Michael Venezia: Painting Kat. Kunstverein Heilbronn

Works by Michael Venezia, born 1935 in Brooklyn, undoubtedly represent some of the most original artistic works of Minimalist Art. His »spray paintings« and »bars« duly follow the minimalist dictum of a spatialization of color and extension of the pictorial space. In contrast to Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, however, who chose the opposing path, namely to renounce painting entirely, ­Venezia devoted himself solely to painting. Inherent in his works are the characteristics of an aesthetic presence, as it can only be developed through painting: texture, paint application and processing. Michael Venezia, ­taking minimalism into consideration, performs a parti­cular maneuver: he leads painting toward a condition of being a »specific object«, adding to the history of ­abstract expressionism a chapter on minimalism. This catalogue endeavors to assign Michael Venezia’s work its rightful place, from its beginnings right up until today. The careful presentation of the works is, therefore, inter­spersed with various autobiographical materials, as well as an entertaining and very informative interview with Michael Venezia by Tiffany Bell, herself known as an expert interpreter of Agnes Martin and Dan Flavin.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 6/2–29/5/2016
 

Michael Venezia, born 1935 in New York, where he lives, is one of the pioneers of abstract minimal painting in New York of the 1960s and 1970s, together with Frank Stella and Robert Ryman. His work of the last decades is now concentrated on the so-called Blocks, a system of modular combinations with wooden bars which the artists is coloring. These are free combined and are reminiscent, with their colors and in their variations, to the works with fluorescent light by Dan Flavin; but in contrast we still have a great work of painting as Matthia Löbke writes. 

Matthia Löbke, born 1963, artistic director of the Kunstverein Heilbronn, is curator and publishes monographic catalogs, among others about Yoshitaka Amano, Markus Lüpertz, Olaf Metzel, Enoc Perez, Michael Schmidt, Michael Venezia, Silke Wagner. In Cologne, she was an assistant to Donald Judd and gained her doctorate on Dan Flavin.

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