We are delighted to share a preview of our presentation at FIAC: MARCIA HAFIF RICHARD NONAS CAROL RAMA FIAC On Site sector: RICHARD NONAS Outdoor Installation on Avenue Winston Churchill For availability, prices, and other inquiries, please contact: Callie Jones, callie@fergusmccaffrey.com Booth 0.A52 Grand Palais Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris Private View October 18, 11:00AM - 9:00PM VIP October 18, 3:00PM - 9:00PM Public Days October 19 & 20, 12:00PM - 8:00PM October 21 & 22, 12:00PM - 7:00PM
MARCIA HAFIF (1929 - ) Marcia Woods was born in 1929 in Pomona, California. After graduating from Pomona College in 1951 and marrying Herbert Hafif, she planned a year-long trip to Florence in 1961. Hafif settled, however, in Rome, where she remained for almost eight years, painting and exhibiting work she has called Pop-Minimal. These works were shown for the first time in the United States in, Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings 1961 1969 at Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2016. Returning to California in 1969, and leaving painting for a time to experiment with film, photography, and sound installation, she completed an MFA degree at the University of California at Irvine. In 1971, Hafif moved to New York City to search out a return to painting at a time when the validity of painting was in doubt and not finding a satisfactory path, she woke on the morning of January 1, 1972, to make her first Pencil on Paper drawing. Using short vertical marks, Hafif covered from top to bottom a 24 x 18 inch sheet of drawing paper. This method was later used in the development of her color study paintings. In An Extended Gray Scale, 1972-73, a work that occupied her for nearly a year, she painted gradations from black to white. Painting as many gradations she could distinguish, she completed a total of one hundred and six 22 x 22 inch oil paintings on standard cotton canvases. Exhibiting for more than eight years with Sonnabend Gallery in Soho and Paris from 1974 to 1981, she developed series of paintings that would become the basis of what came to be called The Inventory: 1974, Mass Tone Paintings; 1975, Wall Paintings; 1976, Pencil Drawings; 1978, Neutral Mix Paintings; 1979, Broken Color Paintings presented at The Clocktower with Alanna Heiss; and 1981, Black Paintings. Hafif continues to add to The Inventory. Most recently, works include the Splash Paintings, 2009-10, and the Shade Paintings, 2013. In the 1980s and 1990s she developed new series, along with relationships with galleries in Europe, first in Munich, then Dusseldorf, and eventually Vienna, London, Paris, and elsewhere. Hafif s work has been exhibited extensively in museums, notably at MoMA PS 1 in 1990; Haus für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zurich, 1995; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, 2000; and MAMCO, Geneva, 2001. In the United States, Hafif s work was most recently seen in Marcia Hafif: From The Inventory at Laguna Art Museum, 2015. This year, she is the subject of two solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland. Hafif divides her time between Laguna Beach, California, and New York City. 2
Installation view of Marcia Hafif at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2017. Marcia Hafif; Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey. Photo: Mark Mosman; Courtesy of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen 3
4 Installation view of Marcia Hafif at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2017. Marcia Hafif; Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey. Photo: Mark Mosman; Courtesy of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
5 Installation view of Marcia Hafif at Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2017. Marcia Hafif; Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey. Photo: Gina Folly; Courtesy of Kunsthaus Baselland
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Yellow, Red, Blue, June 30, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) 6 $32,000
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Blue, Yellow, Red, June 29, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) $32,000 7
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Yellow, Red, Blue, June 27, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) $32,000 8
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Yellow, Blue, Red, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) $32,000 9
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Red, Yellow, Blue, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) $32,000 10
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Blue, Yellow, Red, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm) $32,000 11
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Yellow, Blue, Red, June 14, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm) $36,000 12
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Blue, Red, Blue, June 17, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm) $36,000 13
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Red, Blue, Red, June 23, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm) $36,000 14
Marcia Hafif, Acrylic Glaze Painting: Blue, Yellow, Red, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 32 x 32 inches (81.3 x 81.3 cm) $42,000 15
Marcia Hafif, French Painting: Belfort, 1997 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm) $35,000 16
Marcia Hafif, French Painting: Debrousse, 1997 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm) $35,000 17
Marcia Hafif, French Painting: Dechamp, 1997 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm) $35,000 18
Marcia Hafif, French Painting: Favre, 1997 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm) $35,000 19
