Art Space 616 Martin Prekop catalog

Martin Prekop

Martin Prekop: A survey of work from the 1970s to the present

Pond

2004

24" x 20"

Gelatin silver print

As Art Space 616 embarks on a journey to bring the creative heart back to Sewickley, I am delighted to start with one of the most established and respected artists in the region, Martin Prekop. I selected Martin for the premier exhibit because I wanted to show an artist that grabbed you, and pulled you in.

I first met Martin in the early 2000s at a Boxing Day party. The party was buzzing with a sense of controlled mayhem. When Martin arrived, a hush came over the whole room. Whispers of “the boss had arrived” circulated the house, and then Martin walked in.

He was charming, flirtatious and kind. He was very charismatic. Along with a keen sense of irony, Martin brandished a rapier wit.

Something about Martin’s work draws you in like his personality. His art makes you feel like you are participating in the piece, as if you are hovering around him and following the movement of the conversation. Listening to the words and finding the hidden meaning, following it as the details twist and bend.

Much of Martin’s art teeters on the edge of being interactive. This exhibit is a survey of his work from the 1970s to the present so it spans several mediums. The pieces are reflective; some in emotional and some in literal ways. Through all of his work, Martin is able to combine natural elements with ridged, hard lines and bold colors. Some works are photographs of the complexity of nature, and some are simple pieces created through a complex process.

My favorite piece is opposite this letter. It’s taken at his house, of his pond in the snow, looking out at the trees. It’s a very somber and quiet photo, but the strength of the trees makes me feel rooted and independent. It is as if Martin has been able to reach out of the photo and provoke this response in me. It’s a very emotional experience for me to look at it.

Being able to connect with an artist through his work is a genuine experience. Martin has mastered this ability through his 40 years of bringing the inner workings of his mind to life. It is a path of creation and destruction that has made an impact on how we look at the world around us.

Jessie Britton owner, Art Space 616

Over a number of genres - photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art - Martin Prekop visits and revisits interests and explores recurring motifs. Prekop draws across common, contradicting themes such as measurement, calibration and rhythm; the domestic and the concept of home; nature and the constructed environment; color and absence of color. Prekop insists on repeating pattern, black/white, positive and negative. He wants to give the alternative, the other party, a fair chance. This is expressed as a visual analog - a way of seeing the pulses of a beat, the marks on a ruler and the divisions in a painting as making sense. Yet there is a sense of bending, allowing a change of the mind, out of fancy, to enter and contradict the system. He likes mistakes; he makes them intentionally, as if to point out our fallibility and to give frailty a fighting chance in the work.

Martin Prekop created art in Chicago during the 1970s. At that time, Chicago was reverberating from its legacy of the New Imagists and the Hairy Who of the late 1960s. This era was probably Chicago’s last big push to differentiate itself from New York and the international art scene, and it was more influential on Prekop than is obvious. Both of these groups affected a wide group of artists in the Midwest and much further, with their interest in Art Brut and Surrealism, dovetailing nicely with Prekop’s inclinations to reject art world fashion as framed by New York and the Pop movements. His art is a rougher celebration of idiosyncratic freedom. He was in the right place to feel a supportive independent vibe from the Chicago community. In Chicago with a young family, three kids, a wife and a dog, Prekop was living a relatively conventional life, going off to work every day, paying the bills; but the real work, the art making, happened within the home, blurring the lines between domestic activities. Home was a laboratory of creativity, an instructive painting-as-way-of-life like Mondrian’s famous New York studio, or the personal and immersive environment of German artist Kurt Schwitter’s radical, organic interior, Merzbau. One of Prekop’s favored teaching methods is to cook a nice, big lunch and invite students over to show them around; simultaneously experiencing the life and the work of an artist. It is one of the best experiences the students have in their entire college career.

Needing to push past what is available, Prekop built his own large view camera to document his house as subject. While further refining its essence by photographing in black and white, as in an x-ray, the resultant produced a clarifying effect. His camera is a study tool, discovering the structure hidden to our unaided eyes.

Martin Prekop essay by Jamie Gruzska

Self Portrait

2000

5" x 7"


Performance is vital when you have a stage, and Prekop’s house is his stage. Cue loud Bartok or Charlie Parker, and Prekop becomes the conductor or jazz improvisationist. Inside, we find the performances of a life lived, mundane to ecstatic. Things are in constant flux. The location of an end table matters as a compositional element. Daily acts, such as pulling out a chair, alter reality and edit pictorial potential. After moving to Pittsburgh in 1993, Prekop, his wife Martha and son Zak, found the “biggest house that we could afford. And the ugliest. We figured we could do more with ugly than we could with small.” With its 1960’s luxe interior, replete with pink shag carpeting and a wagon wheel chandelier, he felt that something had to be done - and fast. The renovation began as an urgent drive for eradication. This house stood as a very large reductive sculpture, leading to and ultimately expressing the magisterial air of modernism and a sort of folk art determinism, a sense that fixing the wrongs of the house was without choice, and the result would be inevitable, and right.

