Taking its identify from Sarah Charlesworth’s pivotal art work Tabula Rasa (1981), the present exhibition examines the importance of pedagogical affect inside the context of conceptual images. “Tabula Rasa” is a silkscreen of one of many earliest pictures ever taken, Nonetheless Life on Glass (c. 1829) by Joseph Nicephore Niépce. Charlesworth took the picture from a historical past e-book and reproduced it in white-on-white in an homage to the invention of images that additionally wipes the slate clear for her personal improvements. Reflecting on the importance of Tabula Rasa in 2011, Charlesworth said: “in my view, artwork is frequently absorbing artwork of the previous, and reconfiguring it, and remaking it, and reinventing it.” ¹

Starting with Charlesworth’s trainer Douglas Huebler, Charlesworth herself, and her former companion and collaborator Joseph Kosuth, the exhibition will hint a number of trains of affect that emanate from these artists with a specific concentrate on works that illustrate the relationships between them and their college students. Charlesworth was a pupil of Huebler’s within the late Nineteen Sixties at Bradford Faculty, MA, and it was via him that she met Kosuth. Huebler went on to show at Harvard, and from 1976 to 1988 he served as dean of the Faculty of Artwork at California Institute of Arts, the place he influenced yet one more era of artists akin to Christopher Williams, Stephen Prina, Luciano Perna, and Mike Kelley.

Charlesworth and Kosuth, in flip, had a major impression on a cohort of conceptual artists who constructed upon their work deconstructing cultural imagery and important texts. As an example, Deana Lawson, Liu Shiyuan, and Talia Chetrit every took lessons with Charlesworth at both the Rhode Island Faculty of Design or the Faculty of Visible Arts in New York, and Lawson, James Welling and Michele Abeles taught alongside Charlesworth at Princeton College. Felix Gonzalez-Torres briefly taught at CalArts, and likewise maintained a mutual affect and deep reference to Joseph Kosuth.

Artworks within the exhibition will discover conceptual methods round images, each with textual content and with out textual content. Of explicit word is Huebler’s Variable Piece #70 (Holofernes) (1978). Throughout a gallery swap with Paula Cooper in 1980, Yvon Lambert exhibited this work alongside responses to Artemisia Gentileschi’s portray by Charlesworth and Kosuth. Different highlights embody Charlesworth’s Empire Mild (Optimistic) and Empire Mild (Unfavourable), 1981, which had been reproduced on the back and front covers of the primary subject of BOMB journal and have by no means beforehand been exhibited in New York, and Face/Floor, 1976, a little-known collaborative text-based work by Charlesworth and Kosuth that’s wheat-pasted on to the wall.

Collaborating artists:
Michele Abeles, Sarah Charlesworth, Talia Chetrit, Aria Dean, Liz Deschenes, Sam Durant, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Deana Lawson, Glenn Ligon, Tony Oursler, Hirsch Perlman, Luciano Perna, Stephen Prina, Laurie Simmons, Liu Shiyuan, Sara VanDerBeek, James Welling, Christopher Williams

at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
till July 12, 2024