Pavel Zoubok Gallery invites you to celebrate the life and work of pioneering collagist and sculptor Robert Courtright (1926-2012) with an exhibition of collage constructions and masks spanning the artist’s six-decade career. Courtright’s minimal approach to the aesthetic and practice of collage has influenced subsequent generations of artists. In Gallery 2 we are pleased to present a complimentary group exhibition, Minimal Intervention, featuring seven artists whose work has similarly explored the minimal side of collage: Alice Attie, John Fraser, Charles Mcgill Robert Nickle, Robert Ohnigian, Anne Ryan And Nan Swid.

Robert Courtright’s decidedly reductive style established him early on as a unique figure in a tradition not generally associated with the Minimalist impulse. Beginning with his early cityscapes of the 1950s, Courtright maintained a lifelong interest in architectonic form, which ultimately led to the grid structure that was his signature for the next fifty years.

With an oeuvre that is a visual mutation between imprint and drawing, Courtright’s collages, voluntarily austere and without needless hyperbole, abuse or complacency, reassure and gratify the viewer by their imaginative construction and sensitive chromatization. Arranging the components of his collages to reveal subtle shifts of color and texture, these stacked rectangles explore and create a unique pictorial language. Even if his painted rectangles are held in place by simply a spot of glue, the "play" allowed between the support and the protective glass causes their shadows to move the immobile. They are like the surfaces of buildings or like tile terraces made vertical. As J. Bowyer Bell has written,

Courtright…offers the best of two possible worlds. There is the ideal work, carefully planned, carefully executed, cool, withdrawn, a matter of concept over adventure, a grid imposing order. There is, however, more to what you see than what you first see. Even if few have visuals ... all offer pattern. If the grid dominates as pattern, the real visual drama is elsewhere - in the perception of each viewer. The grid merges into the whole, color moves across the surface, differences in intensity appear, sight changes are made significant, an image rises from the squares, from the object. There is nothing minimal, nothing cold, nothing as exercise in the ultimate image. Each is an adventure for the eye.

In tandem to his collage constructions, Courtright created a series of masks inspired by the legendary “La Bocca della Veritá (Mouth of Truth),” a large masklike face in the portico of the Santa Maria Church in Cosmedin, Rome, which prophesized that anyone who sticks their hand in the mouth and tells a lie would have their hand bitten off. Over the years, Courtright frequently recast the mask, imaginatively altering the expression of his subject through the use different materials: cast paper, bronze, terra cotta and marble, yet always maintain his strong, subtle sense of composition and playful humor.

Courtright exhibited widely in the United States and France. His gallery affiliations, included the New Gallery, Andrew Crispo Gallery, Gimpel Weitzenhofer Gallery, Kouros Gallery, Galerie Dutko, Paris, and since 2009, Pavel Zoubok Gallery. His work is in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), and The Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh, PA) to name but a few. In 2009 Robert Courtright was honored with a major retrospective in his native South Carolina at the State Museum in Columbia.

Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street
New York (NY) 10001 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 6757490
info@pavelzoubok.com
www.pavelzoubok.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 10am to 6pm