The exhibition features artists from three generations, working in disparate mediums, connected through their investigations of color and form.

 

Robert Watts (1923–88) was an enigmatic, influential figure whose ideas and innovations from the 1950s through the 1980s were actively embraced by colleagues such as Allan Kaprow, and subsequent generations of artists including Allan McCollum, Sherrie Levine, and many others. Prolific and highly experimental, Watts was a central figure in Fluxus and participated in every major art movement of his time from Neo-Dada and Pop to conceptual and postmodern art. Watts's extensive oeuvre includes innovations in sculpture, photography, film, sound, and performance. His use of found objects, jokes, visual puns, and cast body parts personified the legacy of Marcel Duchamp. Among the works on view in the exhibition will be Paint Box With Chrome Brush (1964), created in the spirit of the Duchampian "rectified readymade." Works by Robert Watts are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art in Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 (through January 16, 2012); Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond, both at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (through December 3); and Fluxus at Rutgers at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J. (through April 1, 2012).

 

Lawrence Weiner is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists working today. Since the early 1960s, he has created conceptual, language-based works that radically redefine the presentation and reception of the art "object." His structures have appeared throughout the world in extraordinarily varied manifestations ranging from public architecture to manhole covers. Weiner also produces books, prints, posters, drawings, performance, and audio pieces, and since the early 1970s, has created a significant body of works in film and video. The exhibition will include three animated works produced between 2002 and 2007.

 

For more than twenty years, Betsy Kaufman has subverted the controlled language of minimalist, hard-edged geometric abstraction, and the orthodoxy of systems and serial images to produce a highly varied body of paintings. Spontaneous and emotional in their execution, the artist describes her process as "telling stories with surprises." Within her precise execution, lush satiny surfaces, and rich idiosyncratic color, the viewer discovers the paradoxes of subtle spatial shifts. Between 2008 and 2010, eschewing her longtime practice of making large paintings on canvas or small works on paper, Kaufman assigned herself the disciplined task of painting on very small canvases until her studio walls were filled. The exhibition will include selections from the more than eighty paintings she produced. Betsy Kaufman has lived and worked in New York since 1980 after having earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US and Europe.

 

Tim Maul: Liquid Nostalgia, 7 Photographs From the Museum Wish Series, will be on view simultaneously in the entry gallery.

 

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the 6th floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.