Jeffrey Wasserman

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SELECTED WORKS OF THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES SEPTEMBER 26 – DECEMBER 22, 2018

19 E AST 66 TH S TREET

N E W Y O R K , NY 10065

212.202.3270

W W W. R O S E N B E R G C O . C O M

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

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O VIEW JEFFREY WASSERMAN’S work is to be carried away by a lyricism

of luminous hazes and sinuous forms. I first encountered Wasserman’s work within the steel confines of a warehouse, and I had the distinct impression of an emotional outburst freeing itself from chains. His unique

stencil technique grew like vines in a buoyant palette — and suddenly, the space around me was vibrant and joyous.

Rosenberg & Co. is delighted to show Jeffrey Wasserman’s paintings and works on paper.

This would not have been possible without the dedication of Anne Newburg, who has inventoried and cared for the work of her late husband. She brings to this exhibition an invaluable and profound connection to the works.

Devon Zimmerman was also a key part in composing the exhibition. Devon’s affiliation with the Wasserman Estate has given him a comprehensive knowledge of the body and breadth of Wasserman’s oeuvre, which is reflected in the insightful and informative essay he produced for the Estate catalogue. We are deeply appreciative of Devon’s contribution to the catalogue for this show.

Rosenberg & Co. invites you to enter the world of Jeffrey Wasserman.

M A R I A N N E R O S E N B ER G

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HERE IS AN ELUSIVE BEAUTY to Jeffrey Wasserman’s approach to

abstraction. His paintings and works on paper are suggestive of moods or events that are deeply personal. The expressive nature of this work conveys his optimism in the beauty and purpose of painting. Wasserman was a painter

in SoHo during a period of serious skepticism about the expressive possibilities of painting: many critics in the art world considered painting a medium confined to merely a postmodernist recitation or pastiche of past aesthetic movements.

But Wasserman firmly rejected such claims and dedicated himself to the exploration of the history and signification of painting in general, and abstract painting in particular. He was interested in honoring the legacy of modernism and was committed to ideas of subjectivity and self-expression. As such, his distinctive form of abstraction — diaphanous washes of bright pigment and hovering motifs, idiosyncratic in form and facture — stand apart from his contemporaries.

The paintings and works on paper in this exhibition explore several themes foundational to Wasserman’s oeuvre: his fascination with the nature of memory, the relationship between artist and viewer, and the dynamism created through unconventional chromatic arrangement.

Wasserman engaged and reengaged these throughout his nearly four-decade long career. The works selected for this exhibition — all produced during the late 1980s through the 1990s — highlight these themes in their most acute and paradigmatic form.

Beginning in the 1970s, Wasserman developed a growing interest in representing the vibrancy found in the fleeting memories of the mundane and every day. He worked with a sense of playfulness and jest, using tertiary colors, discordant space, and cartoonish forms to create semi-abstract compositions of familiar environments, from New York City sidewalks to his own studio. In the early 1980s, as he became a part of the emergent East Village scene, he began to introduce and develop the earliest characters in his inventory of abstract motifs — clusters

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of triangular forms, hovering white bands, silhouettes of heads in profile, and amalgams of geometric forms suggestive of figures — which became ubiquitous throughout his work.

With these motifs, Wasserman explored the capacity of painting to evoke, distill, and express the affective power of memory. He drew on common experiences, de-familiarizing them into an abstract visual language. As he explained to friend and critic Alan Jones: “I’m trying to set up enigmatic situations, the feeling that some incident has taken place but with nothing really spelled out, to the point that one interpretation outweighs another in the eyes of the viewer.”i In the early 1980s, this interest in the expressive possibilities of memory drew him towards an exploration of Surrealism and its processes. He experimented with the creative potential of automatic drawing, as well as with the odd forms that would emerge from the Surrealist game, cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).ii By 1985, these early forms gave way to a mature set of motifs. Swirling lines, curling floral and vegetal forms, and floating celestial orbs occupied Wasserman’s canvases for the following decade, such as with the sinuous and curvilinear coarse shapes in The Garden Gate (1987, p. 25). Wasserman utilized stencils to build up these forms through a thick, matte layer of pigment mixed with sand. This practice distinguishes the motifs from one another and from the horizontal washes of cream, pink, and blue in the atmospheric background. The vaporous mists and flowing streams of sprayed and poured pigment imbue a sense of translucency.

