In this video we have a look at US-artist Gary Kuehn’s solo exhibition at Galerie Haas in Zürich. Gary Kuehn was born in 1939 in New Jersey. He is an important representative of “Process Art”. Since the beginnings, his artistic career is based in the use of simple forms, such as circle, square or triangle, in conjunction with his interest in mechanical and industrial materials. Gary Kuehn lives and works in New York. His solo show at Galerie Haas features new paintings and drawings.
Gary Kuehn: Recent Works / Galerie Haas, Zürich. Vernissage, September 1, 2023.
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Exhibition text:
Gary Kuehn is one of the outstanding sculptors of the Post Minimal era, which once again radically changed the concept of art in the 1960s. His oeuvre consists mainly of sculptures, objects and installations. In addition, he has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings, complemented by videos of performances that essentially thematize drawing itself and its gestural dimension. His sculptural practice always revolves around pairs of opposites such as hard-soft, solid-liquid, push-pull, static-dynamic, or organic-inorganic. The processes of the play of forces or transformation implicit in these works serve him again and again to bring the opposites towards each other – he calls this “making compromises” – and, moreover, to turn them into metaphors of states of mind.
He is known especially for his sculptures from the 1960s, which at first glance seem like classics of minimal art. But if one looks closer, they create a subtle tension in their mirrored, personal, and often contradicting way, which is present throughout his extensive oeuvre from the last 50 years. In 1962, Kuehn studied art history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and in 1964, fine arts at Rutgers State University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The trained steelworker worked on construction sites and as a carpenter to finance his studies. In 1979, he received an invitation from the German Academic Exchange Service to Berlin, where he spent a working year. Since 1965, Kuehn has been teaching at various American universities.
