*1939 Plainfield, New York – lives in New York

Gary Kuehn is one of the outstanding sculptors of the Post Minimal era, which once again radically changed the concept of art in the 1960s. His oeuvre consists mainly of sculptures, objects and installations. In addition, he has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings, complemented by videos of performances that essentially thematize drawing itself and its gestural dimension. His sculptural practice always revolves around pairs of opposites such as hard-soft, solid-liquid, push-pull, static-dynamic, or organic-inorganic. The processes of the play of forces or transformation implicit in these works serve him again and again to bring the opposites towards each other – he calls this “making compromises” – and, moreover, to turn them into metaphors of states of mind.

Four of the works done in oil and graphite on canvas on wood are based on the strict geometry of the circle which, in the 1970s, Kuehn still described with the formulation “obliteration and alteration impossible.” But now he divides the circle into two equal halves which partially cover two semicircles that are shifted against each other and furthermore are differently colored.

Friedemann Malsch