Ken Greenleaf

A Solo Exhibition

May 20 – June 25, 2023

Ken Greenleaf has been making critically acclaimed work for over five decades. Originally represented by Tibor de Nagy in the 1970s and early 80s, Greenleaf established his career making large-scale steel sculptures, one of which resides in the collection at the Whitney.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to view a powerful cross-section of Greenleaf’s work across time and media in an intimate space in the Maine woods. This exhibition will feature works on paper, shaped canvases, sculpture, and an unheard-of surprise.

Exhibition Views Artist Statement Selected Works Press

Artist Statement

Sometime around twenty-five years ago, I realized that the work I had been pursuing for the previous decades had come to an end, and that whatever I undertook from that point forward would be something else entirely. I had started writing reviews for a Maine newspaper and with a little practice and some good editors I got pretty handy with it. Forty-odd reviews a year gave me plenty to think about. Most of what I saw was not especially engaging, but it made me consider why that was so.

I came to realize that some of the basic fundamentals that had driven my own efforts were actually pretty empty. Especially the idea that abstraction was a useful means of expressing an inner life. Motherwell [1] and Rosenberg had got it wrong. That lode had petered out under the shallow overburden of an apparent need for self-expression. The good work that came out of, say, American abstraction of the 1950’s was just that — good work. Not a path to deeper understanding of the philosophical necessities of individual artistic identity. To recycle a phrase gleaned from an AJ Liebling footnote, the way to make art is to do it well, and how you do it is your own business.

I found myself continually questioning what I wanted to get out the whole process of making art. My distance from the art world and its conversations and mutual interactions helped me go wherever I wanted and could technically and materially handle. I thought about the artists who had survived my mental housecleaning and came up with damned few. Art history, and particularly modern history, is, I realized, fractal rather than linear, so there are no special imperatives. There are plenty of good, powerful, and even admirable artists, but my direct interest list was cooked down to what I care about for my own purposes. The top range of my list in my lifetime included Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson and Ellsworth Kelly.

As I thought about it, I came to realize that my (or anybody’s) work was not about me but about the viewer. Art is abstract by nature, and how it is experienced is determined by the viewers and their expectations. For me, now, what I do is simply what I do, make of it what you will.

That led me back, directly, to Kasimir Malevich. And the black square. He had taken the entire enterprise to its deepest philosophical nature, devoid of all content except the experience of the encounter by the viewer. He had defined the core. And I think it scared him. Of course, he lived in a scary time in Russia. He had to back off — Lenin hated abstract art and Stalin liked to shoot the avant-garde… literally. But Malevich had engendered a group of some amazing artists. Like Lyubov Popova, who in her short life made paintings that could find a place anywhere in the 20th century. [2] And he left an important conceptual legacy.

[1] A book of Motherwell’s writing shows he believed contemporary abstraction expressed the emotional and unconscious condition of the artist, as if that were the foundation of what he and the others were undertaking. That idea was way too simplistic.

[2]This is a very simplified version of that complex time around the revolution - I’m extracting a sliver for my own purposes.