Online

Louise Nevelson

Three Collages

Dec 9 – Dec 30, 2020
Sixty percent of all sales proceeds from this exhibition will benefit Nevelson Chapel's restoration and endowment.

In support of the restoration of Nevelson Chapel in Midtown Manhattan, we're honored to present an exhibition of three exemplary collages by Louise Nevelson.

Nevelson_-104 copy.jpg — Louise Nevelson, photography by Diana Mackowan © 2020 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

One of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, Louise Nevelson began producing collages in the mid-1950s. Inspired by her longstanding interest in Cubism and a correspondence with Jean Arp, these works signify an important turn in her approach to art, prompting her remark “the way I think is collage.”

Made between 1977 and 1979, these three seminal collages represent, as Germano Celant noted in an essay complementing our exhibition of Nevelson's collages in 2015, "a sort of new archeology that uses the extraneousness of things, chairs or tables, crates or wooden decorations, to bring out a similarity between person and surroundings."

On the design of Nevelson Chapel, also completed in 1977, the artist stated, “Being in a space that permits you to contemplate is like being in love. I meant to provide an environment that is evocative of another place, a place of the mind, a place of the senses.” In honor of Nevelson's generous spirit, sixty percent of the sales proceeds from this exhibition will benefit the restoration of Nevelson Chapel—the only remaining, permanent environment by the artist.

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.

Louise Nevelson

40193_NEVELSON-High Resolution — 300 dpi .png — 1/4

40193_NEVELSON_vDet_01-High Resolution — 300 dpi .png — 2/4

40193_NEVELSON-High Resolution — 300 dpi-1.png — 3/4

Here she is less the high priestess of black than a restless, searching artist, improvising with an intuitive flair similar to Robert Rauschenberg’s.

Roberta Smith
The New York Times

39863_NEVELSON_vDet_01-High Resolution — 300 dpi .png — 2/4

She repudiates an interpretation of objects... She takes them apart and assembles them in silence, to confront their hidden, silenced, and masked identity.

Germano Celant
Louise Nevelson: Collages, 2015

39522_NEVELSON_vDet_01-High Resolution — 300 dpi-1.png — 2/4

39522_NEVELSON_vDet_01-High Resolution — 300 dpi .png — 3/4

Nevelson seems to assign herself the task of systematizing the epiphanies of the unconscious, ruling out any disorderly or irrational figure.

Germano Celant
Louise Nevelson: Collages, 2015

Undated-Photographer from Milan.jpg — Louise Nevelson © 2020 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Louise Nevelson's collages appear in the following public collections:

Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
San José Museum of Art, California
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Illinois
Tate Gallery, London
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

Click here to learn how else you can support the restoration of Nevelson Chapel.

Past, Louise Nevelson, Three Collages, Dec 9, 2020