Larry Rivers Exhibition Acknowledged in BLOUIN ARTINFO

Tibor de Nagy Gallery will be hosting an exhibition “(Re)appropriations” by artist Larry Rivers at the gallery’s new downtown location in New York.

Larry Rivers (1923–2002) started his career as a jazz musician in 1940 while studying music theory and composition at the Juilliard School of Music, and later shifted towards the world of visual art. His seminal works have been part of recent exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou.

The exhibition surveys a broad range of inventive methods and materials employed by Rivers over the course of his career, which includes intimate works of graphite, collage, large-scale paintings, life-size sculptures and foam-sculpted relief-paintings. These apparently disparate paintings are informed by diverse and varied visual modalities, and are imbued with Rivers’ early flirtations with Abstract Expressionism that led to the appropriation of pop imagery, incorporating newly available materials into his working vocabulary. Materiality was just one aspect of his diverse interests that include history, poetry, politics, sexuality, and fashion. Employing such tropes as master copying and "vocabulary lessons" as a basis for art-making, he often regarded these works as the source of his new works. Bringing the aid of historical distance and curated juxtapositions into play, the exhibition re-contextualizes and clarifies the creative diversity of Larry Rivers’ oeuvre.