From Dawn to Dusk

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An exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Louise Nevelson

The Louise Blouin Foundation will be hosting Louise Nevelson's 'Dawns and Dusks' exhibition from 30 April.

This is the first major London exhibition of works by the sculptor in nearly four decades. The exhibition, will feature a collection of works highlighting the career of one of the most innovative and influential sculptors from the Post War period in America bringing together some of the most monumental and seminal examples of Louise Nevelson’s art from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Louise Nevelson continuously investigated the space between form and illusion, the space between painting and sculpture and between solid and void.

Nevelson pioneered installation art in America with her assemblage environments of the 1950s. She collected detritus from a variety of urban sources including street-discarded furniture, scraps of wood, refuse from factories, hat forms, patterns and moulds. She then gave the elements a new identity by ‘cleansing’ them with a solid colour: traditionally white, gold or black. These elements were then composed in boxes, sometimes constructed but more often found or reclaimed objects.

With works never exhibited before, the exhibition includes large-scale painted black monochrome wood wall relief and free-standing sculptures ranging in size up to nearly 10 feet by 12 feet, and mixed-media collages on paper and board, which incorporate materials such as wood, paper, newsprint, paint, vinyl, metal, and other found objects.

Nevelson considered herself a formalist whose work was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement in which Rothko, Reinhardt and de Kooning were her closest friends. In the last decades of the 20th century, such formalism fell out of favour and Nevelson’s popularity was eclipsed by art forms laden with identity and symbolism. In the 21st century, the importance and powerful influence of Nevelson’s art is being reappraised. The works presented in Dawns and Dusks have been selected to highlight Nevelson’s remarkable and prolific career and serve to address and underpin this reappraisal of one of the most prolific and influential sculptors in American art.

 

April 5, 2009