Injecting pizzazz was the initial impetus for facing some of the exterior bricks with mirrors. What has begun tentatively as border accents, the mirrors eventually overtook the exterior, replacing the staid, suburban muteness while creating an equilibrium with nature and reflecting all that is not the house. It is both adornment and camouflage. There is a poetry of surreal transformation, expressing an impossible desire to both shimmer and disappear. Oddly, as the house disappears, its invisibility renders it intensely personal and assertive; the same “egoless” result of Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes achieved. Since they were integrated into nature, they paradoxically attracted attention to themselves. Prekop’s “mirror house” stops traffic; as a wry acknowledgment, he installed a cheap, light-up “open” sign, like those posted at convenience stores all over the country.

The surreal impulse to consider the negative of an image as equal to the positive, defining any situation by seeing its opposite, embeds itself in the paper negatives, a form he favors. Landscape and still life are both possible, right in the comfort of home. There is no need to leave the house if the subject is already present or can be constructed.

We see the negative/positive duality appear, maybe as an acknowledgment of the early cubistic experiments of Picasso. Painting over wood grain, so prominent in Prekop’s oeuvre, makes use of the grain as a found, factual structure to emphasize: “see, these dualities exist everywhere,” the underpinning of nature, ourselves in a push-pull, statement and denial.

domesticity

Library Screen

2014

11" x 14"

Unique paper negative

installation Prekop became interested in the opportunity to recreate the domestic in gallery and museum contexts. This approach required a ratcheting down of scale since galleries are almost always soaring, inhospitable spaces. So, Prekop has walls built, creating small rooms. The reading of the work depends on it, literally - mirrors see, they become what is in front of them, so Prekop places and composes pictures based on reflections of images opposite each other, requiring a precise scale and relationship found domestically.

It is not a surprise then that Prekop had an early attachment to the Shakers. Who better melds minimalist beauty with true function? So much of the mess

House, 1993 - 2014

Variable

Photographs and

mixed media

of life can be hung on a peg rail. The Shaker dictum rings true: Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful. But, if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

Everything can be thrown in the system and be integrated into the ‘right’ place. The entire work hinges on exact relationships precisely reflected. Hence, the genius of the Shaker peg rail because it is infinitely movable and adjustable, easier to manipulate and tune as any painting. To that extent, we can consider Prekop’s primary interest to be calibration. Martin Prekop, House (installation view, John Michael Kohler Arts Center), 1993 - 2014; glass, paint, and silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Since Martin’s house is like a living artwork, things are always changing and evolving. A painting or work will have a temporary spot. There is a painting that has a permanent post. This placement is strange since nothing in Martin Prekop’s house really has a spot; he moves things around all the time.

Prekop has always referred to rooms of the house as “my last painting,” but recently a new group of paintings appeared, coming after a long hiatus from painting, resumed exactly where the last piece ended.

Elements persist as though imbued with mystical, totemic power through the paint application, its gesture. There is a faith, a soul present, and it seems to be voiced by the paint like evidence. The painting featured a projecting three-dimensional form emerging from its lines. It was a hybrid object that was part illusionistic painting and part physical world.

The thing that’s odd about the paintings, in opposition to the photographs, is that they are meant to reveal that they are handmade, direct and inevitable. These works are as much a craft as a highly synthetic, sophisticated response to years of obsessing over meaning in art.

Allowing the primitive/handmade and the synthetic/abstract to co-exist in balance is one of Prekop’s unique accomplishments. Another artist that comes to mind is the Irish painter Sean Scully, whose physical honesty and painterly aggressiveness are kin to Prekop’s method of containing the brute force of the painting. Its nature to assert its mark within the borders of geometry.

Their paintings present themselves as emblems, like signal flags, communicating with simplified structures of line and color. The pieces contain all the energy needed to convey a clear message, yet exist as organic units. They are a wasp nest or beehive that exists as innate energy contained in an object. Color, present in full-spectrum naturalism, as an attempt at mimesis, is very messy; just as Mondrian isolated and penned up his color in strict geometry, Prekop has no place in his work for the graphic weakness of color (tethered to the referent) as it is used to describe nature, opting for the literal replacement of the order of the world for a higher order of his own compositions. Why would he want to copy nature?

