Frieze Masters

For the 2024 edition of Frieze Masters, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Allan D’Arcangelo, Nicholas Krushenick, Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Fritz Scholder, Franklin Williams, and B. Wurtz. The seven artists in this exhibition span multiple 20th and 21st century American art movements. A number of these artists—Allan D’Arcangelo and Nicholas Krushenick in particular—engaged with the visual language of Pop, drawing on advertising’s flat but colorful imagery. Others intersected with Postminimalism, Pattern and Decoration, Nut Art, and other movements. All of these artists, however, maintained a critical distance from the movements with which their work is occasionally associated. Over the decades, these unique oeuvres have remained resonant, in part because of their category-defying nature.

While Pop artists plumbed mass culture for spiritual depth, Allan D’Arcangelo instead examined America’s industrialized landscape, turning his attention to its archetypal structures. In works like Shuttle (1982) the artist foregrounds a technological icon, the space-bound rocket ship, against the boundless, infinite sky. The artist once described himself as searching for “icons that mattered.” While the spaceship is widely recognized for its paradigm-shifting impact on the American psyche, many of D’Arcangelo subjects are more enigmatic: lumbering ships, power lines, roadways, and other monumental constructions. Nicholas Krushenick’s works were similarly tangential to those of his Pop contemporaries as he eschewed their narrative and representational conventions completely. His bright and processed colors, broad black lines, and overlapping, quasi-organic forms earned him the moniker of “the father of Pop abstraction.” In Untitled (1965), curved forms overlap to create a vortex or orifice. While fully abstract, the work is suggestive, providing unexpected comic relief in the otherwise serious genre of abstract painting. It wasn’t just Krushenick’s signature “Pop abstract” style that set him apart from his peers, but his high-keyed color, formal rigor, and sheer graphic intensity.

Howardena Pindell belongs to a small group of African-American abstractionists who were largely excluded from the white-dominated institutions for decades. The unjustified exclusion may have had an unexpected upside: a relative lack of institutional influence. In the early 1970s, Pindell began spraying paint onto large canvases through hole-punched cardstock templates, subtly varying the color with each pass. The layers of vibrant dots in works like Untitled (1971) resulted in an elaborate, sensuous interplay between background and foreground with endless fluctuations of color and light. These early paintings served as progenitors of much of her abstract work to follow. Presciently, the artist saved the punched paper dots and, years later, began incorporating them into her works like Untitled (1975). In recent years, the artist has revisited both techniques.

Fritz Scholder came to his most iconic body of work reluctantly. The artist, of Luiseño and European descent, maintained that he was a painter before anything else, and publicly vowed to never make Native Americans the subject of his work. In the late 1960s, however, Scholder finally took aim at the ubiquitous, romanticized depictions of Native Americans, substituting them with unflinching images of alcoholism, poverty, and cultural subjugation. Sitting Indian (1972) demonstrates the animating tension between the artist—focused on materiality, paint, and technique—and his subject, rife with its political meaning that threatened to dominate perceptions of the work. However complex and contradictory, Scholder’s approach was foundational for the generation of Native American artists that followed.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s States’ Names II (2002) depicts a map labeled only with those state names that are Indigenous in origin. The criteria turns out to be nearly comprehensive. Not only does it cover nearly every one of the American states, the labels extend to Central America, Northern Canada, and across the ocean to the island of Hawaii. The poignant work, like those featured in the Whitney Museum’s sprawling 2023 retrospective Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, serves as a reminder of the bustling pre-colonial populations that spanned the continent and beyond, and who persist in spite of colonial upheaval.

Franklin Williams’s dense Degrees of Refinement (1975) is a singular work. Fabric, crochet thread, and paint dissolve into a dance of pattern, color, and haptic texture. While Williams was still an undergraduate, John Coplans set the young artist’s course. Williams initially attempted to hide his idiosyncratic experiments from view, instead directing Coplans towards his more typical abstractions. When Coplans discovered the odd works, he declared, “this is who you are.” The episode culminated in the pair launching Williams’s early forays into Abstract Expressionism off the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In line with Coplans’s imperative, Williams has continued to treat the studio as a sacred place for idiosyncratic exploration.

The two included sculptures typify B. Wurtz’s repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful objects that simultaneously undermines the grand artistic gesture while elevating the commonplace. In Untitled (2014) two wooden hooks oppose each other, each propping up a different flag. The objects are irresistibly anthropomorphic, as they engage in a tragicomic shouting match like two opposing protestors.

The artists in this presentation are influential, beloved by other artists, and, for the most part, willfully uncategorizable. Their idiosyncratic works feel as fresh today as when they were made.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Franklin Williams, and B. Wurtz, as well as the estates of Allan D’Arcangelo, Nicholas Krushenick, and Fritz Scholder in association with LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe.