The Walker Art Center opens "Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy"

Written by Martha Longfellow Wednesday, 25 January 2012 22:51

Minneapolis, Minnesota.- The Walker Art center is pleased to present "Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy", on view at the center from January 26th through May 6th. Known for his brash personality and his inimitable art practice, Frank Gaard has made an indelible mark on the local visual arts community. This exhibition, the largest-ever exhibition of Gaard’s work, will feature more than 30 works from Gaard’s ongoing series of portraits, for which he is arguably best known. His portrait subjects are a who’s-who of the local arts community, past and present—they include artists Bruce Tapola, Melba Price, Mary Esch, and Alexa Horochowski; VocalEssence conductor Philip Brunelle; and writers Emily Carter, Julie Hill, and Neal Karlen, among many others.

Since the late 1960s, Gaard has forged a deeply personal and idiosyncratic style that borrows from classic Sunday comics such as Dick Tracy and the Katzenjammer Kids and the history of Modernism, as embodied in the work of artists Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian, and philosopher-poets such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Baudelaire. Combining his vibrant, highly-saturated palette of deep jewel tones, unsullied pastels, and retinal fluorescents with a profound tendency toward comedic satire on an operatic scale, Gaard’s imagery borders on the iconographic. Cartoon-like faces with exaggerated features populate his paintings, as do crowned and spectacled self-portrait busts, devils, swans, panties, and ponies. His fantastical, sometimes ribald fetishistic imagery stems in part from early-childhood traumas and a life lived with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that he received in the wake of several breakdowns in the 1970s and 80s. This survey of some 75 works features monumental tableaux paintings; portraits of friends, family, and fellow artists from the mid-’80s to the present; a suite of new paintings with a recurring pony motif; an installation of paintings that incorporate DVDs, CDs, and 78-rpm records; and illustrations from Artpolice, the cult zine Gaard published from 1974 to 1994. The exhibition will also feature ephemera including drawings, letters, record album covers, and hand-lettered promotional materials Gaard designed for Twin Cities gallery exhibitions and other events.


For more than four decades, Gaard has been an elemental part of the Twin Cities art scene, revered by many as a mentor and simultaneously scorned by others for his salacious artistic style. He arrived in 1969 to take a professorship at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and later launched his underground zine Artpolice, which he co-published with several other Twin Cities artists and former students, and which developed a cult following worldwide. The illustrations in Artpolice ranged in subject from current events to politics to graphic sex, presented in a licentious comic strip style but also featuring Gaard’s signature brand of intellectualism and social critique. Though Artpolice ceased publication in 1994, Gaard’s diaristic, no-holds-barred observations and commentary on society and art continue on his must-read blog (see frankgaard.com). For nearly 30 years, Gaard has also undertaken a serious study of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, having converted to Judaism in 1982. His frequent use Hebrew textual references and the Sephiroth or “tree of life” as a formal and conceptual construct in his paintings provided him, in the difficult early years of his mental illness, with a readymade of sorts that he could use as a compositional device so that, in his words, “he didn’t have to keep reinventing the universe over and over.” The Walker has had a sustained relationship with Gaard since the mid-1970s, when it began collecting his work (some 20 works from the Walker collection are in this exhibition). Three major paintings were purchased in 2010, and the following year, Gaard gifted an important early painting currently on view in the Walker exhibition Midnight Party. The Walker also presented the exhibition Viewpoints—Frank Gaard: Paintings in 1980. Gaard was born in Chicago in 1944. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the California College of Arts & Crafts, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. He has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. His work has been shown in local, national, and international exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art New York.

