Broadway 1602

Group Show

Rosemarie Castoro, Xanti Schawinsky, Trisha Brown / Babette Mangolte

29 Apr - 13 May 2017

Group show installation view at BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM, April 2017
GROUP SHOW
Rosemarie Castoro, Xanti Schawinsky, Trisha Brown / Babette Mangolte
29 April – 13 May 2017

BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM is happy to announce the opening of a four-person show on the second floor of its Harlem space: ROSEMARIE CASTORO, XANTI SCHAWINSKY, IDELLE WEBER and BABETTE MANGOLTE.

In Fall 2015, BROADWAY 1602 curated Rosemarie Castoro’s “Loft Show” in her 1964 Soho studio, and, one year later, her first solo show at BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM. Now, we will exhibit a selection of Rosemarie Castoro‘s small scale sculptures from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, an aspect of her work that is less know to the New York audience, mostly familiar with her minimal paintings, large scale installations and conceptual work.

Rosemarie Castoro was a central protagonist among of the New York Minimalists and one of the few highly recognized female painters in this milieu. In the early 1960s Castoro found her initial inspiration in modern dance. She collaborated with Minimal Dance pioneer Yvonne Rainer and at Pratt Institute she got intensely involved with choreography. This highly evolved early practice served Castoro to explore three-dimensional space. By 1964 she decided to channel her central aesthetic concerns focusing on painting and drawing. Castoro created henceforth a pioneering body of work of highly sophisticated hard-edge abstraction.

Since 1969 Castoro participated in the now legendary “Art Worker’s Coalition” meetings. By this time, she extended her practice into the fields of Concrete Poetry, Concept Art and Site-Specific interventions. Later, after presenting her Free Standing Walls massive installations in the early 70s, the three-dimensional space gained more and more relevance for her practice, up to the point that sculpture became her primary medium of work after the 1980s.

The rediscovered oeuvre of Bauhaus artist Xanti Schawinsky offers to the contemporary art world a genuine reservoir of the aesthetic memory of 20th century avant-garde. Schawinsky’s highly original oeuvre covers a whole domain of genres and media so characteristic for the interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus school.

Born to a Jewish family of Polish decent in Switzerland, Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky entered the Bauhaus in 1924. He initiated and inspired many activities at the Bauhaus with a verve that revealed him as a true performer, a modernist dandy and a Bauhaus protagonist par excellence. Theater became the very core of Schawinsky’s aesthetic universe throughout his life. In 1936 Schawinsky immigrated to U.S. called by Josef Albers to advance the theater department at the Black Mountain College.

With his concept Spectodrama, an early form of total theater and multi media performance, Schawinsky transferred the innovations of the Bauhaus theater to the young American avant-garde. His Black Mountain Collage works will be now exhibited by the first time at BROADWAY 1602, after traveling across the country for two years as part of the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933 – 1957, curated by Helen Molesworth and presented at the ICA Boston, the Hammer Museum and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Finally, as BROADWAY 1602’s homage to the genius of Trisha Brown, we will be exhibiting a selection of the most iconic Babette Mangolte photographs of the dancer and choreographer, such as the famous Roof Piece (1973); Woman Walking Down a Ladder (1973); Primary Accumulation (1973); and Watermotor (1978).

French-American artist Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker also known for her photography of dance, theater and performance work. Mangolte was born and raised in France where she studied cinematography at the prestigeous “L’Ecole Nationale de la Photographie et de la Cinematographie” as one of the first two women admitted in the 1960s. Encouraged by legendary film theorist and art critic Annette Michelson, Mangolte moved to New York City in late October 1970 being at first fascinated by experimental theater and films and discovering dance later with her meeting with Yvonne Rainer in late 1971.

As a cinematographer, director and photographer Mangolte has been a central protagonist of New York’s 1970s minimal dance, experimental theatre and performance art scene. In 1978 Mangolte directed the legendary dance performance film Watermotor (1978) shooting the solo of minimal dancer Trisha Brown with a special dramatization of filmic time. In her photographic work of the 70s Mangolte focused on an intellectually and artistically invested style of performance documentation, interacting through her still camera with such disitnct artists as afore mentioned Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer, but also Richard Foreman, Robert Whitman, Stuart Sherman, Robert Morris, Lucinda Childs and Sylvia Palacios Whitman, to mention a few.
 

Tags: Josef Albers, Trisha Brown, Rosemarie Castoro, Babette Mangolte, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Rainer Fetting, Xanti Schawinsky, Idelle Weber, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Robert Whitman