Press Release

Assemblagist Show

NICOLE KLAGSBRUN is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Jess. The exhibit will run from March 1 - 30, 1991 and will include early works and more recent assemblage, collage, film and video.

The assemblages artists of California began making art in the 950’s that strongly influenced by Beat poetry and literature. Very much an underground phenomenon the work grew out of concern with and reaction to everyday experience and contemporary culture. The objects were and are still highly unusual at the same time that they are powerful and penetrating. Conceptually linked with Dada and Surrealism of the 1920’s, these objects remain outside any tradition or school of thought and are quintessentially American. Formally, the juxtaposition and association of disparate elements and materials make for art that is-lawful and full of energy. Yet messages implied and inherent in the work tend toward social criticism often with elusive mystical connotations as well. The works have a narrative quality” speaking about the former role of the individual elements and the process of transformation that they have undergone being discarded and recycled into another “life” and also saying something about the nature of relationships between objects, people and culture. To consider these artworks as personalities or as having character is not inappropriate, nor is it difficult to find meaning in them.

A significance of this work within a more traditional art historical role could be as a link with other trends and movements, from folk art to outsider to fluxes to Conceptual and more recently to “scatter-art”. Distinct from each, assemblage as a 3 dimensional collage nevertheless has clear association to all and thus becomes a cloud of exchange.

For further information please call the gallery at (212) 925 5157 between 10 and 6 Tuesday through Saturday and until 8 PM Wednesdays. The gallery is located at 51 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand.