Irving Petlin: A Retrospective

On View

February 2 – April 2, 2010

JAN KRUGIER GALLERY 980 Madison Avenue, New York

February 9 – April 16, 2010

RICHARD L. FEIGEN & CO. 34 EAST 69 Street, New York

The Jan Krugier Gallery and Richard L. Feigen & Co. are proud to present Irving Petlin: A Retrospective, a two-part exhibition featuring works from three decades of the artist's career. The shows will include some of Petlin’s most recent works and both oil paintings and pastels from earlier series. Krugier and Feigen join the Kent Gallery to form a tripartite exhibition project dedicated to Irving Petlin. Irving Petlin was born in Chicago to Polish Jewish parents who left Europe in the early 1920s right after World War I. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, during the height of the Chicago Imagist movement. It was in Chicago and during his subsequent fellowship at Yale, where he studied under Josef Albers, that Petlin honed his ability to transform metaphor and fantasy into composition. The power of negative space on a canvas, the sanctity of drawing, and a keen understanding of color are all traits that would become vital to Petlin’s artistic expression. Stationed at the Presidio military base in San Francisco by the army in 1959, Petlin served in the army by day and painted by night. After spending a couple of years in Paris, Petlin returned to California in 1964, moving to Los Angeles, where he became a visiting artist at UCLA along with fellow artist Richard Diebenkorn. At this time, he collaborated with other emerging artists including Mark di Suvero, and New York-based artists Max Kozloff, Claus Oldenburg, Leon Golub, Carl Andre, and others to protest the war in Vietnam. Petlin worked on a number of important political works during these years such as The Burning of Los Angeles (1965-67), which reflected his intense social and political activism, and the Los Angeles Peace Tower, which he completed with Mark di Suvero in 1966. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Petlin would execute works related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while also producing his luminous ‘landscapes’. Richard L. Feigen & Co. will focus on Petlin’s ‘landscapes,’ which depict spaces that are as much cerebral as they are visual. They are composites of the imagined and the viewed, portraying places where Petlin has worked and lived, as well as places that hold larger historical and mythological significance. The landscapes are often viewed from a window, and suggest an interpretation of nature reflecting an individual’s recollection and the realm of collective memory. The Jan Krugier Gallery, which has represented Petlin’s work for decades, will concentrate on Petlin's pastel works from his series inspired by major Post-War writers and intellectuals like Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, and Edmond Jabès. These profound dedications envision what was once and is no more, as expressed in the postwar prose of Jabès and the poems of Celan as well as in the mysterious tales of Schulz's prewar Poland. Engaging in multiple discourses – political, philosophical, psychological – Irving Petlin examines issues such as American involvement in war, the Shoah, allegories of childhood fables, and the visual meaning of place. The artist has described this approach as an “interrogation of memory” that constantly leads him to further exploration.

For More Information

JAN KRUGIER GALLERY John Mollett

media@krugier.com 212-755-7288

www.krugier.com/petlin/

Or

RICHARD L. FEIGEN & CO. Jennifer Grossman

jgrossman@rlfeigen.com 212-628-0700

www.rlfeigen.com

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