Hollywood High

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present Hollywood High, an exhibition of sculpture by Perry, Maine–based artist Richard Van Buren. Opening July 10 at 545 West 20th Street, the exhibition is Van Buren’s fifth with the gallery. The show features a selection of new works in polyester resin, in addition to a group of recently refabricated sculptures from 1969 and 1970.

Van Buren’s idiosyncratic art is inextricable from the creative firmament of New York City of the 1960s and 1970s. Exhibiting alongside artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson, Van Buren pioneered a distinctive mode of post-Minimalism characterized by synthetic materials, irregular, biomorphic shapes, and an exuberant, heterodox palette. Like the art of Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis, Van Buren’s technical explorations pointed toward a radical new paradigm for sculpture—one premised on the fundamental inseparability of structure, material, and color.

In Hollywood High, Van Buren presents a group of recently refabricated works from 1969 and 1970, in addition to a selection of new multi-part polychrome wall sculptures. In these works, items like shells, feathers, costume jewelry, mylar, fragments of metal, and dry pigment—embedded in clear resin—form quasi-geologic accretions that dazzle the eye with their brilliant, coloristic intensity. Bright, psychedelic, and suffused with a retina-searing palette, the works announce a return to the concerns that animated the Van Buren’s sculpture of the 1970s: the intrinsic relationship between density, volume, and light.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1937, Richard Van Buren studied painting and sculpture at San Francisco State University and the National University of Mexico. While still a student, Van Buren began exhibiting his work at San Francisco’s famed Dilexi Gallery, alongside artists as diverse as Franz Kline, H.C. Westermann, Ron Nagle, Ed Moses, and Robert Morris. In 1964, Van Buren relocated to New York. From 1967 to 1988, he taught in the Sculpture Department at the School of Visual Arts. In 1988, he began teaching at the Parsons School of Design. He remained at Parsons until September 2001. Van Buren lives and works in Perry, Maine.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Van Buren had solo exhibitions at many of the most influential and prestigious galleries, including: Bykert Gallery (1967, 1968, 1969, New York), 112 Greene Street (1972, New York), Paula Cooper Gallery (1972, 1975, 1977, New York), and Texas Gallery (1974, 1976, Houston). During this period, his work also figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Primary Structures (1966, The Jewish Museum), A Romantic Minimalism (1967, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), A Plastic Presence (1970, Milwaukee Art Center), and Works for New Spaces (1971, Walker Art Center), among others. In 1977, the City University of New York, Graduate Center mounted a retrospective exhibition of Van Buren’s work.

Van Buren’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and the Walker Art Center.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Richard Van Buren.