Neil Jenney: Sculpture 1967-68

Neil Jenney will exhibit sculpture from 1967-68 at Alexander and Bonin beginning January 19^th. This body of work was created in New York at the start of Jenney’s career. Most of the works belong to a series called Linear Pieces and were included in exhibitions such as Arp to Artschwager II and III at Richard Bellamy/Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York in 1967-68.

The Linear Pieces are diptychs comprised of two sections of aluminum alloy bent by hand. Each half appear to follow the same design but, like Rauschenberg’s paintings Factum I and II (1957), they comment on the artist’s touch by showing how, even with repeated imagery, a handmade or hand-painted work is always unique. Larger and smaller Linear Pieces will be exhibited as will both painted (with silicone rubber) and unpainted variations. All of these works emphasize the serial quality of Minimalist sculpture and, in their bends and pigmentation, the humanizing or personalized quality implicit in Post-Minimalism. They share many characteristics of work created by a slightly older group of artists. Jenney was 22 at the time, yet the works seem at home with the late 60s and early 70s work of Eva Hesse, Barry LeVa, Keith Sonnier and Richard Tuttle.

This exhibition will also include The Joanne Duffy Piece (1968), made of corrugated tin sheeting and fluorescent fixtures. This is one of several sculptures named after art dealers of the 1960s such as The Richard Bellamy Piece; The David Whitney Piece and The Noah Goldowsky Piece. Jenney’s subsequent body of work, the Unconcerned or Bad paintings, were extensively exhibited in the 1970s and 80s. In 1981-82 a traveling survey of painting and sculpture from 1967 – 1980 was organized by Mark Rosenthal for University Art Museum, Berkeley.  

Neil Jenney was born in Torrington, CT in 1945 and is self-taught. His work has been exhibited in several important group exhibitions including three Whitney Biennials, Dokumenta 5, New Image Painting, Bad Painting, and the 40^th Biennale di Venezia. It is also included in more than twenty permanent museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Guggenheim Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museu Serralves, Porto and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.