COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver announced today that artist Roni Horn will be curating a show of Still’s work next year, joining Julian Schnabel and Mark Bradford as part of the museum’s ongoing Artists Select series. Schnabel’s show, which opens January 20, will feature 60 abstract works by Still, a third of which will enjoy their first ever public viewing. Bradford’s show opens in May, and will be followed by Horn later in 2017.
The series, which began in 2015, aims to shed new light on Still and extend his legacy. In a press statement, director Dean Sobel explained the decision to select these particular artists to engage with Still’s work. “Schnabel used abstract expressionism as one point of departure for his own work and almost singlehandedly brought expressionist painting back into the fore earlier in his career. Bradford has a deep interest in how and why artists use color and the ways in which painters derive meaning from their acts. Horn drew my attention as an artist who offers new approaches to abstraction, material, color, surface, memory, history, and language,” he said.
Schnabel, never short on words, offered his own statement on participating in the series.
“Art and life are incongruous. Each has a life of its own. I happened to meet Clyfford Still by chance while he was visiting an old student of his who had rented the front part of my studio on 20th Street. I had always been an admirer of his work. I was 27 years old at the time. He and I had no idea that 35 years later, through this exhibition, I would come to be the custodian of his beloved work. Or that, through my eyes, there might be a possible reading of his work that might help to illuminate his contribution and also bring it to an audience who hadn’t been born yet and others who might have skipped over his legacy, and maybe meld the world of his art with the art world of the present and the future. His work keeps bringing its present into infinity to those that only his paintings will meet.”