The bright creaminess of what was the newly completed sculpture has darkened to a warm sepia, almost as if it were an aged photograph of the thing in addition to the thing itself. The expansion is expanded, in the past. It is done.
For over three decades, Pat Steir has been one of the leading painters in America. Her abstract waterfalls, with their rivulets of paint descending through cosmic spaces, discover unsuspected possibilities in the vocabulary of gestural abstraction, and reveal a profound spiritual dimension to contemporary art.
Gerhard Richter: Endgadin at Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz, documents Richter’s ongoing fascination with the Swiss Alpine Engadin surrounding the village of Sils Maria and the Fex Valley (Val Fex) in more than sixty overpainted photographs (Übermalungen), together with paintings and works on paper, drawn from a quarter century (1989–2018) of repeated visits to the region. Supplemented by complementary exhibitions at the Segantini Museum (St. Moritz) and the Nietzche-Haus (Sil Maria), this show reveals how Richter mines the pictorial possibilities offered by overlaying abstract gestural swipes, drips, and smears on small format, commercially developed snapshots of the region. Ultimately, what might appear as transgressive acts of defacement transform private memories into indelible public revelations.
No One Thing, the current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is, in effect, an estate sale. The seven items—all steel, all painted, 1961–64—are among the last in circulation. One is very glad to see them but does not mistake this group for a historical exhibition, which in various aspects it pretends to be. In its miscellaneous heterogeneity however, the exhibition is as close to the lost fields as we may ever get, and by a special power of the artist—nothing short of magic, he is present here as if in person. A busy-minded formalist who said, “I don’t edit;” these works were checked off Smith’s exhaustive must-do list. Some are almost unbearably personal.
The title of Henry Taylor’s first major exhibition in France, installed in a neoclassical townhouse near the Champs-Elysées, doesn’t go unnoticed. The expression, which comes from Taylor’s mother’s lexicon, turns heads along with the rich colors of his beautifully rendered, loose paintings on view in the newest outpost of Hauser & Wirth, located in an enclave in the 8th arrondissement that has been historically associated with French luxury but has also a reputation for being “stuffy.”