Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) emigrated with her family from czarist Russia to the United States in 1905, settling in Rockland, Maine. By 1920, she had moved to New York City, where she studied drama and later enrolled at the Art Students League. Throughout the early 1930s, Nevelson traveled across Europe and briefly attended Hans Hofmann’s school in Munich, returning to New York in 1932 where she studied once again with Hofmann. Two years later she was working as an assistant to Diego Rivera, who introduced her to pre-Columbian art; her first solo show in 1941 featured terra cotta and wood sculptures based on Mayan and other primitive imagery. Not until the mid 1950s did Nevelson’s far-ranging interests coalesce into dramatically conceived constructions for which she became world-renowned.
Especially for her mature work, memorable murals and sculptures, for which she is famous today, Nevelson used everyday objects and found objects of all kinds, which she carefully assembled into assemblages, sculptures and collages. She painted her sculptures in monochrome, mostly black, some white and gold, and as such created mysterious worlds. In her collages, she largely left the materials in their original state, their origin still clearly recognizable. Nevelson’s compositions explore the relational possibilities of sculpture and space, summing up the objectification of the external world into a personal landscape.
Although her practice is situated in lineage with Picasso’s Cubism and Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivism, the pictorial attitude of her work and her interest in the transcendence of object and space reveal an affinity with Abstract Expressionism. Her sculptures tend to be large, which would not be so extraordinary were it not for the fact that working on such a scale tended to be a hard-won achievement for women artists of her generation.
Nevelson always viewed her persona as an extension of her work and captivated photographers such as Helmut Newton and Marie Cosindas with her eccentric appearance. A portrait taken by Robert Mapplethorpe completes the artists’ exhibition at Galerie Haas Zürich. In 1961 Louise Nevelson had a solo exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1964 at the Kunsthalle Bern and in 1974 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, but in the last 40 years she has mainly been shown in American institutions, where she is also represented in all major public collections. Against this light, Galerie Haas Zürich is excited to present 15 sculptures, collages and assemblages realized by the artist between the mid-50s and the mid-80s, Nevelson’s first exhibition in Switzerland in many years.
Stay up to date
