NEW YORK
Lynn Umlauf (1942 - 2022)
Paintings from 1974 - 2022
Opening Thursday, February 10th, from 2:00 - 6:00 pm
On view until March 30, 2022
At Zürcher Gallery, New York
Read Thierry de Duve’s remembrance of Lynn Umlauf in Artforum here.
Zürcher Gallery is deeply saddened to present their fourth solo-exhibition of works by Lynn Umlauf , who just deceased 3 weeks after turning 80 years old on February 2, 2022 at 222 Bowery, NYC where she was living and working.
Lynn Umlauf (1942) was born in Austin, Texas, into a family of artists. Lynn graduated in Austin with a Bachelor’s degree in 1965 and MFA in 1969. She moved to New York in 1966-67. Madelon, her twin sister, introduced Lynn to the painter Michael Goldberg (1924-2008) in 1969, and they married 10 years later. She also took classes at the Academia di Belli Arti in Florence, Italy and the Art Students League in New York. Lynn first started showing in Italy. Her first solo-show in New York was with the Hal Bromm Gallery in 1980. She was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1975. She has shown extensively in Italy, France and the United States. Her work is in the collections of MOMA PS 1, Long Island City, NY and Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA.
This exhibition is an homage to a highly original artist who taught at SVA, was absolutely dedicated to her practice from the early 70’s. It focuses on Lynn’s latest watercolors or pastels on paper made at the Riverside Rehab, features a larger work on paper made in January 2022 next to a group of rare early paintings from 1974-79 never exhibited in NY. What makes Lynn Umlauf’s work quite unique is her relationship to the moment. When she was staying at the Riverside Rehab in October-November 2021, then enjoying the view on the Hudson River, she asked her assistant to bring materials so she could work and translate her visual experience of the Riverside landscape on paper. There are moments of the real world in these works. They are not abstracted from nature but abstracted from experiences of nature. In « Painting in the Air : live structures » (February 1989), David Shapiro wrote : Lynn Umlauf is a superb draughtsman and her nature studies are often pleinairiste meditations on an episode. » These studies made upon observation of the flow of the Hudson River reveal the alchemy of the paint as a material she’s been concerned with early on. « I want to take the sensuality out of my works and leave on the physicality. I don’t refer to air and space, I refer to light. »
In the early 70’s, Lynn started making free shaped paintings which have a unique handmade quality close to fresco. Her method consists in using sanded and impregnated paper with pastel, watercolor or acrylic medium and often glued with gum arabic which has the properties of a binder or thickening agent. Her goal is to get the colour go through the paper and into the canvas that’s supporting it. Paper has the memory of the work you’ve done. Lynn gives in to paper. It has porousness. Everything she does to it, even erasing, changes its surface. « Wall, canvas and paper become multiple layers of skin, adhering to and peeling from each other. They are constantly form and reform each other. » Lynn Umlauf, text by Klaus Kertess, Ferrara ed, 1979.
« I have never seen a sculpture that has enough color. The color is the control to keep it from being sculpture. You sense a three-dimensional space because of the color rather than feeling. Color is my subject : it begins and it ends with color. Color usually takes a shape. And because I try to work with two colors then the shapes begin to be the subject matter of a colored shape. The shape has been carved out of a piece of paper out of a piece of canvas and out of a piece of wall. Then I nail in certain places to control the curled shape.
« My paintings are bones without prescriptions. Their existence is their rule and reason. » (Lynn Umlauf, text by David Shapiro, Flash Art N 74/75, May-June 1977.)