Ad Reinhardt Art Is Art And Everything Else Is Everything Else

Art as Art

Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt

The renowned American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art-historical canon—this time taking Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings as a point of departure. Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 (2018) is a new body of work by Levine that continues her ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings held at David Zwirner, New York, in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the twenty-eight works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints Meltdown, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings. Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. This publication features full color reproductions of Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.

Ad Reinhardt: Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

The first retrospective in 30 years on the immensely influential abstractionist, theorist, art-world scourge and forefather of Minimalism The first monographic exhibition on the artist in Spain and one of the most complete surveys ever curated in Europe, Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Elseillustrates Ad Reinhardt's tremendous influence on Abstract Expressionism as well as subsequent contemporary art styles. Reinhardt's paintings are rarely representational and are instead composed of geometrics and eventually only color: canvases of all red, all blue, all black. Organized with the institutional support of the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this catalog includes a selection of approximately 50 paintings and works on paper, spanning Reinhardt's career from early drawings, paintings and collages to later works characterized by a progressive reduction of color and form. Another focal point of the volume is Reinhardt's passions and artistic pursuits beyond painting, including his slides, writings on art, illustrations in newspapers, books, magazines and pamphlets, and his comics satirizing the art world and politics. Ad Reinhardt(1913-67) was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied art history at Columbia University from 1931 to 1935, after which he participated in the WPA Federal Art Project initiative. Reinhardt soon became an official member of the newly formed American Abstract Artist group alongside painters such as Josef Albers and Jackson Pollock. He exhibited regularly and taught at Brooklyn College for the remainder of his life.