Bernard Jacobson Gallery is proud to announce its forthcoming exhibition Robert Motherwell: Collage, in the New York Gallery at 17 East 71st Street. This show follows the exhibition in the London Gallery, from June 5th – August 28th, which was the most comprehensive exhibition of Motherwell collages ever to be held. The current exhibit in New York is a small concise exhibit of 12 collages drawn from the much larger London show. The exhibition will run from September 25th to November 2nd and will coincide with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection's exhibition Robert Motherwell: The Early Collages, which opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on September 27th, 2013.

In 1943 three young American painters, Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, were approached by Peggy Guggenheim and asked to produce work for the first exhibition of collages in the United States, at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. Motherwell was only in his 20s - the youngest of the three painters - but his powerful new experiments were exhibited alongside the great European modernists including Picasso, Ernst, Miro, Braque, and Arp. As he recounts, "Pollock and I didn't really know much about collage except that you pasted things on. We were both intimidated by the project, so we decided to try it together." Pollock and Baziotes soon abandoned the form, but Motherwell discovered a passion and aptitude for the medium which spurred him to continue with it throughout his career. As he says, "I felt a magical release. I took to it, as they say, as a duck to water."

Motherwell's major innovation with the form is the torn paper edge - a technique that reflected his love of working with paper, and his commitment to automatism. Further, he worked on a much larger scale than his European counterparts had attempted, and Americanized the medium to reflect his views that "in Europe...people take it much more for granted that certain things are for certain people. But in America, people believe everything is for everyone, including abstract art." To this end, Motherwell believed collage to be "a necessary invention", in which "one has the whole world and human history as subject matter, juxtaposition inconceivable before modern times."

The exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, New York presents 12 works from the 1960s, 1970’s and 1980’s. In his 1960s collages, Motherwell incorporated "everyday" fragments, echoing Schwitters' merz technique developed 40 years earlier. Collages such as, Untitled 1967 (1967), which includes part of a mailing wrapper addressed to Motherwell from the Times Literary Supplement, is an example of this.

In the 1970s and 80s, Motherwell developed entire series of collages. The collage elements in these later works were often cut and torn fragments of proofs of his own prints that he embellished with gestural brushstrokes and painted compositions, and are demonstrative of his work with the torn edge. This technique of incorporating print fragments occurs in works such as The Red and the Black No. 44 (1987-1988) and Irish Book (1989.

Other highlights from the exhibition include, Australia II (1983). The title commemorates the Australian boat that won the 1983 America’s Cup. It is a superb example of the torn paper technique.

Robert Motherwell continues the trajectory of modern European visionaries Picasso, Braque, Schwitters, and Matisse, and his advancements with American collage are unrivalled. As Robert Hughes suggests, in making collage Motherwell became "the only artist since Matisse in the fifties to alter significantly the syntax of this quintessentially modernist medium."

Bernard Jacobson Gallery
17 East 71st Street
New York (NY) 10021 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 8791100
mail@jacobsongallery.com
www.jacobsongallery.com

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From 10am to 6pm