| Arcadia University Art Gallery
450 South Easton Road
Glenside, PA 19038
tel: 215-572-2131 or 215-572-2133
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday, 10 am - 3 pm; weekends, 12 noon
- 4 pm and by appointment. |
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CARY
LEIBOWITZ
"Stop Copying Me
Stop Copying Me"
February 7 - March 14, 2002 |
About the Exhibition
Slide Lecture - Thursday, February 7,
6:30 pm
"Hi Fatty Hi"-
Lecture by Cary Leibowitz; at the Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall.
Opening Reception - Thursday, February
7, immediately following talk
Arcadia
University Art Gallery is pleased
to present "Stop Copying Me Stop Copying Me," an exhibition
of recent paintings and multiples by New York-based artist Cary
Leibowitz. The exhibition includes a series of twelve text-based
paintings on wood panels and a stack of over 200 trash cans/umbrella
stands piled high in the center of the gallery.
Since emerging in the late 1980s using the alias "Candyass,"
(which he dropped in 1996) Leibowitz has developed a reputation
for what he refers to as his "late 20th-century gay Dada."
His early paintings and multiples (such as pennants that read "Go
Fags!" or dinner plates inscribed with phrases such as "I
don't deserve anything I have," "my friends should kill
me") used confessional, self-deprecating humor to critique
narcissistic fantasies of ambition and appearance. While the work
in this exhibition makes self-conscious references to his identity
as a gay, Jewish artist, Leibowitz's most recent pieces comment
wryly on more universal questions germane to the exhausted discourse
around painting and contemporary practice that have also been his
stock in trade. (A series of banners from 1989 included works with
titles such as "I Love Sherrie Levine," and "I Love
Tom of Finland.") More than a decade later, "Stop Copying
Me Stop Copying Me" demonstrates how the persistence of Leibowitz's
dandified, sad-sack whining allows him to claim the nominal "failure"
of his career as potent content for his work.
For this exhibition Leibowitz employs a minimal, monochromatic style
compared to his more effusive previous efforts. Each of the new
pictures is painted in his signature, candy-colored palette on thick,
wood panels. Labeled in Leibowitz's faux-naive scrawl and hung from
their top edges on exaggerated nails, they resemble a cross between
old fashioned shop signs and 3-D cartoons.
The majority of the works are visual puns. "Painting with Something
Missing" (2001) is a purple field with a square cut into its
center. "Painting with a Way Out" (2001) offers a door
knob. Painting with "Hindsight" (2002) has a rearview
mirror attached to it. Many of these multiple panel works use text
to address each other as well as the viewer. In "Hi Fatty...HI,"
(2001) a "slim" painting taunts a "fat" one.
In another, a pink square with red lettering implores eleven others
to "stop copying" it. Confident in their awkward physicality
and impudent formalism, Leibowitz's deadpan one-liners take material
literalism to a hyperbolic, bratty extreme.
In the center of the gallery Leibowitz has installed a mountain
of garbage cans/umbrella stands, each printed with a snapshot of
the artist on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, circa 1976. "The
cans with the picture of Fatso," he explains, "also have
the text GAIN! WAIT! NOW!, which is very much in keeping with my
longstanding history of wanting/needing/hoping/praying for things
to improve in my own impatient way." The garbage cans are $50
and the umbrella stands are $52, the only difference being their
price.
Leibowitz's penchant for producing inexpensive multiples in flagrantly
large editions is extended in the 6 x 9" announcement card
he conceived expressly for the exhibition at Arcadia University
Art Gallery. Based on the aforementioned painting, "Stop Copying
Me Stop Copying Me," this multiple was printed in an edition
of 12,000 and was bulk-mailed twice to every address on the gallery's
mailing list.
Leibowitz (38) received his MFA in painting from the University
of Kansas in 1987 after studying interior design at the Fashion
Institute of Technology (1983-84) and architecture at Pratt Institute,
New York (1981-83). Since his first one-person show in New York
(at Stux Gallery in 1988), he has exhibited internationally and
been featured in important group shows such as "Bad Girls"
at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (1994); "In a Different
Light" at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California;
and "Two Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities" at
the Jewish Museum, New York (1996). He is the recipient of an Award
in the Visual Arts Fellowship (1991) and a grant from Art Matters
(1994). In October of 2001, the interior of his Harlem town house
("decorated to within an inch of its life") was featured
in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine's "Home Design"
section.
Writing about Leibowitz's
paintings on view in a recent exhibition at the Andrew Kreps Gallery--his
first one-person exhibition in New York since 1996, New York Times
critic Holland Cotter remarked: "Mr.
Leibowitz takes a passive aggressive jab at a whole range of art-world
non-issues in work that is post-beauty, post-theory, post-cool,
post- mature, and possibly -- this has been Leibowtiz's consuming
worry for over a decade -- post success. But he needn't fear failure.
He never "arrived" on the scene in any conventional
sense, so he has never left it either. Being perpetually out of
step is a career move that makes him an artist for all seasons."
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