Andrew Spence (born 1947) is an American artist known for
abstract paintings that combine a
minimalist vocabulary with playful references to the observed world.
[Hirsch, Faye. "The World in Brief," ''Art in America'', September 2006, p. 150–3.][Mahoney, Robert. "Andrew Spence at Edward Thorp," ''Art In America'', January 2002, p. 112–3.][Smith, Roberta]
"Andy Spence: '20 Years of Painting,'”
''The New York Times'', November 15, 1996, p. C21. Retrieved May 24, 2021. In the 1970s and 1980s, he gained recognition as one of a number of younger artists who were re-examining
geometric modernism through a contemporary lens that invited humor and reference to everyday objects and life experience into the tradition.
[Wilson, William. "Art Walk, A Critical Guide to the Galleries, La Cienega Area", ''Los Angeles Times'', August 26, 1974, Part IV, p. 14.][Westfall, Stephen. "Andrew Spence at Barbara Toll," ''Art in America'', January 1984, p. 124.][Perl, Jed. "The Old is New," ''Vogue'', August 1989, p. 214–8.][Stapen, Nancy. "Neo-Geo Spence paints lasting impression," ''The Boston Herald'', April 4, 1989, p. 34.] Spence's method of distilling visual phenomena into simple, emblematic images has been compared to
Ellsworth Kelly, but his work has differed in its more even balance between abstraction and recognition (often aided by the picture titles), intuitive approach, and varied, expressive paint surfaces.
[Naves, Mario]
"Andrew Spence One-Ups Ellsworth Kelly,"
''Observer'', April 30, 2001. Retrieved May 18, 2021.[Heartney, Eleanor. "Andrew Spence at Barbara Toll", ''Art in America'', February 1989, p. 162.][Diehl, Carol. "Andrew Spence at Ed Thorp," ''Art In America'', July 2003, p. 89–90.][Katz, Vincent. "Andy Spence at Morris Healy," ''Art In America'', May 1996.] ''Art in America'' critic
Ken Johnson wrote that his work maintains "an ironic tension between lofty purism of modernist geometry and earth-bound ordinariness of the vernacular sources."
[Johnson, Ken. "Andrew Spence at Max Protetch," ''Art In America'', December 1993, p. 97.] In later paintings, Spence has increasingly obscured the original inspirations of his abstractions, in both form and titling.
[Storr, Robert. ''Doing What Comes Naturally: Seven Painters in Their Prime'', New York: Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff Foundation, 2019, p. 3–12.] His work belongs to the permanent collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''China'', 1991, Andrew Spence
Art, Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Museum of Modern Art,
[Museum of Modern Art]
Andrew Spence
Artists. Retrieved May 15, 2021. and
Whitney Museum of American Art,
[Whitney Museum of American Art]
Andrew Spence
Artists. Retrieved May 15, 2021. among others. He has received a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
and awards from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and
National Endowment for the Arts.
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
Andrew Spence
Fellows. Retrieved May 15, 2021.[American Academy of Arts and Letters]
Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund
Awards. Retrieved May 15, 2021.
Life and career
Spence was born in 1947 in
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and raised in Philadelphia.
[La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art]
''Four Californians: Christopher Georgesco, Patsy Krebs, Andrew Spence, Robert Therrien''
La Jolla, CA: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1977. Retrieved May 15, 2021. He attended the
University of Oklahoma, then transferred to the
Tyler School of Art
The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...
, studying in Rome and Philadelphia before graduating with a BFA in 1969.
In 1971, he completed an MFA at
University of California at Santa Barbara and moved to Los Angeles.
[Harkavy, Donna. ''Insights: Ann Messner & Andrew Spence'', Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1991.] He continued to make art and worked for several years as an art handler and crater, which reinforced an interest in the built world and afforded him direct access to the work of minimalist painter
John McLaughlin John or Jon McLaughlin may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* John McLaughlin (musician) (born 1942), English jazz fusion guitarist, member of Mahavishnu Orchestra
* Jon McLaughlin (musician) (born 1982), American singer-songwriter
* John McLaugh ...
and designer
Charles Eames
Charles Ormond Eames Jr. (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978) was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. In professional partnership with his spouse Ray Kaiser Eames, he was responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the field of a ...
, both early influences.
