January 06 - February 14 2024
Dan Gorski: Primary Colors: Dan Gorski Paintings, 1962-65
Dan Gorski created a group of paintings between 1962 and 1965 that demonstrate his intense interest in color and its effects on both artist and viewer. These abstract paintings, with their specific color combinations and biomorphic compositions, offer viewers a contemplative space for reflection and inspiration.
Gorski’s early engagements with minimalism, color field, and hard-edge movements as they developed in the United States mark a critical period in 20th century art, and illustrate the journey of artistic experimentation and investigation that he pursued throughout his entire career. His work from this mid 1960s period was selected by the curator Kynaston McShine for inclusion in the groundbreaking exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966. Alongside artists such as Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Walter de Maria, Gorski was featured in that historic exhibition which is widely considered to be the first to spotlight artists working in a minimalist mode, with a focus on essential forms, geometries, and planes of color.
The new exhibition at The Jung Center will feature works by Dan Gorski from this important period in the 1960s and spotlight a remarkable chapter in the history of an artist who lived and worked in Houston for a large part of his career.
Artist bio:
Dan Gorski was born in 1939 in Cleveland and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art before attending the prestigious Yale Norfolk Summer School, completing his MFA at Yale in 1964. While at Yale, professors such as Al Held and Jack Tworkov significantly impacted his practice in a tightly-knit milieu of fellow classmates including Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra. Gorski made his debut in the landmark group exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966.
Gorksi combined his active studio practice with a long-standing commitment to teaching, including at Ithaca College in the late 1960s. He led the painting department at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore from 1971 to 1990. Gorski relocated to Houston to direct the Glassell School at Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 1990, retiring in 1996, and dedicating his attention to working in the studio until his death in 2017.
Centering the processes of inquiry and self-discovery, Gorski summed up his years of artistic practice in the following way: “I would always change again and again, realizing that the change was an obligation to myself.”
Artist's Reception: January 06 2024, 5 - 7 pm