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 totally 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 product of dots and features, 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 referred to as various methods. For them, nature was a part of the cosmos, teeming with unseen power. That is the inspiration from which Younger developed his preoccupations.
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 supplied 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 fabric round sticks tied collectively, the other of what was occurring 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 buddy who lived in England.
After he returned to america, he wandered across the West. He ultimately settled in Bisbee, Arizona, the place he continues to dwell, work, and contribute to the group, 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.
The 11 work within the exhibition are all titled with a quantity and yr. The planar “36-1970” is, based on Ellen Johnson in a 1971 ArtForum article, the final portray within the collection. Collectively, Younger’s 36 “stick” work set up a viable various 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 will not be a tightly executed, machine-like portray, however a humbler and extra weak 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 plenty 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 essential then and urgently so now. Younger is excess of a maverick artist, and the broader implications of his visually placing oeuvre have but to be registered totally within the historical past of American artwork.
Peter Younger: “Stick” Work, 1970 continues at Craig Starr Gallery (5 East 73rd Avenue, Lenox Hill, Manhattan) by means of February 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.