Barbara Purcell at Salmagundi:
On a 95-degree evening in Austin last fall, I ran into a curator from the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art at a gallery reception across town. We briefly chatted about the Blanton’s then recently opened “Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards” exhibition, which had been organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. I mentioned I was covering the show for Salmagundi and that I was very much looking forward to seeing the presentation—a departure from the artist’s much larger monochromatic works—up close and personal, and possibly with a pair of reading glasses.
“I wish someone would write about Kelly, the closet Dadaist,” the curator sighed with a little wink. Is it such a secret, I wondered? A half a century’s worth of repurposed postcards—micro collages, really—that playfully combine elements of chance, humor, and appropriation? Sounds rather Dada to me. The term even appears once or twice in the exhibition catalog, and the postcards themselves are effectively mass-produced readymades—a cornerstone of an art movement that was always hard to pin down, even in its heyday.
more here.