NEW YORK
The Return of Tom Doyle
September 18 - November 1, 2019
PRESS:
Michelli, Thomas “The Gnarly, Sassy Minimalism of Tom Doyle” Hyperallergic, October 19, 2019
Holmes, Jessica ”The Return of Tom Doyle”, The Brooklyn Rail, Oct. 2019
Zürcher Gallery NY presents its first solo exhibition of works by Tom Doyle (1928 - 2016). This exhibition offers a representative view of the artist's work from 1959 to 2016 in wood and bronze as well as rare drawings on marlite made in 1961 and selections from his clementine box series, exhibited here for the first time. This exhibition takes its title from the essay by Mark von Schlegell published in the Zürcher Gallery exhibition catalog.
Excerpts from "The Return of Tom Doyle":
"The re-emergence of Tom Doyle into the contemporary might as well be from the deep past. Not simply because the sculptor died in 2016, age 88, after decades of self-exile from New York or any other scene, working to the very last on his signature wooden pieces, among thirty acres of trees; also because contemporary art history, except as biographical addendum to the story of his one-time wife, painter/sculptor Eva Hesse, who famously passed away in 1970, has left him unremarked upon.
Tom Doyle comes from a forgotten golden age of U.S. sculpture he himself helped initiate. Though he had found his voice with the found-wood Stillman, of 1958, his New York work that followed showed him experimenting widely with form and material, as he joined a younger generation eager to use sculpture to move beyond the gallery and market-oriented limits of abstract expressionist painting. Doyle's painted fiberglass piece Over Owl’s Creek fit in seamlessly with the dynamic, boundary-pushing three-dimensional work around New York, famously captured in the Jewish Museum's Primary Structures exhibition of 1966."
"For Doyle's generation this mystical and theoretical cultural influence dovetailed with the expressionist formalism celebrated by the newly powerful post-war U.S. art critics like Clement Greenberg. With abstract expressionist painting in the limelight, soon fully critiqued and ideological, sculpture evolved more slowly. Painting was influencing change. And for sculpture change turned out to have more radical implications. In Tom Doyle, the gestural and spatial concerns of abstract painting from Gorky to Rothko are certainly in play. But there is another quality to the work, constituting much of its readable content; it is soaked in a sense of its own building. To some extent, it is indistinguishable from its construction."
"Nature's depth and bounty gives the work its certainty, its solidity -- indeed its content. But its ability to come to life in a room is a direct effect of the artist's personal engagement. There is a "vocabulary" and conceptual system; it is the beginning, the place of setting out. The engagement with nature, as nature, produces an improvised grammar and set of possibilities negotiated between artist and material. Wood arrives with its own theoretical complexity, between living body and dead matter. Doyle's sculptures introduce different strains to one another. Oak, Sassafras, Cherry, Poplar. Various woods join the conversation, each shaped according to its peculiar coloring, mass, and joined to a foreign neighbor. The artist hauled or felled the trees himself, eventually from his own woods, with specimens that needed removal or felling...Every un-used cutting was itself potentially a piece of another future work; Doyle fashioned numerous indoor pieces from smaller cuttings. As with Thoreau, natural conservation went hand-in-hand with creative work with Nature."
"Doyle does not dream of an ideological role for his work. Rather he makes transcendence real, forging it out of the grammar of the woodsman, setting it, as art, in and apart from the world. Entirely, and only self-aware, these three legged improbabilities also touch on the triple nature of time. Coming to the present from out of the past, they remind the future to arrive..."
-Mark von Schlegell, 2019
Tom Doyle (born 1928, Jerry City, OH - died 2016, Roxbury, CT) earned his BFA in 1952 and MFA in 1953 from Ohio State University, Columbus. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. In 1982, he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 1991. Doyle has had multiple solo exhibitions in New York since his debut at Allen Stone Gallery in 1961/62 and Dwan Gallery in 1966/67.
Doyle's work was included in the following seminal museum group shows, among others:
1964, Marcel Duchamp, Wasssily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Josef Albers, Tom Doyle at the Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland
1966, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, NY
1967, American Sculpture of the Sixties Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA in 1968.
1967, The Whitney Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
1972, Museum of Drawers at Documenta, Kassel, Germany
2006, Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
2015, Venice Biennale, Frontiers Re-Imagined at Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Italy
His work has also been exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, The Bronx Museum, SculptureCenter (NY), The Cooper-Hewitt Museum (NY), The Smithsonian Institute (Washington, D.C), The Parrish Art Museum (NY), The Neuberger Museum of Art (NY), The Walker Art Museum (Minneapolis), The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT), Miami Art Museum (FL), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), Kunsthalle Berlin, Stadtlische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, and Kunsthalle Essen, Baden-Baden Germany Kunstverein, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel).
Doyle was a tenured professor at Queens College and taught at the School of Visual Arts, The New School for Social Research and the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
Zürcher Gallery would like to thank Jane Doyle for her immense help in mounting this exhibition.
For all inquiries, please contact Ernesto Renda, studio@galeriezurcher.com.
Images of ALL the works in the exhibition and installation photos can be viewed online at www.galeriezurcher.com.
Exhibition catalogs are available for $20.00, and can be purchased at Zürcher Gallery, NY or ordered over the phone at (212)-777-0790 (mailing only available for customers outside of New York City.)