Peter Young and Maren Hassinger | Forms Unbound

Overview
Maren Hassinger, "Untitled Vessel (Small Body)," 2021, Stainless steel wire rope on steel armature, 48 x 36 inches (121.92 x 91.44 cm)
Maren Hassinger,  "Untitled Vessel (Small Body)," 2021, Stainless steel wire rope on steel armature, 48 x 36 inches (121.92 x 91.44 cm)

Gallery Wendi Norris Headquarters                  436 Jackson St, San Francisco

 

Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite                              38 Hotaling Place, San Francisco

 

 

Gallery Wendi Norris is delighted to announce Peter Young and Maren Hassinger: Forms Unbound, an exhibition showcasing the work of two boundary-defying California artists. This presentation spans two San Francisco locations, the gallery’s headquarters and an expansive offsite exhibition space in a historically landmarked carriage house located across the street from the gallery in the heart of Jackson Square. 

 

Forms Unbound pairs Peter Young (b. 1940, Pittsburgh) and Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles), two artists of the same generation who were raised in Los Angeles and spent their formative years in New York City when Clement Greenberg’s ideas of formalism dominated the art world. Despite the prevalence of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Young and Hassinger developed unique artistic vocabularies and techniques. The works in this exhibition––Young's acrylic dot paintings and Hassinger's wire and fiber-based sculptures––transcend rigid formalist views of art. In pairing these two artists, Gallery Wendi Norris celebrates their remarkable contributions to contemporary art and invites an exploration of the limits and possibilities of Abstract and Minimalist art. With its soaring ceilings and grand historic setting, the offsite exhibition space amplifies the impact of the large-scale sculptures and paintings, allowing for a complete engagement with the artworks, experiencing them as the artists intended.

 

The distinct practices of these two artists both juxtapose the organic and the synthetic while celebrating their shared materiality. Young’s monumental paintings reflect his lifelong engagement with the language of dots and spots, a motif rooted in his childhood exposure to ethnographic African and American Indigenous art collected by his parents. His signature style features luminous colors and meticulous layering of dots and lines, creating visual movement and depth within a composition of discernible order and precision. Featuring works spanning from 1967 to 2015, an exhibition highlight is his twelve-foot “star” painting from 1967, a pivotal work in his career. Reflecting on this piece, Young has remarked, “After deciding that I had missed the boat so far as becoming a Minimalist, I decided, what the hell, I'll become a Maximalist and somehow the so-called Star Paintings were the result of this turnaround.” Also on view are four paintings from 2015, two incorporating detritus from his painting palette accumulated over five decades, embedding the history of his studio practice into the works.

 

Hassinger’s sculptures, often constructed from man-made materials like steel wire rope, explore the intersections between the natural world and human constructs that embody the fragmentation, disarray, and challenges of contemporary life. Hassinger approaches her art with a universal perspective, having said, “I don’t think my work has so much to do with ecology but focuses on elements or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, in which we all have a stake.” In Untitled Vessel (Large Body) (2021), Hassinger unwinds stainless steel rope down to its metallic threads, weaving the wire over and under as if it were threads in a piece of fabric, to create the vessel. Serving as a metaphor for the human body, Hassinger’s prickly vessels remind us that though complex, humans are fundamentally similar. The tension between the natural and synthetic continues in the wire rope sculpture Bush (on Dangerous Ground) (1981/2024), which presents a striking simulacrum of organic forms such as branches and grass. 

 

Young and Hassinger have garnered international acclaim and are now experiencing renewed national attention. Hassinger has recently had installations on view at numerous institutions, including SFMoMA, Dia Art Foundation, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Concurrent with Forms Unbound at Gallery Wendi Norris, Young celebrates his first solo gallery show in New York City in more than a decade at Craig Starr Gallery, showcasing a historic 1970s body of work. 

 

About the artists 

Peter Young (b. 1940, Pittsburgh) grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Pomona College for two years before moving to New York in 1960. Young's paintings have continuously defied categorization since his early New York years showing with Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy. He has been described variously as the first post-modernist painter, as well as a minimalist and an abstract surrealist. From the beginning, his paintings have addressed the rigid formal criteria of minimal art that prevailed in the 1960's. 

 

Following his first two solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1970 at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery, Young then exhibited at Richard Bellamy's Oil & Steel Gallery in Tribeca in 1984. Through Bellamy's interest in Young's work, it came to the attention of then P.S.1 Director, Alanna Heiss, and in 2007 the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center dedicated a comprehensive survey exhibition to the artist's work, accompanied by a monograph, focusing on the period between 1963 and 1977. 

 

His work has been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Guggenheim, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; as well as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom; Rolf Ricke, Cologne; and Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany. Peter Young's work is featured in collections, including the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; the American University, Washington D.C.; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; University of Texas, Austin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. 

 

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles) has built an expansive practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subject of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. Wire rope has played a prominent role in Maren Hassinger’s artistic practice since the early 1970s when, as a sculptor placed in the Fiber Arts program at UCLA, Hassinger used the material to bridge the gap between the two disciplines. The artist often takes a biomimetic approach to her material, whether bundling it to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting it in cement to create an industrial garden. Within the past five years, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone), Dia Bridgehampton, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Aspen Art Museum. Her work is currently installed at Dia Beacon and at Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton. Hassinger will be honored with an upcoming two-person survey alongside Senga Nengudi at IVAM, Valencia, as well as participation in an upcoming exhibition at The Met. Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum, NYC, among others. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) acquired Hassinger's archive.
Installation Views

Photo by Glen Cheriton.

Works
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