Selections from The Rachofsky Collection
Aug 7, 2007 – Sep 29, 2007
Each new installation at The Rachofsky House aims to focus on salient issues in contemporary art that can be explored meaningfully within the collection. This time, however, we have simply indulged the desire to look at some personal favorites. The emphasis is on more historical works, including concentrations in Italian postwar art and in American and European painting by artists who emerged in the fifties and sixties.
Even though this presentation is guided more by taste than by the exploration of specific historical points, one can nonetheless trace some meaningful developments in postwar art. On the first floor, with its preponderance of Minimalist works and their American and European antecedents, and of Italian Arte Povera, one sees the beginnings of a rupture in artistic values and a breakdown of unified picture making, not only of the picture plane but of the integrity of abstraction. On the second floor, a perhaps more dire kind of rupture is explored in representational work by European and American artists of the sixties and seventies that manifests a breakdown in societal, cultural, and personal identity. And in the bedroom, one sees a search to reconnect with the transcendent—a search at times noble, critical, or transgressive.
Allan Schwartzman
Director of The Rachofsky Collection
August 2007
Aug 7, 2007 – Sep 29, 2007
Each new installation at The Rachofsky House aims to focus on salient issues in contemporary art that can be explored meaningfully within the collection. This time, however, we have simply indulged the desire to look at some personal favorites. The emphasis is on more historical works, including concentrations in Italian postwar art and in American and European painting by artists who emerged in the fifties and sixties.
Even though this presentation is guided more by taste than by the exploration of specific historical points, one can nonetheless trace some meaningful developments in postwar art. On the first floor, with its preponderance of Minimalist works and their American and European antecedents, and of Italian Arte Povera, one sees the beginnings of a rupture in artistic values and a breakdown of unified picture making, not only of the picture plane but of the integrity of abstraction. On the second floor, a perhaps more dire kind of rupture is explored in representational work by European and American artists of the sixties and seventies that manifests a breakdown in societal, cultural, and personal identity. And in the bedroom, one sees a search to reconnect with the transcendent—a search at times noble, critical, or transgressive.
Allan Schwartzman
Director of The Rachofsky Collection
August 2007