3 Shows in the Nineties

How abstraction changed my mind…

A march backward through time. My friend, Michael Zahn, and I have been chatting a lot about painting in the 90s. There were 3 shows at Gagosian on Wooster that came to mind! (What a space that was – so many storied exhibitions.) It turns out that many of the older artists of the time were making innovations that no one took to heart. Anyway – we isolated 3 shows that have affected our thinking, and I thought I might share them with you. 

Andy Warhol – Camouflage Paintings – 1998-99
Andy’s Show of paintings was incredibly prescient about this moment where abstraction and decoration are inseparable. I had no idea at the time what any of this could mean. I was struggling with my own inconsistencies and failures. And it was through Greenberg that I came to some understanding of what I was seeing. He always made pejorative distinctions about the “decorative” in painting. In these paintings, Andy used repetition, appropriation, and replication to make a more pertinent statement about abstraction. He begins with something as mundane as camouflage. Camo is meant to hide things in plain sight. It fools the eye. Think herds of zebras. Stripes confuse and disguise the singularity. It’s used to hide the target, keep something safe. The larger panels took up nearly the whole wall in this space. You must physically move to scan the perfect surfaces, the pristine patterns, and the all-over formalism. The imagery is pure decoration until it isn’t. Andy proves that Clem’s idea of “using the decorative against itself” is a way to transcend the decorative. These paintings are passing for something that they are not. Decoration AS Abstraction, hiding the “target” in plain sight. Warhol isolates also the patterns into smaller single panels and when we look carefully at these, we see campy “pixellations” of AbEx paintings. Warhol is demanding (not very Andy, I know) that we look deeper and make bigger connections to smaller ideas. We have to see what’s been missed. Here’s a link to Roberta Smith’s review.

Frank Stella – Wooster Street – 1995
Frank had been important to me from day one. However, I was too enthralled with earlier work – those blacks, coppers, and aluminums had filled my mind. I still had not come to terms with Working Space when I ran into this painting in Gagosian’s in 1995. I went back as often as I could. The idea of the Baroque Abstract Painting is exemplified in this work and it startled me so thoroughly that it took me a few years to pull my head out of my backside. Again a huge giant with a large club had beaten me into the ground. But look at the forms, the twisting, broken spaces, the spreading metastasizing imagery pushing off the front of the surface. There’s movement like a city moves, like a sports team moves. Speed, heft, rhythm, it’s all there. It’s not pretty, it’s not decorative, but it is beautiful. It is a horror show of abstraction! And it is great! Here’s a link to Michael Kimmelman’s review of the show!

Cy Twombly – Wooster Street – 1994
When I first saw this painting I was astonished. So much canvas! Empty canvas. The Wooster space was cavernous – a fucking arena.. And the paintings shown there had to hold these walls or the work would look tired and wimpy. Nuance could be included, but one had to have an understanding of scale and size. I wasn’t a big Twombly fan at the time. I felt his works were old-fashioned, too expressionistic, and a bit arrogant. Oh, stupid youth! But then this painting came along and suddenly everything in my studio felt insignificant and unrealized. I did not have any true understanding of scale – of how an image might hold huge spaces within a work. Even in this tiny reproduction’s size, you can see how the right side imagery pulls into the left open spaces. That break between the huge panel and the smaller one cracks open the space AND adds an element of time. It pulls us in closer. We’re meant to notice something important here in this space. It takes over our understanding of the larger space and makes reasonable the slide we take across the canvas. I’m still learning these lessons. – More in depth discussion of the painting is linked here!

Mark Stone – 2025