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OR

Peter Downsbrough

2017

Painted steel in four parts

65 x 65 x 1.5 inches (165.1 x 165.1 x 3.8 cm)
Signed on accompanying certificate
(Inventory #30803)

The work of Peter Downsbrough (b. 1940, New Jersey, lives in Brussels) utilizes absence, edits, lines, space and words in architectural settings in order to further an observer’s experience of space, time and continuity. Since the 1960’s, Downsbrough’s work has meandered around, between and within architecture, Minimalism, conceptual art and visual poetry. His works take many forms, from architectural interventions to books, films, installation, multiples, prints, sculptures and more. “The word for me is an object,” he has said.

For Krakow Witkin Gallery’s One Wall, One Work, Downsbrough created “OR”, a four part sculpture that utilizes the space between and among the elements as much as the metal parts, themselves. Over the years, he exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, and outdoor sites, mainly in Europe. In 2003, he was honored with a retrospective in Brussels, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. This exhibition, curated by Marie-Thérèse Champesme, later traveled to Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, France (2003–04), and to the Muzeum Sztuki in Lódz, Poland (2004). He published over 100 artist books, has been in over 50 museum exhibitions and is in many public and private collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Tate, London, SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst, Gent, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, along with more than forty other collections. The Centre national d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris has recently acquired a significant early sculpture from 1967.

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Peter Downsbrough developed a strongly reduced visual vocabulary, which he used to investigate the given space in a very personal and precise way. His materials consists of letters and lines. He used adhesive letters, forming conjunctions, prepositions, verbs and/or nouns and applies them to the walls, floors and/or ceilings. Lines, for which he used cloth tape, emphasize certain architectural elements. Metal pipes, in the space and sometimes on the wall, accentuate the space. Areas defined by lines or painted black sometimes play a role, and, with the lines and the words reveal the architecture of interior or exterior spaces.

This rigorous treatment of the space continues in Peter Downsbrough’s books, maquettes, photographs, videos or prints. They all reveal an extreme coherence, which some situate in the minimal and conceptual art movements. In the course of time, the spatial interventions with the parallel vertical pipes or dowels have been complemented with words, lines and planes. Conjunctions such as AS, IF, BUT, FROM, MAAR, OP, EN, ET, OU, MAIS… have a double function: they work as iconographic signs which underline and reveal the space, and they offer the viewer the possibility to go, in his/her mind, from one thought to the other. For a conjunction is a word that can’t be declined or conjugated; it establishes a connection between sentences or parts of sentences.

Peter Downsbrough: With the word, one takes part in a dialogue, a discourse on its precise meaning. The word for me is an object. It has both a precise and a vague meaning. It is a universe one is confronted with. But there is no obligatory way of reading.

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