that combine abstraction work had evolved into his enigmatic Pictographs, paintings that employ a visual language of symbols that are at once a personal construct and an evocation of an ancient and universal language of symbols.
For Gottlieb, the focused distillation of simple geometric shapes continued in his work from the 1940s through the end of his career in 1974. In 1967, Gottlieb abruptly shifted his interest to sculpture and began to explore the simple and often monumental symbols that had preoccupied him in steel, bronze, aluminum and other materials. The elements of his painting, that had emphasized the picture plane, now began to occupy three dimensions. The exhibition, Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor brings together both sculptures from the roughly eighteen months that he worked in that medium, and paintings and monotypes of 1964–1974. In addition to finished sculptures and related paintings, the exhibition allows an examination of Gottlieb’s process in creating his sculptural work by also including maquettes and templates used in the fabrication of the final work.
Carole McNamara: Senior Curator of Western Art [email protected]