Terry R. Myers

Joe Zucker has flown under the radar of larger public awareness due to the frequent transformations in his art from one style to another, and thus his work has not been easily characterized and identified. Nevertheless, he has forged a powerful artistic persona as a process artist with a certain pop inflection, who not only grapples with formal and theoretical concerns but also explores themes of history, culture and Americana. This career-spanning survey deals with all of Joe Zucker’s various bodies of work, from his grid paintings of the 1960s to his latest pieces, including the monumental 1000 Brushstrokes (2015–1016). Zucker’s art is rooted in a conceptual framework where tools, materials, processes, procedures, content and subject matter are all interrelated.Working with materials ranging from cotton balls, sash cord, peg board and squeegees to acrylic and rhoplex, and exploring such themes as the grid, the history of cotton, ancient civilizations, an assortment of ‘dubious characters’, paintings that paint themselves, as well as meditations on the studio, Zucker merges materials, process and content – abstract and otherwise – to produce compelling works of extraordinary inventiveness, irony and passion.

The first comprehensive study on the work of visionary painter William Monk William Monk is a British-born, New York-based artist known for his enigmatic and vibrant paintings that often investigate the same motif or theme in different permutations. Deeply interested in the idea of creating images that are not a direct transcript of the real world but a product of his mind, Monk creates starkly divisional compositions carrying irregular intensities of detail, line, foreground, and background, pushing his work and the foundational elements of painting to the point where model and subject become two separate entities.

An illustrated study of Mary Heilmann's seductive 1979 abstract painting in hot pink and black, Save the Last Dance for Me."You want beauty? I'll give you beauty!"-Mary HeilmannMary Heilmann is one of the most important abstract painters of her generation. Her distinctively fluid, humorous, and bright canvases combine the modes of Abstract Expressionism with a vibrant Pop sensibility. Heilmannn's 1979 painting in hot pink and black, evocatively titled Save the Last Dance for Me, marked a shift in the artist's perspective. Heilmann describes it: "Now the work came from a different place. Instead of working out of modernist non-image formalism, I began to see that the choices in the work depended more on content for their meaning." This beautifully illustrated study of Save the Last Dance for Me explores the development of Heilmann's work, and the way it continues to engage us-psychologically, sensually, and socially.The three bright pink rectangles in Heilmann's painting seem to dance off the edge of the canvas, through a black field that seems dark as a nightclub after midnight-or perhaps the three are actually one pink rectangle, seen in a blissfully formal time lapse, moving across the dance floor/canvas. These definitively modernist geometric forms coexist with a sense of movement in real time. For many, abstraction may have been dancing its last dance in 1979, but Heilmann's bright pink rectangles boogie on.