Local History Brings Rarely Seen Works By Enrico Castellani,
Donald Judd, and Frank Stella to New York and London
Dominique Lévy London
22 Old Bond Street, London
October 14, 2014 – January 24, 2015
Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York
909 Madison Avenue, New York
October 30, 2014 – January 3, 2015
New York/London… Dominique Lévy gallery is pleased to announce a transatlantic exhibition that captures a fleeting but profound moment of creative intersection in the careers of three exalted Post-war artists. Local History brings together rarely seen early works of the 1950s through early 1970s by Enrico Castellani, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella, and juxtaposes them with important later examples that reveal each artist’s distinct evolution and the varying degrees of reverberation from their brief aesthetic collision in the 1960s. The exhibition takes as its starting point Judd’s effort to formulate what he dubbed a “specific object” – an artwork that was neither painting, nor sculpture but something beyond the confines of those existing categories – and spotlights the surprising impact upon his quest of Castellani’s and Stella’s early experiments with radical painting.
Local History will take place concurrently in London and New York, inaugurating the gallery’s new space at 22 Old Bond Street on October 13, and opening at Dominique Levy’s space at the historic landmark 909 Madison Avenue on October 30. The exhibition has been organized by noted curator and art historian Linda Norden, with Peter Ballantine, who is regarded a leading expert in the work of Donald Judd and was one of the artist’s long-time fabricators. A book featuring essays by Norden and Ballantine will complement the exhibition.
The exhibition coincides with AZIMUT/H: Continuity and Newness, currently on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice through January 19, 2015, celebrating Azimut/h, the Milan gallery and eponymous review founded in 1959 by Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni. Castellani’s work is also featured in the major exhibition ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, on view October 10, 2014 through January 7, 2015 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Local History takes its title from a passage in an essay Donald Judd penned in 1964, examining some of the best art being shown in New York City at the time. Ostensibly an exhibition review, Judd’s text in fact was a manifesto calling for a new kind of art freed from the concerns of expressionism and medium-specificity, ideas he elaborated more fully in his better-known ‘Specific Objects,’ which followed soon after. Enrico Castellani, whom Judd regarded as father of the style that came to be known as Minimalism, and Frank Stella were both championed in these texts, and their experiments exerted strong influence on Judd’s own. Local History at Dominique Lévy revisits the cornerstone objects of this transformative period, testing Judd’s hypotheses in physical form.