534 West 21st Street
May 30 – July 12, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 30th from 5-7 PM
Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition examining the connections between three generations of artists, beginning with the influential teachers and conceptual artists Douglas Huebler, Sarah Charlesworth, and Joseph Kosuth. The exhibition will open at 534 West 21st Street on Thursday, May 30th.
Charlesworth was a student of Huebler’s in the late 1960s at Bradford College, MA, and it was through him that she met Kosuth, her companion and collaborator in the 1970s. Huebler went on to teach at Harvard, and from 1976 to 1988 he served as dean of the School of Art at California Institute of Arts, where he influenced a generation of artists such as Christopher Williams, Stephen Prina, Luciano Perna, and Mike Kelley.
Charlesworth and Kosuth, in turn, have had a significant impact on a cohort of conceptual artists who built upon their work deconstructing cultural imagery and critical texts. Deana Lawson, Liu Shiyuan, and Talia Chetrit each took classes with Charlesworth at either the Rhode Island School of Design or the School of Visual Arts in New York, and James Welling and Michele Abeles taught alongside Charlesworth at Princeton University.
Artworks in the exhibition will explore different conceptual strategies around photography, both with text and without text, and with a particular focus on works that illustrate the relationships between artists and trace the multiple trains of influence. Of particular note is Charlesworth’s Empire Light (Positive and Negative), 1981, which was reproduced on the front and back covers of the first issue of BOMB magazine and has never previously been exhibited in New York, and Face/Surface, 1976, a little-known collaborative text-based work by Charlesworth and Kosuth.
Artists:
Michele Abeles
Sarah Charlesworth
Talia Chetrit
Aria Dean
Liz Deschenes
Sam Durant
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Douglas Huebler
Larry Johnson
Mike Kelley
Joseph Kosuth
Deana Lawson
Glenn Ligon
Hirsch Perlman
Luciano Perna
Stephen Prina
Laurie Simmons
Liu Shiyuan
Sara VanDerBeek
James Welling
Christopher Williams