Connie Butler

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  previews January 2020

  “Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958”

  Curated by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães

  Revisiting foundational work by any great artist is always instructive. That of Lygia Clark’s first decade, from roughly 1948 to 1958, presages her radical sculptural and therapeutic experiments—the latter of which didn’t materialize until 1963, with Caminhando, a performance that invited viewers to cut Möbius strips from paper—and includes her breathtaking early paintings. Those years are the focus of an exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, which will be the artist’s first in Spain since the 1997 retrospective at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.

• previews January 2018

  “Matt Mullican: The feeling of things”

  Matt Mullican is a polymath. A performer, an archivist, and a maker of exquisite objects, he was among the first artists to anticipate early computer technology with an exceptionally varied visual language—before fractured attention was a deficit. After finishing his studies at CalArts in 1974, emerging from feminist art discourses into the circle of the Pictures artists, Mullican worked with hypnosis to create a performance persona—who may or may not be the artist himself, but who has generated an enormous body of drawings over a span of forty years. Such

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  print Summer 2007

  Connie Butler

  ONE OF THE SONGS I had in constant rotation for years in my car in Los Angeles was David Stephenson and Richard Bell’s “I Want to Hang Out with Ed Ruscha”: “I want to pack up and fly to LA / I want to hang out with Ed Ruscha / He makes the words and light interplay / He puts cool into LA / That’s Ed Ruscha.” It was on a compilation CD commemorating the late Giovanni Intra, the mercurial New Zealander who was a founder and the pied piper of China Art Objects gallery in Los Angeles for four short years. Like the French-born artist and LA immigrant Guy de Cointet, whose work is the topic at hand,