This solo exhibition is the first institutional retrospective in Europe of Leon Polk Smith in over twenty years, and the first ever in a Swiss museum. Shown on four floors and largely in chronological order, it combines paintings and works on paper from almost all creative phases of Smith’s career from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s.
The show is accompanied by a catalog published by Hatje Cantz in German and English, with texts by Sabine Schaschl (director of Museum Haus Konstruktiv), Brandon Taylor (professor emeritus for art history at the University of Southampton, UK), Margit Weinberg Staber ( Art publicist and first director of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv) and David M. Roche (director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona). The catalog will be available starting in April 2023.
Installation view, Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, Brooklyn Museum, on view August 12, 2022 – August 6, 2023. (Photo: Danny Perez, Brooklyn Museum)
This installation of works by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith—four artists with strong connections to Brooklyn—creates a dynamic environment through four distinct, visually immersive experiences.
This fully-illustrated catalogue was published to accompany the recent exhibition Leon Polk Smith: Prairie Moon at Lisson Gallery in New York (September – October 2021). Edited by art historian, curator and writer Lynn Zelevansky, it features new scholarship by Zelevansky; Elizabeth Buhe, a twentieth- and twenty-first-century art scholar; and a reproduction of a 1968 essay by the legendary critic Lawrence Alloway. Representing three generations, these diverse perspectives provide a rich and complex discussion on the artist’s legacy, and unprecedented insight to his career.
Gray is pleased to announce the release of Leon Polk Smith: Endless Space, an illustrated publication examining the artist’s iconic Correspondence and Constellation series.
Produced on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Gray Warehouse in 2019, this in-depth volume offers readers the opportunity to explore 51 color illustrations, a foreword by art historian and independent curator Dana Miller and an essay by scholar and curator Jonathan David Katz.
