Hyperactif

Alexander Calder

Larry Bell

Nicholas Moenich

D’Agostino and Fiore is excited to announce Hyperactif, an exhibition of works by Larry Bell, Alexander Calder, and Nicholas Moenich. In step with the gallery’s curatorial focus, the exhibition seeks to explore the perceptual nuances so crucial to viewing the respective artist’s works while also celebrating the art historical import of Bell and Calder’s works on a new generation of artists. By pairing their work with Moenich the exhibition underscores the undeniable impact each artist had in defining a new use of physical space from their generation through contemporary experience.

Alexander Calder’s artistic arrival at the mobile broke through the static nature of early 20th century art and ushered in an entirely new lexicon for discussing the viewer’s relationship to sculptural form. The employment of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors required a recalibration of possibilities on the part of the artist as well as the viewer. The forms, always teetering between figuration and abstraction, activate space whether suspended as mobiles, a pun originally made in reference to Calder’s works by Marcel Duchamp which alluded to their motion and motives, or the stabiles, the logical static complement to the kinetic works. In both cases the dance between figuration and abstraction allows the work to remove itself through referent and occupy a spatial and conceptual plane reserved for pure contemplation.

Certainly conscious of Calder’s contributions, Larry Bell’s work at its inception as an artist initially prominent through the Light and Space movement integrated the role of immateriality and situationalism into the otherwise static language of minimalism. From his role in West Coast Minimalism, Bell evolved to computerized sketch pieces. Resolving to figurative works after a career in abstraction Bell’s narrative figures are constructed digitally through the conceptual tenets of a mythological narrative of an ancient people. The stick figures, both enigmatic and anonymous bounce between the personal and unknown much the same way Calder and Moenich’s works allude but never insist upon their referent.

With every new scroll through our ever important smartphones the experience of art is a little more deflated than the time before. Today the world is flatter than ever. Nicholas Moenich produces sculptural works which are nearly, if not entirely, unphotographable. A rarity in a time artist of his generation seem to reduce the 3 dimensional to the 2 for the broader circulation of their work online, Moenich's work stands as a new, reinvigorated, approach to sculpture. Inescapably touching on a lauded visual language of formal abstraction, Moenich’s works in scale and sensibility exude an inescapable anthropomorphization of form. Somewhere between a familiarly stoic house cat and an eerie alien lifeform Moenich activates a spacial language and awareness so literate in the work of his predecessors it procures an essential active dialog about the role of the object in an image based world.

Bending the space between abstraction and the figurative form, Moenich builds on Bell and Calder’s critical contributions to spatial relationships between viewer and art work. Each employing an alternate method, Hyperactif seeks to celebrate the nuanced approaches to figuration after abstraction as well as the essential experiential role of the art object in situ in an increasingly flattened world.

Larry Bell (b. 1939) lives and works in Taos, New Mexico. From 1957 to 1959 he studied at the Chauvinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He is a grant recipient from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation. His works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Tate Modern, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Bell’s work has been shown in museums and public spaces abroad over the course of this 40 year career including Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, 1966, Stedejilk Museum, Amsterdam 1967, The High Museum, Atlanta, 1988, Musee d’Art Contemporarian, Lyon, 1989. Notable recent exhibitions have include 2D - 3D: Glass and Vapor at White Cube, London, 2015, Larry Bell: 6 x 6 An Improvisation at Chinati Foundation in Marfa TX, 2014, and Pace/Wildenstein, New York, 2005.

Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976) Born 1898 in Lawton, Pennsylvania and passed away 1976 in New York City. In 1919 Calder received a degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. Over his 50 year career Calder gained significant success both critically and institutionally. Calder’s works have been exhibited and included in major institutional collections. Major retrospectives of Calder’s work were held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 1964, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1964, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1965, Foundation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1969, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1976.

Nicholas Moenich (b. 1985) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2011 Moenich graduated from Hunter College with an MFA in Painting. Recent exhibitions include Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, 2015, Ermerson Dorsch, Miami, FL 2014, Shirley Fitermen Art Center, New York, 2014, Regina Rex, New York, 2014, and Philips de Pury, New York, 2012. Moenich has also been the recipient of numerous esteemed grants and participated in several respected residencies including Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO, 2014 and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT also in 2014 amongst many others.