An exhibit dedicated to the most recent works of New York–based sculptor Michael Gitlin. Composed over the course of four years, Gitlin’s geometric wood sculptures combine compact form with immanent color, which he uses to compress the volume between the works and the white wall on which they depend. Though begun before the COVID-19 pandemic, the works have sustained the shock of crisis and transition in their formal integrity, both arresting and withdrawn.

The Compressions series marks both a departure and a continuation for Gitlin, whose forty-year career has continually probed the relationship of wall pieces to their supporting architecture, while exploding any illusion of compositional equanimity through disjointed, displaced forms. Already in 1987, Barry Schwabsky described Gitlin’s work as “characterized above all by its restlessness.” Schwabsky observed that “the object in crisis—for Gitlin at least, and perhaps only for him, such is the risk of the artist—implicates the subject of sculpture more than its means. For the sculptor, there is the object and there is the space it inhabits, and these must have a determinate relationship. This relationship is perhaps the true subject of the work." Schwabsky's insight of more than thirty years ago remains acute. But the austere new works exhibited here exude a serenity, retaining only a tinge of the prior agitation. Intrigued by the relationship between a work and its environment, by the dynamism of an object and its constitutive parts in space, Gitlin has been experimenting with the functional use of color for decades, allowing his materials to assume their own life within the logic of his constructions.

Reductive and abstract in form and clear in presence, Gitlin’s work continues to press questions of wholeness and displacement, compression and expansion, while urging acceptance, if restlessly, of that which we cannot understand.

About Michael Gitlin:

Michael Gitlin was born in Cape Town, South Africa and raised in Jerusalem. He received a dual Bachelor of Arts in Art History and English Literature from the Hebrew University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, before moving to New York City in 1970, where he received his Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1972. Gitlin’s first museum show was at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1977, where he was the recipient of the Sandberg Prize. That same year, his work was exhibited at the Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture and drawing in 1987 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), and he has taught at the Bezalel Academy of Arts, Parsons, Pratt Institute, the University of California at Davis, and Columbia University.

Gitlin’s works have a home in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; the British Museum, London; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; the New York Public Library, New York; the New School Art Collection, New York; and the Mannheim Kunsthalle, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, in Germany.

The artist would like to thank Sean Scully for his generosity, and Michellé Hoban, ​​Daniella Gitlin, Barry Schwabsky, Poliana Duarte, Ilan Rubin, Diego Olivera, Adam Gitlin, Solly Angel, Lucy Gitlin, John Doherty, Shuli Sade, Eric Stark, and Lee Tal for their support with the Compressions project.