Although entirely abstract, Wasserman’s ensemble of forms in The Garden Gate hints at some dematerializing landscape, or, as in The Broken Bough (1990, p. 41), resonate in nature.

Wasserman was fascinated by the fluidity of paint and infatuated with the color blue. His blue is wholly idiosyncratic — it is more saturated than the blues of Joan Miró, thinner and more fluid than that of Yves Klein — and, by the 1980s, his paintings were dominated by it. The color was often evocative of landscape, such as in Untitled (1985, p. 17). “I have often felt a real kinship with the boldness of color in painters like [Hans] Hoffman, abstraction with a slight reference to landscape,” Wasserman said. “The blue paintings I have recently done developed out of something not far from that.”

Although they loosely signify the real world, Wasserman’s abstract motifs and color palette never fall into the realm of iconography. Rather, according to Wasserman, “The mood is what is more important to me.” For example, in The Garden Gate: A Man’s Estate (1987, p. 26), the composition transcends a reference to a specific place, instilling instead an almost synesthetic rhythm. An arrangement of syncopated forms pushes the eye back and forth. The composition at one moment accelerates into a spinning vortex of blurred black linear motifs and

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interpenetrating white apostrophe-like forms twisting above a blue field, and then slows in a field of black teardrops and shimmering gold orbs. The painting seems in constant flux. The faint pentimenti visible under the golden orb and mauve and teal washes behind the creeping veils of white convey a sense of movement and volatility. A similar process is at play in Futile Ambassador (1989, p. 34), as the coarse, matte forms dissolve and reappear through a complexly layered mist of color washes and swaths of encaustic. These forms and washes become traces of something dreamt or seen, fragments of fleeting memories.

Wasserman’s abstract visual language is intended to keep his work open-ended. He noted, “So long as the compositional elements that are joined together in the picture have an impact on [the viewer], they are invited to freely create their own mythology out of it.”iii In The New Dawn (1988, p. 33), the painting points to no specific event; rather, constructed through a mise-enscène of Wasserman’s motifs, it follows a common trope in his painting during this period: the stage. Each form — the hovering gold orb, salmon-colored apostrophe-like motifs, charcoal grey floral forms, and wispy lines of blue and black — becomes a character framed by the drips of a flowing curtain of red. Far more abstract than earlier iterations of this stage motif, The New Dawn alludes to the emotional and social relations formed through the performative act of presentation and reception. This compositional device is also used in The Gate (1988, p. 30), as a faint curtain of black frames, scrawling black lines, and washes of yellow, blue, and red. These works are decidedly self-reflexive, as painter and painting simultaneously become performers for the viewer.

Wasserman’s interest in the nature of looking is present in a more playful tone in his works on paper. In Untitled (1985, p. 21), for example, he explores this theme further. With a cycloptic figure, comprised of a vertical elongated blue form capped with a pink bow and swirling blue “eye,” Wasserman humorously explores the dichotomy between observer and observed. The abstract figure exists within the frame (the pink bow lies below and thus behind the blue rectangle) as well as without (the figure’s “body” crosses above the lower edge of the frame and thus in front of it). This play with perspective presents the abstracted figure as both the subject and object of its vision.

The frame motif is also present in Untitled (1985, p. 18). A translucent black rectangle in the lower left frames a peach orb surrounded by fields of orange and yellow. These colors emanate across the composition, beyond the limits of the frame, spreading along the plane with floating diamonds of yellow, and ink-scratched starbursts and rosettes. This electric swirl of color and form surrounds a central musical note-like form — muddled brown in color and created from

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the layering of two stenciled forms. Both works on paper seem to reflect on the extension of the visual field, and its affective reach, beyond the frame and into the realm of the viewer.