The new oils use red alongside black and white. Not only does red play well with black and white, it adds the zest of color, and stands for the inclusion of color itself.

painting

Excavation

1990

50" x 70"

Oil and hammered

aluminium on wood

panel

Red Interval Painting

2013

77" x 83"

Oil on wood

Black Interval Painting

2013

85" x 85"

Oil on wood

Glass Painting

2000

26" x 38"


Richard Artschwager also contributed to Prekop’s development. They both shared a love of art and of craft. While in Chicago, Prekop built custom speaker cabinets in a high-end audio store where he also worked in sales to supplement income for his growing family. He also got some perks - really good stereo equipment. As Artschwager found the enterprise of making functional objects satisfying as a craftsman, it failed to engage higher purposes as art, so an unconventional hybrid object was called for, one that reflexively understood its function while undermining it in self-awareness. So although Prekop did not share Artschwager’s fascination for shiny, synthetic simulacrums, he tended to the handmade, and a playfulness with the iconic aspects of objects; picture frames are a conceit shared by both artists, as if the picture inside wasn’t even necessary once you had a frame. In salon style hangs throughout his house, Prekop includes many “blank” frames, placeholders to make the wall work. Pseudo paintings emerge from his studio. Prekop referring to his Framed Paintings as “Imitation” and even throwing out paintings after they fulfilled their use as photographic subjects (see Photo Paintings). There is a debt to surrealism here, and Dada too, like Man Ray’s “Object to be Destroyed,” a metronome with a witnessing eye, that was indeed destroyed by the artist once it was documented in a photograph. Nothing, however, really prepares us for the Frame Paintings, 2011, also known as the “Imitation Paintings.” These are confections, so treacle and fake, so much giving us what we want: color. Contained safely in echoed hues, each sardonic tint isolated inside its own picture, infinity suggested by the vanishing point inevitability of endless repetition. The frames themselves, dripping with their own self-consciousness, silver leafed to ersatz perfection, provide all the drama any painting could desire. But these are constructed like classic paintings, utilizing Western vanishing point perspective, and as a result, possess space. As a nod to the famous color theorist Josef Albers’ pedantic examples, Prekop’s color exercises turn academic color theory in on itself, suggesting that theory is a purely personal matter.

Frame paintings overleaf

Frame Paintings

2011

Each 64" x 52"

Oil on canvas and

frame moulding

Prekop recently described himself as a minimalist, upon which my wife burst into laughter. She says if anything he is Rococo, maybe Baroque in style, minimal never. He has enjoyed the perfect sobriquet “baroque minimalist” ever since. Of course, the fact that Baroque artists, like Caravaggio, were known for exploiting illusionistic tricks also connects Prekop to photography’s true essence, its illusionistic “trick.” The illusions of the photographs exist in contrast to the stubborn factualness of his approach to painting; painting as an object, especially as one made to be photographed, remains a wonderful fallacy.

One can look to the minimalism of the early, and I’d say best work of Frank Stella, such as the Black Paintings from the early 60s, to see some of the paradoxes in a formalist approach that simultaneously plays with the definition of painting and object hood: Stella applies the paint as a sign painter would, following a logic hewing to the object’s contours. The emotional tenor of such work rejected the theater of abstract expressionism while still maintaining true painting ideas like composition, shape, and receding and advancing forms. Prekop shares the wry position we see in the best of Stella, while also admitting unexpected forays into color and shape as formal exploration into spatial expansion without the naturalistic. Like Stella, Prekop remains a committed abstractionist. A number of Prekop’s paintings explore the relationship of containment and control in a more literal way. Tape Measure Painting, 2010 lampoons his own methods by loosely draping cloth dressmaker’s measuring tapes within a painting frame. One can imagine a slight breeze would cause the entire pictorial structure to flutter, like a mirage, a kinetic yin to the concrete yang of the other “painted” paintings.

minimalism

Tape Measure Painting

2010

36" x 48"

Measuring devices on

plywood, frame moulding

Measured Painting

2007

52" x 64"



Painting With

Bubble Levels

2011

52" x 64"



Mercury Glass

2005

28" x 40"


Mercury Glass

2005

28" x 40"


Mercury Glass

2005

28" x 40"


Mercury Glass

2005

28" x 40"


House

2005

52" x 19"


olive trees In Fasano, Italy, Prekop photographed ancient olive trees, fascinated by the variety possible in the trees’ forms courtesy of nature and time. The influence of Hilla and Bernd Becher is clear. Prekop applies their extensive work with typologies of manmade to these natural structural forms. The tortured branches, bent and twisted, represent time telling a dramatic will-to-power as struggle. Since the shape of these trees is so expressive, Prekop seems to feel that simple documentation is enough.

