Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents sculpture by late American artist Richard Stankiewicz


Presenting in the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, a sculpture by late American artist Richard Stankiewicz (1922-2018) in its micro project space, The Box. Constructed in Stankiewicz’s characteristic rusted metal, Man of Parts (c. 1950-59) can be seen as a figural exploration of modernity, in which both materials and people are sacrificed in favour of technological and social ‘progress’.

 

Unable to afford the fees, Richard Stankiewicz forwent a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, instead enlisting in the Navy when the United States entered World War II in 1941. Stationed in the Aleutian Islands and Hawaii over the course of the war, Stankiewicz spent his free hours fashioning animal bones and other found materials into his first sculptures. Like Jacob Epstein, who famously altered his Rock Drill (c. 1913–1916) in the shadow of the First World War’s mechanised brutality, Stankiewicz’s experiences during the Second World War appear to have marked him with an ambivalent attitude toward technological innovation and its relationship with human life. The title of the piece presented in The Box, Man of Parts, plays on the bricolage construction of the sculpture and the idiom ‘a man of many parts’ (a multitalented man). A figure formed from discarded scraps of metal, the sculpture hints at the fragmentation of the modern psyche and, perhaps, the trauma of war, which so often returned men home in pieces, literal and psychological.

 

After being discharged in 1947, the artist travelled to New York City to study at Hans Hofmann's School of Fine Art, only a few years before Judith Godwin, whose work is currently showing in the gallery’s main space. Stankiewicz later made his way to Europe, where he studied sculpture under Ossip Zadkine and painting at Fernand Léger’s Paris atelier. In 1952, after returning to New York, Stankiewicz co-founded the Hansa Gallery with Allan Krapow and other fellow students of Hans Hofmann, including Jan Müller, Jean Follet, and Wolf Kahn. New York’s second artist-run cooperative, the Hansa Gallery regularly presented Stankiewicz’s work until its closure in 1959, and its archives are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was in this period that he began working with welded scrap metal, giving new life to the detritus that littered New York’s streets. In these works, Stankiewicz appears to be working through ways that society and the individual might rebuild themselves from the wreckage of industrialisation and successive World Wars.

 

Throughout the decade during which Man of Parts was made, Stankiewicz’s practice was increasingly celebrated, and he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Young America 1957at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Irons in the Fire at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1957), a solo exhibition at the iconic Stable Gallery (1959), and in the 29th Venice Biennale (1958).

Judith Godwins’ First European Solo Exhibition Expressions of Life @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents American painter Judith Godwin's first European solo exhibition, Expressions of Life. The exhibition comprises an overview of the artist's work from the early 1950s - the period in which she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement - to the end of the century. The opening exhibition truly illustrates the artist’s lasting influence over the landscape of American art, despite the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.

Long underappreciated, Godwin’s contribution to the New York avant-garde has undergone recent revision following her inclusion in landmark exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Whitechapel Gallery and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, that offered a reappraisal of women abstractionists of the 20thcentury. Her thesis was – and remained – one of liberation from the conventions of a movement anchored in a language of masculinity and heteronormativity. Starkly aware of the limitations imposed on her by the milieu in which she practiced, Godwin sought to redefine such ‘masculine’ values by way of gestural abstractions that brought a loose geometry into dialogue with nature, dance and Zen philosophy. Her innovative reorientation of the language of modernism remains a radical statement today.

 

Godwin’s interactions with the New York art world began early in her career. As a student at the Mary Baldwin College in her native Virginia, she sought the acquaintance of the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Godwin’s invitation to Graham to perform at her college laid the foundations for a lifelong friendship between the two, and Graham’s trailblazing path in a world dominated by men became a touchstone for Godwin. The diaphanous washes of colour, colliding forms and sensuous arcs which characterise Godwin’s works from the early 1950s are indebted to Graham, whose performances she frequented on arrival in New York, often watching from the wings.

 

By 1953 Godwin had settled in New York and was continuing her artistic education under Hans Hofmann, whose influence can be seen in her dynamic approach to composition and colour. Provincetown Summer, 1953, exemplifies Godwin’s facility for translating depth and volume into two dimensions. Introduced to Zen Buddhism by Abstract Expressionist painter Kenzo Okada, such philosophies began to play a larger role in her painting, encapsulated by calligraphic brushwork, redolent too of Franz Kline, another close friend of Godwin’s. As the 1950s continued, the artist’s work took on larger proportions and a darker palette, all the while maintaining an organicism and proclivity for light and space in her evocation of the spiritual in nature. Her vigorous abstractions caught the attention of influential art dealer Betty Parsons, who included Godwin as the youngest artist in the inaugural exhibition at Section Eleven Gallery in 1958 alongside artists including Agnes Martin, and went on to present solo exhibitions of her work in 1959 and 1960.

 

During the 1960s, as Pop Art and Minimalism began their ascent, Godwin distanced herself from the New York art world, retreating instead to Connecticut where she worked restoring 18th-century homes and trained in masonry, carpentry and landscape design. Her return to New York in 1974 saw a change in her paintings, which demonstrated a robust communion with the outdoors and a physicality that invoked the power of nature. With its assertive cardamom red palette and esoteric iconography, Elegy to a Slain Deer, 1975, captures Godwin’s investigation of the relationship between the physical and metaphysical. As in her paintings of the 1950s, her keen appreciation of the corporeal form is palpable in the material presence of her body on the canvas, in body-length arcs of the brush that express her movements with agency. The liberation of the body and its inherent sensuality continued to play a central role in Godwin’s works of the 1980s and 1990s, as articulated by the flesh-inflected palette of The Nest, 1994. Godwin died in 2021 at the age of 91, just as her work began to reach new audiences worldwide. Her lasting legacy is in the transformative nature of her practice, which successfully recalibrated the masculine language of gestural abstraction, shifting representations of womanhood and sexual identity on the canvas.

Expressions of Life is on view through March 9 @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery 6 Heddon St, London W1B 4BT, UK