May 11 - June 30, 2022
WEDNESDAY - SATURDAY 11 - 5
Jonathan Silver
Matter and Vision | Plaster, Bronze & Drawing
Jonathan Silver (1937-1992) received both a BS and an MA in art history from Columbia University. While taking courses in art history as an undergraduate, he made a critical decision to study with the sculptor Peter Agostini. The life drawing classes with Agostini re-awakened the artist in Silver, who as a child had made busts of Beethoven and drawn from books on Michelangelo. He decided to become a Columbia Ph.D candidate, working under Meyer Schapiro, but even as Silver was researching a doctoral thesis on the influence of Analytic Cubism on Giacometti’s paintings he was obsessed with modeling clay and making casts in plaster. Casting in plaster allowed him to preserve the first head intact while deconstructing and reconstructing additional versions. Throughout his labor-intensive and often mysterious process, he was continually reckoning with the very idea of a head. The expressive and intellectual possibilities of the plaster casts were endless and soon he worked heads by carving and adding found materials. The heads became abstract assemblages or cubist sculpture.
The gallery last exhibited Jonathan Silver in 1992, in a 30-year survey of his drawings. In collaboration with the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation, this exhibition presents important works from 1965-1992, the span of Silver’s artistic practice. The installation comprises 20 figure drawings, 12 plaster heads, and 10 figurative bronzes, The catalog essay, titled On the Edge of the Visible: The Drawings of Jonathan Silver, was written by Michael Brenson.