By the late 1980s, the reoccurring motifs that occupied Wasserman’s abstract compositions during the decade began to fade behind condensed, allover fields of scumbled and scraped paint. In Night Life (1992, p. 49), the edges of the central, white motif blur and blend into the push and pull of the undulating layers of scraped whites, yellows, and blues. Color takes on a more eccentric and discordant role. In Cowboys & Indians (1990, p. 45), layers of color create a modulating and dense chromatic fog of pink, yellow, and cream. With Cowboys & Indians, erasure becomes a prominent formal device. The faint echoes of buried forms, covered by swaths of cream, play as critical a role in the balancing of the composition as the yellow rosette or the strike of vertical blue.

With Untitled (1990, p. 42), opacity comes to dominate, as Wasserman exchanges the atmospheric washes of color for dense layers of impasto. Colors no longer bleed into one another through rivulets or creeping fractals guided by gravity. Instead, areas of red, purple, lime green, and black are forcibly pushed with a palette knife to create vibrant areas of discordant colors. “I use colors in an artificial way,” Wasserman said. “A lot of times they enter totally against what is going on in the painting.”iv In both Cowboys & Indians and Untitled, Wasserman’s eye for and control over unconventional color relations is evident. Each work puts on display the drama and energy Wasserman can conjure through color alone, whether in diaphanous wash or thick impasto.

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Wasserman’s idiosyncratic form of abstraction garnered a variety of competing labels by critics seeking to categorize his painting during the 1980s and 1990s — “Paramodernist,” “neoSurrealist,” “Abstract Implosionist,” and “Post Modern Abstract Expressionist” to name but a few.v Though all of these readings have their merits, touching on valid characteristics of his paintings, they either overstate or fail to fully capture the nature of his work and his position in the history of painting during this period. While his paintings allude to art historical referents, such as in his use of Piet Mondrian’s palette of primary colors in The Gate (1988, p. 30), Wasserman’s work from this period — unlike some of his contemporaries and colleagues — explores abstraction neither in an overtly cynical manner nor through a postmodern practice of appropriation and pastiche. Instead, his paintings seek to reinvigorate and explore fundamental pictorial problems historic to painting: the boundaries between abstraction and figuration; the opposition between geometric and biomorphic forms; the limits of natural and artificial color; and the nature of subjectivity and expression. As such, his work does not fall neatly into a singular critical or stylistic category.

Wasserman’s enduring engagement with the properties and problems of painting have led patrons and artists alike to refer to him with admiration as a “painter’s painter.” His unrelenting faith in the possibilities of painting, his fascination with color and form, and his drive to explore and move beyond what is comfortable and known all imbue his work with a lasting resonance and a language that only deepens with time; a language that can be found in the paintings and works on paper in this exhibition.

D EVON Z IMMERMAN

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Untitled, 1975 Watercolor on paper

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15 x 22 in.

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Untitled, 1978 Tempera on paper

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22 x 15 in.

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Untitled, c. 1980 Oil on paper

19.5 x 14 in.

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Untitled, c. 1985 Oil on paper

30 x 22 in.

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Untitled, c. 1985 Oil on paper

24.5 x 19.5 in.

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Untitled, c. 1985 Oil on paper

30 x 22.25 in.

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Untitled, c. 1985 Oil on paper

30 x 22.25 in.

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The Garden Gate, 1987 Oil on canvas

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30 x 36 in.

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The Garden Gate: A Man’s Estate, 1987 Oil on canvas

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51 x 58 in.

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Untitled, c. 1988 Tempera on paper

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15 x 20 in.

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The Gate, 1988 Oil on canvas

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36 x 42 in.

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The New Dawn, 1988 Oil on canvas

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58 x 50 in.

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Futile Ambassador, 1989 Oil on canvas

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60 x 54 in.

