Gary Kuehn: Practitioner’s Delight

Abundantly illustrated and collecting several essays plus a long conversation with the artist, Practitioner’s Delight is published on the occasion of American artist Gary Kuehn’s (born 1939) first solo exhibition in Italy, at GAMeC Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea - Bergamo, which presents a significant core of about 70 works, including sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations, among the most important in the artist’s corpus, dating from the early 1960s to the most recent pieces.

Both the exhibition and the publication pay homage to the American artist, whose radical language developed from an initial reflection on the physicality of materials and played a significant role in the birth of a new conception of sculpture, equidistant from the subjectivism of Expressionist abstraction and the objectivity and geometric rigor of minimalism.

Kuehn participated in watershed exhibitions like the famous 1966 Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, and When Attitudes Become Form (1969), curated by Harald Szeemann, and spent over five decades exploring the tension between change and deformation, his intent being to refute the dogma of the cube, as he has repeatedly declared, and to subvert the force of pure forms.