Round 1963, Peter Younger started to consider himself as a painter. A Los Angeles native who spent two years at Pomona Faculty, 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 totally dedicated to being an artist. However by 1964, a 12 months 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 establish 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 might be known as different techniques. For them, nature was a part of the cosmos, teeming with unseen vitality. 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 had 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 pals he made within the Boruca tribe. The opposite one he gave to a buddy who lived in England.
After he returned to the US, he wandered across the West. He finally settled in Bisbee, Arizona, the place he continues to reside, work, and contribute to the group, however he additionally frolicked 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 Pictures)
The 11 work within the exhibition are all titled with a quantity and 12 months. The planar “36-1970” is, in accordance with Ellen Johnson in a 1971 ArtForum article, the final portray within the sequence. Collectively, Younger’s 36 “stick” work set up a viable different to the inflexible, large-scale summary work that had 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 just a few equally coloured traces. He by no means revises the drawing, and the viscosity of the traces 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 susceptible strategy, the labor of the painter.
Whereas the drawing is summary, the works evoke Native American motifs. That proximity, together with the ponderosa frames, deliver forth a whole lot of associations, together with the Indigenous sources behind so-called American abstraction. Actually and metaphorically talking, the canvas is connected to nature, slightly than to a stretcher, which Younger linked with the self-serving, aesthetic rigidity of the New York artwork world. His resistance to aesthetic agendas and group suppose was vital then and urgently so now. Younger is way over a maverick artist, and the broader implications of his visually hanging oeuvre have but to be registered totally 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 pink 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) via February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.