[Bartman, William S]
''Andrew Spence''
New York: A.R.T. Press/Art Resources Transfer, 1992. Retrieved May 21, 2021. In his first professional decade, Spence was selected for the 1975
Whitney Biennial and group exhibitions at
MoMA PS1, the
La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art
The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) was an exhibition venue for visual arts that ran between 1974 and 1987 (approximately) in Los Angeles, California. It played an important role in showing experimental work of the era as well as ...
(LAICA), and
Indianapolis Museum of Art.
[Muchnic, Suzanne. "Four Abstractionists – Krebs, Spence, Therrien, Georgesco," ''Artweek'', May 26, 1977.] His first solo exhibitions were at the
Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 and 1976.
[Wilson, William. "Art Walk, A Critical Guide to the Galleries, La Cienega Area", ''Los Angeles Times'', April 9, 1976, p. E12.]
In 1977, Spence moved to New York City, where he exhibited in seven solo shows at the Barbara Toll Gallery between 1982 and 1990.
[Howe, Katherine. "Andy Spence at Barbara Toll Fine Arts," ''Images & Issues'', Summer 1982.] He has had subsequent exhibitions at the
Worcester Art Museum (1991) and
Max Protetch Gallery (1992, 1993), Edward Thorp Gallery (2001, 2002, 2006) and 57W57 Arts (2016) in New York, among others.
[Magiera, Frank. "Worcester Art Museum; Insights on contemporary art," ''Telegram & Gazette'', April 8, 1991.][Naves, Mario]
"An Artist’s Formidable Gaze, Withering and a Touch Arrogant,"
''Observer'', November 25, 2002. Retrieved May 18, 2021. He also appeared in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, the 40th Biennial at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art (1987), and group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.
[Grimes, Nancy. "Whitney Biennial," ''Tema Celeste'', September 1988, p. 66–8.][Brenson, Michael]
"True Believers Who Keep the Flame of Painting,"
''The New York Times'', June 7, 1987, Sect. 2, p. 37.[Thorson, Alice. "Two Ways of Approaching Abstraction," ''The Washington Times'', May 14, 1987.][Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', July 17, 1987. p. C32. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
Spence lives and works in New York with his wife, Sique Spence.
Work and reception
Spence's work has been related to minimalist predecessors such as
Constructivism,
Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich ; german: Kasimir Malewitsch; pl, Kazimierz Malewicz; russian: Казими́р Севери́нович Мале́вич ; uk, Казимир Северинович Малевич, translit=Kazymyr Severynovych ...
and McLaughlin, as well as to contemporary movements such as
Neo-Geo.
However, critics suggest that it evades simple categorization, developing out of an intuitive "internal momentum,"
rather than theoretical frameworks or ideological trends.
[LeClair, Charles. "Minimalism and Postmodern Attitudes,]
''Color In Contemporary Painting''
New York: Watson Guptil, 1991, p. 72–3. Retrieved May 24, 2021. Eleanor Heartney wrote that his "quietly effective paintings steer a course between the austere reductiveness of an Ellsworth Kelly and the self-proclaimed negation of a
Peter Halley."
Writers point to Spence's synthesis of humanizing aspects outside the
formalist tradition as defining characteristics: a quirky sense of humor and associativeness;
the use of personal imagery and observed experience;
[Myers, Terry, "Andrew Spence," ''Arts Magazine'', September 1990.] a populist enthusiasm for vernacular design and the breakdown of high-low distinctions;
[Pardee, Hearne. "Andrew Spence," ''ARTnews'', Summer 1992, p. 130–1.][Harris, Jane. "Andy Spence," ''Review'', November 1996, p. 24.] and densely worked surfaces that reveal the artistic process and impart an emotional quality to otherwise cool work.
Spence's art often occupies an ambiguous position between abstract and representational, sophisticated and ordinary, and meditative and deadpan that is echoed by shifting figure-ground relationships.
[App, Timothy. "Six Approaches to Formalist Abstraction," ''Artweek'', March 5, 1977, p. 7.] His paintings arise out of a rigorous drawing process, which results in schematic images refined to edge of recognition and a core of essence.
[Armstrong, Richar]
"Andrew Spence"
''Artforum'', December 1983, p. 83. Retrieved May 18, 2021. This formal concision extends to his use of color, which is non-associative, and while sometimes bold, often limited to two or three colors, one of which is nearly always white.