The museum’s focus on modern art began in the 1940s, when a gift from Mrs. Gilbert Walker made possible the acquisition of works by important artists of the day, including sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and others. During the 1960s, the Walker organized increasingly ambitious exhibitions that circulated to museums in the United States and abroad. The Walker’s collections expanded to reflect crucial examples of contemporary artistic developments; concurrently, performing arts, film, and education programs grew proportionately and gained their own national prominence throughout the next three decades. Today, the Walker is recognized internationally as a singular model of a multidisciplinary arts organization and as a national leader for its innovative approaches to audience engagement. Adjacent to the Walker is the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, one of the nation’s largest urban sculpture parks. When the Garden opened in 1988, it was immediately heralded by the New York Times as “the finest new outdoor space in the country for displaying sculpture.” The Garden’s centerpiece and most popular work is Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–1988), which has become a beloved symbol of the Twin Cities. The Garden has demonstrated extraordinary appeal in the community, and is a vital force for bringing new visitors inside the Walker and building new audiences for contemporary art. More than 15,000 people attended the Walker’s Rock the Garden concert and 15th-anniversary celebration in June 2003. The Walker’s expansion, which was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, opened in April 2005. The increased indoor and outdoor facilities, including the William and Nadine McGuire Theater, allow the Walker to share more of its resources with its growing audiences—from objects in the collection and books in the library to an inside view of the artist’s own creative process. Increasingly, this ability to link ideas from different disciplines and art forms is seen as a model for cultural institutions of the future. A key aspect of the design is a “town square,” a sequence of spaces that, like the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, draws people for informal conversation, interactive learning, and community programs. Today the Walker Art Center ranks among the five most-visited modern/contemporary art museums in the United States and, together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, attracts more than 600,000 visitors per year.

The Walker's permanent collection has its origins in the mid-1870s with acquisitions made by lumber magnate Thomas Barlow Walker, who built an eclectic personal collection ranging from European paintings and sculpture to Asian porcelains, Chinese jade carvings, and Southwest Indian artifacts. In the 1940s, the Walker's focus on contemporary art began with the acquisition of works by important artists of the day, including sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti and paintings by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Franz Marc. During the 1960s, the Walker formalized its commitment to contemporary art, and works by young artists such as Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, George Segal, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg were acquired; this commitment to nurturing artists early in their careers continues today. The highlights of these collections are numerous. Within the visual arts holdings of some 11,000 objects, there are Minimalist sculptures and paintings, including seven by Donald Judd, three by Dan Flavin, and two each by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin; these are augmented by drawings and prints in which the same artists explore their ideas on paper. There is a rich representation of the Italian Arte Povera movement, with works by eight of its major figures, and a concentration of paintings by the mid-century Japanese Gutai group--both unusual choices for an American museum. A large number of artists--including Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Ellsworth Kelly, Sherrie Levine, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol--are represented in depth, offering viewers an extended assessment of each career. Editioned works are a strong focus: there are more than 500 objects by the wide-ranging international group known as Fluxus, 500 multiples by influential German artist Joseph Beuys, and concentrations of prints and multiples by Katharina Fritsch, Sigmar Polke, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The Walker has the only complete archives of graphic works by Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell, as well as hundreds of prints from the archives of Tyler Graphics Workshop, which collaborated with such masters as Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Frank Stella. The Visual Arts Study Collection contains models, working drawings, and other preparatory materials related to objects within the larger holdings. Within the Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection, one finds nearly 800 titles, including an unusually rich group of experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Paul Sharits, and many others, as well as the complete catalogue of films by William Klein and a clutch of rare early-20th-century films from the Soviet Union. The Walker holds more than 1,200 artists' books and multiples as well as ada'web, an early and historically significant archive of Internet-based art. In the performing arts, choreographers Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Bill T. Jones together account for 21 residencies and 38 performances over five decades, and have been commissioned to make 11 new works--a significant contribution to the development of contemporary dance and an immeasurable enrichment of this community's cultural life. In recent years, the Walker has tended to collect around the edges of the obvious, distinguishing itself by embracing hybrid or otherwise unclassifiable works that might fall between the cracks in more traditional institutions. Visit the center's website at ... http://www.walkerart.org