John Willenbecher: New Works

Babst Gallery is pleased to present John Willenbecher: New Works, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by John Willenbecher. This is Willenbecher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 1972.

 The exhibition includes a series of new works each of which is entitled Object. Willenbecher’s works are made of acrylic paint and circles of metallic leaf on fiberboard. In 1963 Donald Judd wrote that the forms in Willenbecher’s works “combine into a quiet but definite circling movement. You see arcs of the various circles. The cause is so mechanical and understated that it is hard to figure out at first…the work is generally rather philosophical…the sorts of meaning Willenbecher is dealing with are interesting. In so far as art is philosophical this is relevant, believable philosophy, which, since it is in the art, takes art.”

 The paintings may be positioned in any way—there is no right side up—and the shelf on which they rest is a part of the work. Each composition contains a group of interwoven geometric figures: the equilateral triangle (from the tetrahedron), the circle (from the sphere); the square (from the cube); and the cone—shapes that have been a part of Willenbecher’s work for over 60 years.

 William Wilson wrote in Arts Magazine, “For John Willenbecher, to be is to be a variable center, interwoven into a background of systemic, geometric, yet infinite relations…it is interesting when the indefinite is strengthened to the infinite, and the secretive is strengthened to the mysterious.” Willenbecher says that his interest in astronomy and constellations grew out an attempt “to make some kind of sense, impose some kind of order on the great random dispersal of lights in the heavens [and] an absolute passion for the glittering panoply of the night sky.”

 John Willenbecher (b. 1936, Mancungie, PA) is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Tribeca. He majored in art history at Brown University and went on to study at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where he planned to write his Master's thesis on the drawings of the Florentine artist Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515). Instead of doing that, Willenbecher decided to become an artist after seeing the 1961 The Art of Assemblage  exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1964 he exhibited in the Boxes  exhibition at Virginia Dwan’s legendary gallery in Los Angeles. Since then, Willenbecher has exhibited extensively. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Harvard Art Museums, amongst many others.