Lehmann Maupin announces The Parallax View, an exhibition of significant works exploring observation as conflict, curated by Manual E. Gonzalez.
On view 10 February – 19 March, 2011, the Chelsea exhibition features works by Teresita Fernández, Dan Flavin, Gego, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson, all acclaimed artists who confront traditional notions of space, light and the nature of observation.
Grounded in the idea of a parallax, defined as “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer,” this exhibition brings together stylistically disparate artists linked by the tension and romance between rigorous geometry and expressive chaos.
The Parallax View explores the idea of observation as conflict: conflict between mind and object; analysis and fleeting insight; continuity and fragmentation; object and artifact; inner and outer.
The minimalist works by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin provide narratives about light and landscape. Agnes Martin and Mary Heilmann suggest both the vastness and intimacy of nature, yet another source of conflict, but free of nostalgia or sentimentality. Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris and Teresita Fernández define perception, the physical and temporal relationships that a viewer encounters in relation to an artwork, setting the stage for interpreting a parallax as a prism that reflects the many facets of observation as conflict. Eva Hesse and Gego take a playfully minimalist approach to liberate sculpture from its traditional restraints, and straddle the line between figuration and abstraction.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition is a complex spatial proposition on the relationship between seeing and experience, an abridged history within the shifting paradigms that ushered art towards the present century.