Round 1963, Peter Younger started to think about himself as a painter. A Los Angeles native who spent two years at Pomona School, in Claremont, California, he moved to New York in 1960 and studied briefly with Theodoros Stamos and Stephen Greene on the Artwork College students League earlier than enrolling within the artwork historical past program at New York College — not but absolutely dedicated to being an artist. However by 1964, a yr after graduating from NYU, he was making all-over plaid work in addition to all-over work composed of identically sized, equidistantly positioned dots. Though he didn’t search gallery illustration, he gained appreciable consideration with these latter works.
Whereas Younger used a reductive vocabulary manufactured from dots and contours, he didn’t determine himself with Minimalist or formalist portray, which insisted on the grid, flatness, and a rejection of nature as a topic. In a video interview on the Gallery Wendi Norris web site, he calls himself a “Maximalist.”
Younger’s “Maximalism” had its roots in his upbringing. When he was 16, he met the couple Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, each modernist painters. In distinction to their East Coast counterparts, they didn’t reject mysticism, otherworldliness, and nonwestern sources, or what could possibly be known as various techniques. For them, nature was a part of the cosmos, teeming with unseen power. That is the inspiration from which Younger developed his preoccupations.
Peter Younger, “#36-1970” (1970), acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with beige nylon twine, 21 x 21 inches (53.34 x 53.34 cm)
In the summertime of 1969, simply as his work have been included in prestigious exhibitions such because the Corcoran Biennial, 9 Younger Artists/Theodoron Award on the Guggenheim, and a two-person present with David Diao at Leo Castelli, Younger eliminated himself from New York. When Castelli invited the artist to hitch his gallery and provided him a stipend, Younger turned him down, and remained together with his then vendor, Richard Bellamy.
At first, Younger went to Costa Rica and lived with the Boruca tribe, the place he made work by wrapping material round sticks tied collectively, the alternative of what was happening in New York. When he left Costa Rica, he gave all however one to associates he made within the Boruca tribe. The opposite one he gave to a pal who lived in England.
After he returned to the USA, he wandered across the West. He finally settled in Bisbee, Arizona, the place he continues to dwell, work, and contribute to the neighborhood, however he additionally hung out in Utah. Whereas there, he made “stick” portray. These are the topic of Peter Younger: “Stick” Work, 1970, at Craig Starr Gallery. Persevering with the formal and materials explorations that he started in Costa Rica, Younger stretched canvas over ponderosa pine branches held collectively by nylon, jute, or cotton twine, and painted with acrylic.
Set up view of Peter Younger: “Stick” Work, 1970 at Craig Starr Gallery, New York. Left to proper: “#24-1970,” “#20-1970,” “#25-1970” (all 1970) (photograph by Thomas Barrett Images)
The 11 work within the exhibition are all titled with a quantity and yr. The planar “36-1970” is, in line with Ellen Johnson in a 1971 ArtForum article, the final portray within the sequence. Collectively, Younger’s 36 “stick” work set up a viable various to the inflexible, large-scale summary work that have been then being hailed in New York on the time. Handcrafted, modest in scale, and irregular in form, they’ve a brown border that echoes their handmade frames, protrusions and all. Over the monochromatic inside, Younger painted a number of equally coloured strains. He by no means revises the drawing, and the viscosity of the strains register when he stopped and reloaded his brush. What you see shouldn’t be a tightly executed, machine-like portray, however a humbler and extra weak method, the labor of the painter.
Whereas the drawing is summary, the works evoke Native American motifs. That proximity, together with the ponderosa frames, convey forth lots of associations, together with the Indigenous sources behind so-called American abstraction. Actually and metaphorically talking, the canvas is connected to nature, quite than to a stretcher, which Younger related with the self-serving, aesthetic rigidity of the New York artwork world. His resistance to aesthetic agendas and group assume was necessary then and urgently so now. Younger is way over a maverick artist, and the broader implications of his visually placing oeuvre have but to be registered absolutely within the historical past of American artwork.
Peter Younger, “#21-1970” (1970), acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine, 18 1/2 x 24 inches (46.99 x 60.96 cm)
Peter Younger, “#16-1970” (1970), acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with purple nylon twine, 21 1/2 x 17 3/4 inches (54.61 x ∼45.1 cm)
Peter Younger, “#9-1970” (1970), acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine, 18 x 18 inches (45.72 x 45.72 cm)
Peter Younger, “#6-1970” (1970), acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine, 19 1/2 x 22 inches (49.53 x 55.88 cm)
Peter Younger: “Stick” Work, 1970 continues at Craig Starr Gallery (5 East 73rd Road, Lenox Hill, Manhattan) by February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