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P R O C E S S

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F O C U S

Jeffrey Wasserman’s Use of Stencils

T

HE HISTORY OF STENCILING — the creation of a positive image out of a

negative structure — runs hand in hand with the history of manmade imagery. Over the centuries, stencil-based art and design went through many different iterations and purposes. More than 35,000 years ago,

Neanderthals placed their hands against cave walls and, with straw-like implements, blew fine pigment around them, leaving their mark. By the first century AD, the Chinese had developed the paper stencil, using the device to advance early printing techniques. Trade brought the craft to Europe where it was further developed and utilized for everything from manuscript production, to fabric design to home decor.

Throughout the twentieth century, stenciling proved to be a tool for artists in pursuit of pushing the boundaries of Modernism. It offered an immediacy and simplicity that met the desires of artists as varied as Henri Matisse, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the subject of this exhibition: Jeffrey Wasserman.

In the 1970s, Jeffrey Wasserman lived and worked in SoHo, the heart of New York’s creative resurgence. He took up residence in the studio of his previous employer, the abstract artist Edward Avedisian. The artists around him were using commercial paints and products to apply neon colors with alternative devices — from spray cans to palette knifes — not only onto canvas, but onto the walls of the city. Street Art and Graffiti Art had taken hold of metropoles across the United States and Europe. Here, stencils were used as a means of efficiency to allow artists to make their mark quickly, as this form of creative expression was viewed as an act of vandalism. The stencil also allowed for easy reproduction, producing recognizable impressions, easily identifiable to passersby.

Most often, this art was made in response to political and social events, acting as a form of cultural commentary. However, Wasserman took the graffiti-like gesture and ubiquitous, saturated colors, and discarded the popular narrative.

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Wasserman’s interest in color — instilled in him by his teacher, Color Field painter Friedel Dzubas, who introduced the young artist to the gestural techniques of Willem de Kooning and the color theory of Hans Hoffman — moved to the streets.i Fellow artist, Frank Galuszka noted, “He [Wasserman] got crushes on colors: a particular orange, or the way black looks against blue. There were contrasts between veils of partly dripped color and crisp stenciled devices, like romantic icons or heroic emblems, figures against the ground.”ii

Embracing his surroundings, Wasserman developed a “repertory of forms — upright loops like giant violin f-holes and dragged shard-like shapes” produced by stencils he made from wax paper (see photo above).iii The flimsy, swiftly made cutouts were often discarded after one use, due to their fragile nature. This produced consistently similar but always-unique shapes — as can be seen in works such as The New Dawn (1988) and Night Life (1992), where clef-like shapes reoccur across the canvases. These forms, inspired partially by the Street Art around him, “hover in the space near the surface of the picture” and “gently collide and merge with excited brushwork and ghostly overlays of translucent color.”iv As critic Richard Huntington notes, “there is action, it’s just limited to small lateral jabs or slow up-and-down sweeps.”v All of this is “set in dynamic opposition with thick, gestural areas of impasto,” where added sand and grit produce texture and extend the interior dimensions to the canvas’s flat plane.vi His was a “grungy, whatever-hits-the-drop-cloth technique,” that remained impressively balanced.vii

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In the 1990s, Wasserman left behind the buzz of the city and moved upstate. He took with him an amassed aesthetic — the precision and balance of Dzubas’s teachings, and the creative immediacy that ran through the streets of downtown New York — and synthesized his style into a wash of electric colors and muted motifs. With this departure, his work, indebted to, yet removed from, the trends of the twentieth century, began to “read as image[s] dissolving into a turbulent, painterly ether.”viii

In her review of an exhibit of Wasserman’s works in 1990s, Ann Wilson Lloyd wrote:

His previous works relied heavily on eccentric forms — intricate knots and snaky arabesques — which reviewers have identified as postmodern quotations of historical motifs. He usually floated these forms within a romantic and painterly Hofmanesque universe of color and spatial tensions. In his newer works, he seems to be abandoning the forms and exploring the universe behind them.ix

The familiar motifs become increasingly muted. Whereas works from the 1970s and early 1980s show shape and color juxtaposed and blocked (as seen in his Untitled drawings from

c.1980s), these later works are covered in layers of washed electric colors and bold strokes of natural hues.