RICHARD NONAS (1936 - ) Nonas was born in New York in 1936. He studied literature and then social anthropology at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Following his education, Nonas worked as an anthropologist for 10 years, doing fieldwork on American Indians in Northern Ontario, Canada, and in Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona. He turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s at age 30. His anthropological work left a deep imprint that affected his sculptural practice and his engagement with the perception of space. Through a Minimalist vocabulary, Nonas developed a body of sculpture that engaged with the issue of place. In the 1970s, Nonas was a part of an intrepid group of artists and curators who found alternative places to show. His work involved the alteration of the environment and repeated geometric forms, and he came to see sculpture and space as interdependent carriers of deep philosophical and emotional meanings. Many of his works made of such materials as timbers, linear beams, granite curbstones, and steel planes rest directly on the ground and function less as formal aesthetic objects, and more as spatial markers. His forms serve to interrupt the space, calling attention to the non-specificity of the forms on the one hand, while creating a charged sense of space on the other. Richard Nonas is considered one of the leading artists of New York Post-Minimalist sculpture, and will be represented by an array of wall-mounted and floor-based works, made primarily in steel and wood in a range of dimensions. In addition, he has also been selected as a participant in the On Site sector of FIAC with a large-scale, site-specific public installation. Nonas has exhibited extensively throughout the world, making floor-based and wall-mounted works that range in scale and are situated both indoors and out; such as, the permanent installations at the abandoned village, Vière et les Moyennes Montagnes, Digne-les-Bains, France in 2012 and at the Fondazione Ratti, 2003-11. His most recent solo exhibitions include The Man in the Empty Space at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, 2016; Richard Nonas: ridge (out, away, back) at the Art Institute in Chicago, 2016-17; and Richard Nonas: AS LIGHT THROUGH A FOG, Architectural Memory Pierced by Art at the Church of Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, 2017. He lives and works in New York, NY. 20
On Site: RICHARD NONAS Outdoor Installation on Avenue Winston Churchill COL; the place between, 2017 A site specific installation of two curved lines of seventy-seven wood beams 19in x 232ft x 98ft (50cm x 71m x 30m) A clogged and formal place. A tight urban world wrapped in history, cut by long lines of intersecting wooden beams. Lines that mark both the strong emotional edge of a ceremonial place and also the raw edge and necessarily downward slope of its complex meaning, its dirt-floor shift-and-slide back to old political ground, ongoing tension and ancient skew. For sculpture is that spatial gap-between, that Col between mountain peaks. Sculpture is that implied absence, that almost-clarity about not-quite-confusion. Sculpture is that dissonance. The dissonance, I mean, of intersecting and conflicting chunks of human meaning cut into an historicized world. The dissonance, that is to say, of art. Richard Nonas; Courtesy of Jan Meissner 21
22 Richard Nonas, Installation view of as light through fog ARCHITECTURAL MEMORY PIERCED BY ART, Chiesa di Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, 2017. Richard Nonas; Courtesy of Galleria P420, Bologna
23 Richard Nonas, Installation view of as light through fog ARCHITECTURAL MEMORY PIERCED BY ART, Chiesa di Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, 2017. Richard Nonas; Courtesy of Galleria P420, Bologna
24 Installation view of ICE AND AFTER THE ICE... (2017) in Textile as Art: Antonio Ratti entrepreneur and patron at Palazzo Te, Mantua, 2017. Richard Nonas; Courtesy of the Artist
CAROL RAMA (1918-2015) Carol Rama was born in Turin, Italy, in 1918. A self-taught artist, Rama refused adherence to any one specific style, method, or group during her seven-decade career. Beginning in the 1930s, Rama began to create an aesthetic vocabulary filled with icons that were linked to issues of reallife mental illness, financial ruin, and suicide, woven together with a mythologized biography. When her first exhibition was censored in 1945 for erotic and sexually explicit works, some of which featured women with wagging tongues and excreting snakes and bestiality, Rama took a hiatus from figurative motifs and became involved with the Concrete Art Movement (MAC) until the mid-1950s. In the early 1960s, Rama created the Bricolage series, titled by close friend and writer, Edoardo Sanguinetti. Using materials such as glass eyes, medical syringes, animal claws, metal scraps, and decorative beads, she created intensively visceral and uncanny works on paper and board, as seen in Untitled (1966). These works were closely followed by the Napalm pictures of the late 1960s. Observing the carnage carried of the Vietnam War, Rama responded with works that evince tortured bodies using black or colored aerosol spray, thick glue, and glass eyes. In 1970, there was a decisive switch with the introduction of rubber, and this material would come to dominate her practice for the next decade. Rama s father had owned a bicycle tire factory in Turin before his suicide in her youth, and the worn, punctured, and repaired rubber tires in these Gomma works function much like aged human flesh. At times, the bicycle tires are left hanging, deflated like flaccid intestines from a phallic hanger (derived from a sculpture that Pablo Picasso had given her) in a more bodily and transgressive use of the material. A distinctive example from this period includes Arcadia (2000). During the 1980s, Rama returned to figuration and an unapologetic representation of orifices and sexualized body parts, often created upon architectural or engineering plans. In the 1990s, news reports of mad cow disease in Europe attracted Rama s attention and empathy. Embedded in the series, La mucca pazza (The Mad Cow) are issues of deviance, madness, death, and sexuality. In these images, Rama reconnects with her work of the 1930s, updated to reflect the horrible reality that surrounded her in later life. Rama was recently subject of the travelling retrospective The Passion According to Carol Rama, which was on view from 2014 to 2017, at institutions such as the Museu d Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Musée d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Museum of Modern Art Ireland, Dublin; and Galleria Civica d Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino. Her most recent retrospective exhibitions include Carol Rama: Antibodies at The New Museum, New York, and Carol Rama: Spazio anche più che tempo at Ca nova in Venice. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Rama died in 2015. 25
Carol Rama, La fase dal nero, 1972 Rubber and acrylic on canvas 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches (120 x 120 cm) $650,000 26
Carol Rama, I marchettoni, 1958 Ink and pigment on wallpaper, mounted on cardboard 24 x 19 3/4 inches (61 x 50 cm) $275,000 27
28 Carol Rama, Untitled, 1966 Glass eyes and ink on paper 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches (16.5 x 16.5 cm)
Carol Rama, Malelingue, 1981 Ink and acrylic on paper 23 1/4 x 18 1/8 inches (59 x 46 cm) $80,000 29
30 Carol Rama, Arcadia, 2000 Steel hook and rubber on canvas, with steel and vinyl 74 3/4 x 23 5/8 inches (189.9 x 60 cm)
31 Carol Rama, Mappa/Ricostruzione compromettente, 2005 Metal washers, ink and acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas 17 3/4 x 11 inches (45 x 28 cm)