Olive Trees

2001

17" x 23"


Olive Trees

2001

17" x 23"


Olive Trees And Rocks

2001

17" x 23"


Mirrored Trees,

back yard

1995

52" x 19"


repetition Once I arrived at Prekop’s studio to find it filled with chair parts. The place looked like a factory with scores of shapes in wood, all identical. He explained: the art gallery near his office at the Carnegie Mellon Fine Arts building was about to become a coffeehouse. The chairs were to be his own design, black and white wood grain pattern, all hand painted. The now indispensable Zebra Café is a living sculpture. It is the site of many conversations and budding collaborations, all because of the clarity of “this is what must be done.” Even if it meant giving up the artist’s claim of unique object maker and accepting a factory worker’s sense of production. Martin told me where it all started. Back when he lived in England, absorbing the collection at the Tate, he saw Magritte’s Man with a Newspaper. It had a profound effect. The image palpably expresses the role of artist as witness to time moving away, further and further. At one moment, in the first panel, the man is sitting, enjoying his paper, while in panel two, three, and four, he is not. Each of the three ‘empty’ panels is an identical painting. Can time, and absence, towards our obvious end, be expressed any better? Prekop’s passion for photography, as a reproductive medium, may also be a response to that moment of captivation at the Tate. Photography’s poignancy lies is its ability to record a moment that is forever lost. His use of mirrors also makes sense when seen in the context of the Magritte influence, for surely time itself mirrors hallucination.

Photo Painting

- Pencil of Nature

1989

24” x 20”


Photo Painting

- Pencil of Nature

1989

24” x 20”


Photo Painting

- Pencil of Nature

1989

24” x 20”


King Lear

1998

30" x 40"


Collection of Carnegie Mellon University

Hamlet

1998

30" x 40"


Collection of Carnegie Mellon University

During Prekop’s artistic development, one unusual picture by Timothy O’Sullivan, Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest, South Side of Inscription Rock, N.M. No. 3, 1873 stopped Martin Prekop in his tracks. O’Sullivan placed a simple government issue ruler, with plain Arabic numerals, in front of the camera as an indicator of scale.

Taken as part of an extensive geological survey of the West, the image transcends its purely practical function, and changed how Prekop saw. The implications were exciting: permission was granted to place the objective authority of the ruler in front of the camera, and also for the photographer, the artist, to enter the frame in the guise of the measuring device.

Once Prekop begins to use the rulers, he also begins to be occupied by images of trees. Trees as omnipresent symbols of nature, and the ruler the presence of the artist, always appraising and measuring. Later, trees become actors in a larger domestic landscape context, sometimes acting as purely formal, linear and organic elements.

Prekop’s love of music also informs work obsessed with imposing the regularity of measurement. Inches are akin to measures in a score, intervals and the scale. Photographer Ansel Adams was a trained musician, yet rejected that discipline as limiting, favoring the possibilities found in photography. How does the need for clarity, movement and purity, manifest itself visually? Well, everywhere we see it: the rhythm is elegant, refined, yet rococo; John Cage and Mingus come together - structure, ornament and improvisation.

Later, mirrors replaced the rulers. Intervening in the landscape, reflecting the house, garden and other nature, as well as the self. Acting as chunks of reflected reality, the mirrors have their own staccato pattern, much as photography itself makes patterns out of the endless flow of time. There is a trace of the pugilistic in Prekop’s entire oeuvre. Growing up, he was an adept boxer. What were the prospects for this young man, torn between a life in the ring or in the arts? Ultimately, although he didn’t choose a future of knocking people out, his tendency to call a good picture a “knockout” perhaps illustrates his desire to shake people up.

measurement

Ruler Tree

1972

16" x 20"


Ruler Tree

1972

16" x 20"


Ruler Tree

1972

16" x 20"


School of the Art Institute of Chicago vs. Cranbrook Academy of Art football game.

Martin Prekop (left) and Jim Zanzi holding the winner’s trophy in 1968.

This publication accompanies the Martin Prekop: A survey of works from the 1970s to the present exhibition at Art Space 616 on view from April 10 through May 9, 2015.

Editor: Linda Nawrocki Author: Jamie GruzskaCatalog Design: Spencer NormanDirector of Publications: Jessie Britton, Timothy Hadfield and Elysia CecchettiProject Manager: Gregory LiberiPrinter: RR Donnelley

© 2015 by Art Space 616, 616 Beaver Street, Sewickley PA 15143.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission. All images are © the artists, reproduced with the kind permission of the artists and/or their representatives.

Photo credits: Ric Evans Photography Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to ensure that all the information presented is correct. Some of the facts in this volume may be subject to debate or dispute. If proper copyright acknowledgment has not been made, or for clarifications and corrections, please contact the publishers and we will correct the information in future reprintings, if any.

Art Space 616616 Beaver StreetSewickley, PA 15143412 259 8214

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Art Space 616 Martin Prekop catalog

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