NY Arts Magazine » L. Brandon Krall

The Life and Times of Luis Perelman

mauri — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 09:00:47 +0000

L. Brandon Krall: You grew up in a cultured and affluent family in New York City, your mother was an editor at Look magazine and your father was a psychiatrist. Talk about your discovery of art, experiences as a child making collages from paper you mother brought home from the Look art department, and mazes. Also please describe your youth attending classes in oil painting, city scenes, learning to stretch canvases at the young age of nine … Your interest in weaving, facture, and precision?
Luis Perelman: These are so many questions. My earliest recollection of doing ‘art’ was when I was seven. I copied maps—the shapes of countries—using crayons. Around the same time, mother sent my sister and I to ‘study’ art at Art Life Craft Studios, an art school one half block from where we lived. The owner set up an easel and a stretched canvas near a window and in those days acrylics were not available so I used oil paints, and attempted to paint our street. I started to make collages at this time. Mother would bring home colored papers from the Art Department at Look Magazine and I was always drawn to collage. I tended to cut the papers with scissors and occasionally tore them. Several of these early collages were published in the magazine; I did not have a real talent for drawing. A few years later, did a series of mazes with a ball-point pen. I think I was trying to re-create an archetypal process of finding a path to freedom. My interest in collage never went away. In my first year of college, I used one of the walls in my dorm room to make a giant collage/assemblage using found objects.

LBK: When and how did you realize your interest in abstraction?
LP: I was always drawn to form and color rather than to the depiction of people or nature. As a child and adolescent, my favorite artist was Piet Mondrian.

LBK: Describe your experiences going on your own to the galleries and museums in New York .
LP: In the 1950’s the Whitney Museum was temporarily occupying a building on West 54^th Street, opposite to and owned by MOMA, so one could walk from one to the other in a single city block. I went often to the galleries in mid town as my family home was nearby.

LBK: Discuss the “sacredness” that art has for you.
LP: I think this happened unconsciously at first, before I could articulate my understanding. What is sacred is the act and process of experiencing a greater wholeness and sense of presence through the creative process, whatever form it takes.

LBK: How did your life change when you went to college at Columbia?
LP: In my second year at Columbia someone told me about a new translucent casting resin that was sold on Canal Street, so I went downtown to that fabled area and bought a quart. I make a cardboard mold, poured the resin into the mold and dropped various small objects randomly into the mold including a small firecracker that exploded inside the resin. I brought the piece to the school woodshop and the man in charge brought it to one of the machine shops on campus where the sides were machined flat. The architecture school professor sent it off to a traveling exhibition and the piece was stolen, I never saw it again. This was my entrée into plastics and subsequently, I started a series of resin castings.

In my third year at Columbia I was assigned a desk in the architecture drafting room next to Art Garfunkel, who at the time was an unknown architecture student. Art and I become friends and he offered to take my work around to galleries. In 1963, he took both my Mark Tobey inspired series of paintings and a resin block and by luck or fate, showed them to Ivan Karp at Leo Castelli gallery. Ivan encouraged me to come in and bring more of my work to the gallery and Ivan sold all the resin pieces that I brought, most to well-known collectors. This process continued for about four years.

In 1967 I met the artist Arman, who was also doing resin castings. Actually, he had someone else doing the castings for him, and he lived in the Chelsea Hotel, and as far as I know did not have a studio. He introduced me to another gallery dealer, Jerry Eisenberg, who wanted to start showing contemporary art and agreed to give me a one-man exhibition. I was young and naïve, and arranged to do this, much to my eventual regret, since it meant severing my association with Leo Castelli.

I had also started doing much more orderly work in which I carefully arranged the objects in a mold rather than randomly dropping them in. Eventually I started doing works that incorporated layers of various kinds of hardware—wing nuts, bolts, screws, etc. in regular rows. I wanted to create three dimensional grids that manifested precision and order. The most interesting part of the process was finding the hardware, which often mean rummaging through bins in deserted warehouses.

LBK: Talk about the Ape event you did in the 60s.
LP: This happening was previously hashed out by my friend Jon and Art. We rented an ape suit with a moveable jaw from a costume rental shop in the theatre district. I went out to Central Park with a small entourage on two Sundays and to the Wall Street Area on a weekday. The first time we went to the park, I went to the Metropolitan Museum. I remember going to the Greek vases. Interestingly enough, no one stopped me from wandering around. Finally at the end of my sojourn to the financial district, a policeman told us that we needed a permit to walk around in a costume.

Luis Perelman, 16 Square Pineapple, 2008. Metal strips on board, 28 x 28 in. Featured this summer at The Katonah Museum of Art, New York.

LBK: In the course of several decades your work evolved in series and incorporated painting in various water-based mediums, when did it became dimensional? How did you find the medium of sheet metal—recycled cans, development of patinas? The most recent resin pieces made use of typewriter parts from typewriter repair places.
LP: Many questions … I did a series of color field paintings for about two years around 1974, but these never evolved into three dimensional objects. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, I did a number of wall reliefs based on Islamic patterns. I also did shaped wall pieces using copper leaf on wood constructions. I resumed working in resin and made various shaped pieces and eventually started casting old typewriters.

