bodies of resilience | gary kuehn

bodies of resilience highlights the physical and emotional dimensions of Gary Kuehn’s works, exploring the tensions between constraint and release, gesture and geometry and softness and rigidity. The solo show brings together selected sculptures, paintings and drawings from 1969 – 1972 and beyond.

As a well-known representative of American Process Art, Gary Kuehn (*1939 Plainfield, New Jersey, US) contributed significantly to the radical change in the concept of art in the 1960s. His artworks demonstrate a deep understanding of material properties. Simple shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles form the basis of his artistic investigations in conjunction with a variety of handcrafted and industrial materials such as fiberglass, wood, plaster, and steel. The geometric bodies are often subjected to deforming forces or kinetic energy, spatially displaced, knotted, or bumped, always generating an emotional value to Kuehn's formally abstract works.

At the center of bodies of resilience is the two-part sculpture Untitled (1969), which combines elements from the Box – and Mattress Pieces series and confronts the viewer with its own physicality. The same yellow, rectangular body made of fiberglass appears soft and malleable on the right side, its geometric properties loosening and dissolving, while on the left it is encased in a wooden box, both confined and supported. In this way, Kuehn explores the nature of sculptural bodies and the vulnerability of structures that can be translated into psychological states and feelings, raising questions about resilience and social structures. His gestural drawings and paintings also test the physical limits and freedom of thought.

The first solo exhibition by Gary Kuehn at max goelitz is supported by Häusler Contemporary Zurich and accompanied by an exhibition text by Alex Bacon (art historian at Princeton University and co-editor of Circle Books).