On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, April 27 - 29, 2012, Moeller Fine Art Berlin is pleased to present “Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New,” extended until July 13, 2012. The tribute exhibition will include paintings, sculpture and multi-media works by artists supported by the American gallerist Howard Wise.
Howard Wise (1903-1989) opened the Howard Wise Gallery of Present Day Painting and Sculpture in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957. In 1960 he moved his gallery to 50 West 57th Street in New York, and inaugurated his new premises by exhibiting European and American New Tendency artists. Wise was the pioneering art dealer and champion of kinetic sculpture and video art in the US, as he foresaw the future of art to be an alliance between artistic and technological concerns, in which the machine was paramount. Wise was the only gallerist in Europe or America to embrace artists from both continents working with new media.
Howard Wise Gallery presented landmark exhibitions important to the history of art, such as “On the Move” (1964), the first US exhibition of kinetic art consisting of seventeen American and European artists; “Lights in Orbit” (1967), a major US survey of art using moving light by 39 American and European artists; and “TV as a Creative Medium” (1969), the first-ever gallery exhibition devoted to video as an art form. In 1971, at the height of its success, Wise closed his gallery and established the foundation Electronic Arts Intermix to assist artists and organizations working within the emerging video art movement.
Moeller Fine Art will feature a selection of works that were exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery, including Otto Piene’s Light Ballet (1969), an aluminum round table and hanging globe containing revolving lamps that project light on the walls, ceiling and floor; Heinz Mack’s Veil of Light (1964), a large sheet of aluminum hex cells that reflect light; Billy Apple’s Unidentified Fluorescent Object [UFO] (1967), a neon light sculpture; Aldo Tambellini’s Black Spiral (1969), a video of a flowing spiral in a TV; and Peter Sedgley’s Blue-green Trace (1966), a geometric abstract painting of interconnecting lines. Also on view will be works by Christo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Piero Dorazio, Juan Downey, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, George Rickey, Eric Siegel, Takis, and Günther Uecker.
An illustrated catalogue will include the essays “Homage to Howard Wise” by Peter Selz (Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley) and "Against the mainstream: Howard Wise and the New Tendency Artists of the 1960s" by Joseph Ketner (The Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art, Emerson College, Boston), both written for the exhibition.
The gallery will also present Giacomo Balla’s (1871-1958) Paravento con linea di velocità (c. 1915), a double-sided painting presented in the form of a screen, which was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, alongside a related collage of the same period by the artist, Linea di velocità e paesaggio (c. 1915). Balla, whose work, along with that of other Italian Futurists, influenced kinetic art.
www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de