Against Abstraction
February 29 – April 5, 2020

The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents Against Abstraction, an exhibition of constructions and works on paper by George Ortman  (1926-2015) opening on Saturday February 29 and continuing until Sunday, April 5, 2020.

The current exhibition, the first since the artist’s death in 2015 and timed to coincide with the Museum of Modern Art’s Donald Judd retrospective, is built around four of Ortman’s masterpieces from the 1950s and early 1960s: Stages of Life, 1956; Tales of Love, 1959; Peace II, 1961; and Omen, 1962. The show also includes works on paper highlighting the artist’s extraordinary draftsmanship with early etchings done at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York in 1949, pencil drawings analyzing the structure of paintings by Uccello, Gauguin and Matisse which the artist used in creating his final compositions, and late drawings made conflating the work of Bosch, Gaudí, and Miró. George Ortman remained a prolific and intensely inquisitive artist throughout his life. His work widely engaged the culture at large, touching on philosophy, architecture, art history and theater. (In the early 1950s Ortman was involved with the Tempo Playhouse in New York which introduced works by Genet and Ionesco, among others in the “Theater of the Absurd.”)

Donald Judd considered George Ortman an important precursor to minimal art (though Judd avoided that term). Ortman’s construction Stages of Life (1956) in the current exhibition is illustrated in “Specific Objects,” Judd’s seminal essay of 1965 where he–Judd–provides a definition of specific objects for which “[t]he work of Johns and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman’s reliefs for example, are preliminaries.”

Over time, George Ortman’s work has come to be seen through the lens of Donald Judd, as both precursor and influence. Yet Ortman’s work has always been more complex than this approach suggests, and viewing it solely from this perspective misrepresents Ortman’s art. Judd himself understood this, taking issue with Ortman’s formal transgressions as early as 1963 (“Towards a New Abstraction,” Arts Magazine, Sept. 1963). As outlined in an insightful essay on Ortman by Adam Dunlavy[1] such a perspective limits an understanding of his art: “Ortman’s work had been called Surrealist, neo-Dada, Assemblage, Pop, Abstract Imagist, Hard-edge, and Minimalist. Each critic emphasized a different aspect of the work, and Ortman himself accepted all interpretations…This open-ended approach flew in the face of the New York art world’s expectations for art in the 1960s.”[1]

Scheduling the current exhibition to coincide with MoMA’s Donald Judd show provides an opportunity not only to reexamine Ortman’s work as viewed through the lens of Donald Judd, but also to do the reverse and view Donald Judd’s work through the lens of George Ortman.