Carol Diehl
Carol Diehl is an American artist, art critic and poet. In addition to her writing, most recently appearing in her blog ''Art Vent'',''Art Vent''Carol Diehl blog Retrieved March 8, 2018. she is best known for her paintings, which have often docume ...
wrote that the work's "innate drollness" is offset by Spence's acute attention to surface.
While his paintings appear flat and hard-edged in reproduction, reviewers frequently note their physicality and dense, varied textures.
[Hornung, David. "Andrew Spence", ''ARTnews'', January 1989, p. 134.] Spence builds them in waxy layers applied with a paint-laden palette knife, creating shapes with nearly engraved edges that he sands and polishes to an opaque sheen.
Early work: 1970s
Spence first received attention in the mid-1970s for abstract work compared to modernists from Malevich to
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense o ...
in terms of its reductive visual grammar, geometric integrity and stillness.
[Rush, David. "Andrew Spence: Avoiding Gravity Plays," ''Artweek'', September 25, 1976, p. 7.][Kienholz, Lyn]
''L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980''
Los Angeles: The California/International Art Foundation, 2010, p. 428. Retrieved May 18, 2021. The paintings referenced the texture and color of Los Angeles's built environment (e.g., prefabricated homes and trailers, aluminum siding or painted walls), incorporating molded-acrylic structural elements, abutting panels, impersonal industrial hues, and thickly applied enamel that sometimes formed vertical spines dividing color areas.
Critics compared them to "abstract facades ripped out of context" situated between paintings and painted objects,
[Auping, Michael. ''Abstract Painting: A Selected Exhibition'', Long Beach, CA: Long Beach City College, 1977.] and physical coarseness and compositional elegance.
''Artweeks
Suzanne Muchnic
Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the ''Los Angeles Times'' for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums.
Academic career
Muchnic is a graduate of Scripp ...
wrote "Spence attends to the anonymous, manmade beauty frequently overlooked in mundane surroundings";
''Los Angeles Times'' critic William Wilson likened the contemplative quality of the textured surfaces to the metaphysical paintings of
Giorgio Morandi.
Mature work
In the 1980s, Spence moved away from a rectilinear vocabulary, incorporating arcs, spirals and triangles and biomorphic shapes into his work.
His images initially consisted of singular, iconic images in limited colors that were embedded in heavily textured surfaces and read like graphic language symbols or fragments of advertising logos.
As the decade progressed, he turned increasingly to tongue-in-cheek, schematic renderings of common objects and architecture or modernist furniture (e.g., ''Light'', 1987), whose inspirations and eccentric perspectival views (often overhead) only became apparent through the picture titles.
For example, ''Swivel Chairs'' (1988) drew on the well-known Eames armchair design, while ''Blue Canoe'' (1988) presented a field of horizontal stripes, two of which were blue and altered to mimic half-canoe shapes.
Critics such as Eleanor Heartney and
Stephen Westfall
Stephen Westfall (born 1953 Schenectady, New York) is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.
Biography
When Stephen Westfall was an adolescent, he was fascinated by the social spaces created by archi ...
contrasted the work's minimalist qualities—frontality, figure-ground equilibrium, a sense of planar rigor, proportion and balance—with its divergences from the tradition: idiosyncratic references to manufactured objects, elemental concepts and life experiences and an emphasis on the artist's hand, conveyed through expressive, evidently reworked surfaces.
[Lurie, David. Review, ''Arts Magazine'', January 1986.] Heartney described paintings such as ''Ivy Windows'' (1988) as "simple without being simplistic," comparing its subtle and intricate relationships between shape, negative space and proportion and irregular rhythmic patterns to
Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also , ; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being o ...
's ''
Broadway Boogie Woogie
''Broadway Boogie Woogie'' is a painting by Piet Mondrian completed in 1943, after he had moved to New York in 1940. Compared to his earlier work, the canvas is divided into many more squares. Although he spent most of his career creating abstrac ...
''.
By the end of the 1980s, Spence shifted toward enigmatic, formal compositions whose titles were comparably cryptic, seeking to extend viewer engagement with the work.
For example, ''Commander'' (1989) and ''Citibanker'' (1990)—inspired respectively by a television remote control and an ATM—each presented spare abstractions of shifting planes, squares and rectangles, rendered in heavy, textured brushwork and surfaces scraped into smooth patinas.