His technique became increasingly physical: he “floods, stains, resists, blots, prints, stencils, smears, scrapes, and peels” the paint on and off the canvas. In this way, writes artist Pamela Wye, a contemporary of Wasserman’s, “the image on the canvas is twice removed from deliberateness of the hands action.”xi A greater sense of depth grows with these works. The forms, still identifiable as the stenciled shapes, have been submerged into the “visual texture” of the work.xii

One of the most rudimentary yet resilient image-making techniques, the art of stenciling is embedded in the developments of Wasserman’s oeuvre. With the passing decades, the actual intended shape of the stencil became less significant. The process, the application of the stencil and paint and grit to canvas, “the improvisation and accident of untried color combinations [left to] bleed” into each other, would become the artist’s interest and source of inspiration.xiii

K A DIE R OSS R OS ENB ERG & C O .

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The Broken Bough, 1990 Oil on canvas

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54 x 60 in.

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Untitled, 1990 Oil on canvas

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24 x 18 in.

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Cowboys & Indians, 1990 Oil on canvas

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38 x 36 in.

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The Boulevard, 1991 Oil on canvas

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18 x 14 in.

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Night Life, 1992 Oil on canvas

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24 x 20 in.

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Treason, 1998 Oil on canvas

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38 x 36 in.

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A Painter’s Painter i

Jeffrey Wasserman, “From an Interview with Jeffrey Wasserman by Alan Jones,” in Jeffrey Wasserman (New York: Virtual Garrison Gallery, 1984), n.p.

ii

Within the archives of the Jeffrey Wasserman Estate there exist examples of cadavre exquis games Wasserman exchanged with fellow artists.

iii

Wasserman, “From an Interview with Jeffrey Wasserman by Alan Jones,” n.p.

iv

Wasserman, “From an Interview with Jeffrey Wasserman by Alan Jones,” n.p.

v

See Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, Approach/Avoidance: Art in the Obsessive Idiom (New York: Queens Museum, 1981), n.p.; Stephen Westfall, “Surrealist Modes Among Contemporary New York Painters,” Art Journal vol. 45, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 315-318.; Ted Greenwald, Abstract Implosionism, (New York: Ted Greenwald Gallery, 1984), n.p.; and Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, “Essay for the Exhibition,” in Outsider America: Going into the 90s, (Atlanta: Fay Gold Gallery, 1991), n.p.

Devon Zimmerman, “From Where I Stand: Jeffrey Wasserman, 1946-2006,” in Jeffrey Wasserman: Selected Paintings and Works on Paper (New York, NY: Jeffrey Wasserman Estate, 2017).

ii

Frank Galuszka, “Thoughts on Jeffrey Wasserman,” see: Jeffrey Wasserman: Selected Paintings and Works on Paper (New York, NY: Jeffrey Wasserman Estate, 2017).

iii

Richard Huntington, “A rebirth for abstract painting: Vivid colors, elegance at Freudenheim Gallery,” The Buffalo News, Saturday, March 23, 1991.

iv

Huntington, “A rebirth for abstract painting: Vivid colors, elegance at Freudenheim Gallery.”

v

Huntington, “A rebirth for abstract painting: Vivid colors, elegance at Freudenheim Gallery.”

vi

Devon Zimmerman, “From Where I Stand: Jeffrey Wasserman, 1946-2006.”

vii

Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Jeffrey Wasserman at Bill Maynes,” Art in America, December 1995.

viii

Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Jeffrey Wasserman at Bill Maynes.”

ix

Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Jeffrey Wasserman at Bill Maynes.”

x

Catalogue essay by Pamela Wye, see: “Jeffrey Wasserman,” at Bill Maynes Contemporary Art, New York, NY December 1994.

xi

Catalogue essay by Pamela Wye.

xii

Catalogue essay by Pamela Wye.

xiii

Catalogue essay by Pamela Wye.

Photographs courtesy of the Jeffrey Wasserman Estate

Rosenberg & Co. ©2018

Process in Focus: Jeffrey Wasserman’s Use of Stencils i