The use of beverage cans came about accidentally. I remember using shredded cans in some of my obelisk towers, and suddenly got the idea of making quilts out of flattened cans which I acquired from beverage wholesalers. The flat quilts eventually evolved into layered constructions. I also started using copper sheet metal on which I applied patinas of various kinds. My current work is the “Kamal” series, dimensional constructions of patterned sheet metal, based on a traditional Islamic design.

LBK: When did you move to Yonkers and form the Blue Door Art Association and what have been your activities in this time as an advisor and leader in the Yonkers art community?
LP: I wouldn’t characterize myself as a leader of the Yonkers art community. There are other artists who have also made strong efforts to enhance the arts in Yonkers. Three of us founded Blue Door in 2001. I was the only artist in the group. The other two dropped out and I became the director and moving force. We were offered our present gallery space in 2008. Prior to that time, I organized exhibitions at the Yonkers Riverfront Library where I have also organized and curated yearly exhibitions of Yonkers artists in the new gallery under the auspices of Yonkers Arts.

I am responsible for many of the public art installations in the City of Yonkers including the installation of sculptures at City Hall and the Waterfront Esplanade. The creation of a mural, Woven Gifts in Southwest Yonkers is also a project as well as the organization of several Windows on Main Street. These involve artist installations in storefronts downtown, and many other projects at additional venues throughout Westchester County.

LBK: What was your reaction to the Lygia Clark survey show now on view at MoMA?
LP: I was fascinated by the geometric basis of Clark’s work and particularly by the works made for spectators to actually manipulate and interact with. They inspired me begin to curate and organize an exhibition of interactive art works by artists working with these concepts wherever they may be.

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The Shaped Canvas, Revisited

mauri — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 09:00:01 +0000

“The Shaped Canvas, Revisited,” currently on view at the Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery on 77^th street, just off Madison Avenue, takes “The Shaped Canvas,” curated by Lawrence Alloway at the Guggenheim Museum in 1964 as a point of departure and augments it with new work by younger artists. The curators cite as precedents exhibitions of the period that exposed complex developments in painting-sculpture hybrids such as “Shape and Structure” at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1965, curated by Frank Stella, Henry Geldzhaler, and Barbara Rose. To this, one can add “Eccentric Abstraction,” curated by Lucy Lippard, which was also in New York in 1965, and which traveled to the legendary Ferus Gallery in L.A. in 1966. Human culture as a whole was evolving explosively in the 60s and 70s, and the arts were vibrantly blossoming in all directions. Lippard’s contribution to the recognition of Earth Art and Conceptual Art is well known through her magazine articles and books at the time, and she was on the scene, directly engaged in the innovations in dance, performance, installation art, Arte Povera, Nouveau Realisme, and Idea Art.

The 28 artists in “The Shaped Canvas, Revisited” each use formal qualities of mixed painting and sculpture differently, which, in itself, is an excellent reason to take in this show. The works are engagingly installed on 4 floors of an immaculately restored townhouse, and at the entrance you find yourself standing between a Stella shaped geometric abstract from his second classic series and a Pop shaped canvas of red lips and emerging cigarette smoke by Wesselman, a juxtaposition that is electric.

Installed high on the wall, a small piece by Fontana in gold is covetable and also sort of kitsch. Ron Gorchov has worked for decades with a uniquely shaped canvas, and while the piece shown is not his most exuberant, his commitment to the shaped canvas deserves greater exposure. Classic knot pieces by Lynda Benglis and the humble force of an unassuming Richard Tuttle are in wonderful company with fine inter-formal works by Elizabeth Murray, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Steven Parrino, Harvey Quaytman, and Richard Prince. It is a pleasure to looks at these pieces and share the artists’ feelings in sensing the processes involved in their facture. The works are vital, refined, and, at times, hilarious.

By L. Brandon Krall

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From Primitivism to Propaganda

mauri — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 08:00:11 +0000

A museum quality exhibition of 35 Russian Constructivist and early modernist works on paper by 16 artists are on view in the main salon of the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park South. Curated from the collection of Marina and Nikolay Shchukin by Matthew Drutt, the show is on view through June 14^th, and it is rich with works from this fertile and socially turbulent period of world history. The show features a marvelous set of costume designs: a fabulous Erté, a striking costume for the Pushkin production of The Golden Cockerel by Natalia Gontchorova, and Smeraldina, a delightful black character wearing curly-toed slippers by an unknown artist. These costume designs and finely executed studies for propaganda posters and book covers make us realize that they were made in an epoch when the theatre and stage spectacles engaged most people, decades before movie theatres and television in the 50s. These inventive paintings, drawings, and collages were contemporary and cutting edge, and many retain that vitality from artists working in the pre-digital age. Suprematist works by Nikolai Suetin, less known to a Western audience, freshly express their idealism. Designs in red and black on a white field for radio speakers and Communism MUSIC Americanism by Gustav Klutsis arouse admiration and still conjure today some of the revolutionary spirit they invoked a century ago.

This exhibition is part of a citywide celebration, taking place as part of the 12th Annual Russian Heritage Month, with the participation of the Russian American Foundation. The Shuchkin family has three main branches, and the founders of Gallery Shchukin are from the Siberian branch. Sergey Shchukin was a textile merchant of the Moscow branch of the family. His extensive collection of Monets, Matisses and Picassos form the core of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

By L. Brandon Krall

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