The minimal forms of ''Sculpture/Painting'' (1989) offered Spence's humorous recreation of the sight of his work behind a sculpture at the Whitney Biennial, as well as a meditation on the arbitrary nature of various art distinctions—representational, abstract, flat, three-dimensional, object and image.
Between 1993 and 1996, in shows at Max Protetch and Morris Healy, Spence continued to create visual complexity within simple configurations, relying on plays with similarity and difference, precise cropping, and repetition to push his images further into the nonfunctional, purely aesthetic realm.
[''The New Yorker''. "Andrew Spence," February 17, 1992, p. 13.][Rubinstein, Raphael. "Andrew Spence," ''ARTnews'', December 1993, p. 128.] Two-color works, such as ''Up and Up'' and ''Space Saver'' (both 1993), alternated in terms of figure and ground to complicate readings, while others, like ''Cover Up'' (1993) and ''Goggleplex'' (1995), rotated and repeated simple forms (zigzags or letters, outlines of goggles) to create rhythmic visual puzzles that, given time, snapped into recognizability for viewers.
[Perl, Jed. "After Judd: notes at season's end," ''The New Criterion'', June 1994, p. 41.]
In the 2000s, Spence altered his palette (often using bright saturated colors, in greater quantities), approach to pictorial space, and according to Carol Diehl, his content, shifting toward more fanciful images inspired by emotions rather than the emblematic objects of his past work.
[Shull, Chris. "Paintings that pop," ''The Wichita Eagle'', September 23, 2005, p. 15C.] For example, works such as ''Bob'' (2002), presented complex spatial and optical effects that shifted under scrutiny, in that case, using horizontal stripes that changed color to suggest an ovoid shape in motion against a rectangle and curve.
Faye Hirsch noted in Spence's 2006 show at Edward Thorp a relaxed approach to allusion that introduced a wider range of visual jokes and puns. The paintings ''Hidden Landscape'' (2005) and ''Untitled (Camouflage)'' (2004) combined bright and stereotypically girly colors with camouflage patterns, undermining traditional associations (masculinity, concealment); the lines and squiggles of ''Squid'' (2003) suggested both the aquatic creature and a lightbulb and its filaments.
Spence has turned to linear forms that suggest contemporary signage, architectural schematics or scaffolding, and further disguise his original inspirations in much of his later work.
[Goodman, Mathew Shen]
"Painting Advanced,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', May 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2021.[Karmel, Pepe]
"The Golden Age of Abstraction, Right Now,"
''ARTnews'', April 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2021. Earlier examples include ''Paint Run'' (2005)—which features a scaffold-like red line overlaid on pink and light green blocks—and ''Red Line'' (2005)—a continuous, red stroke tracing sideways flames on white.
Later works, such as ''Red Pink White 3'' (2011) or ''Untitled Brown/Violet'' (2018), use spare lines and shapes to suggest layered or shifting two-dimensional planes within or on the periphery of canvasses, and continue Spence's longstanding explorations of picture, object, architecture and design.
[McGlynn, Tom]
"Doing What Comes Naturally: Seven Painters in Their Prime,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', July 2019. Retrieved May 21, 2021.
Awards and collections
Spence has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1987).
His work belongs to corporate, university and museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''Car Racks'', 1988, Andrew Spence
Art, Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Museum of Modern Art,
Whitney Museum of American Art,
,
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery]
Andrew Spence
Person. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Boston Museum of Fine Arts,
[Museum of Fine Arts Boston]
Andrew Spence
Collections. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Carnegie Museum of Art,
[Carnegie Museum of Art]
Andrew Spence, ''Commander'', 1989
Objects. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Cleveland Museum of Art,
[Cleveland Museum of Art]
Andrew Spence
Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...
,
[Philadelphia Museum of Art]
Bag'', 1994, Andrew Spence
Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Smithsonian Institution[Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution]
''Flow'', 1986, Andrew Spence
Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. and
Walker Art Center,
[Walker Art Center]
Andrew Spence, ''Light'', 1987
Collections. Retrieved May 15, 2021. among others.
References
External links
Andrew SpenceAndy Spence 57W57 Arts
Andrew Spence Jennifer Melby Editions
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spence, Andrew
21st-century American painters
20th-century American painters
Abstract painters
Painters from New York City
Artists from Philadelphia
University of California, Santa Barbara alumni
Temple University Tyler School of Art alumni
People from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
1947 births
Living people