John McCracken (1934-2011) occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as his work melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. McCracken developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces for which he was to become known. As he described his practice, "In distilling my ideas I was doing something analogous to making poetry—trying, in a way, to say the most with the least."1
Beginning in the 1960s, McCracken exhibited steadily in the United States and abroad, and his early work was included in groundbreaking exhibitions such as Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York (1966), and American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967). In 1986, the major survey Heroic Stance: The Sculpture of John McCracken 1965–1986 was organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, and traveled to the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art), Newport Beach, California; Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. In 2011, his work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Other significant solo shows include those hosted by the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1995); Kunsthalle Basel (1995); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2004); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2009); and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, England (2012).
McCracken’s work has been prominently featured in major group exhibitions worldwide, including A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004); The Los Angeles Art Scene, 1955–1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); and Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957–1968, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008). Additionally, the artist’s work was in three shows organized as part of the 2011 region-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California.
McCracken joined David Zwirner in 1997. During his lifetime, the artist had seven solo exhibitions with the gallery in New York, including Sculpture (1997); Stainless Steel Sculptures (2000); Early Sculpture (2005); and New Works in Bronze and Steel (2010), among others. In 2013, Works from 1963–2011, which was on view at the West 20th Street location in New York, marked the gallery’s most comprehensive presentation to date of the artist’s work. In 2017, David Zwirner presented a solo exhibition in New York of key examples from three discrete groups of McCracken’s work—leaning multipart wall pieces, wall-mounted multipart reliefs, and freestanding columns. The two-person exhibition, William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories, was on view at David Zwirner, New York in 2021. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work is currently on view at David Zwirner, Los Angeles.
Work by the artist is held in prominent international collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Harbor, California; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1 John McCracken and Matthew Higgs, "Interview," in Early Sculpture/John McCracken. Exh. cat. (New York: Zwirner & Wirth, 2005), p. 8.
November 23, 2021–March 20, 2022
Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022) offered museumgoers the opportunity to experience a distinctly West Coast style of art on the East Coast, presenting work by artists affiliated with the Light and Space movement and related “finish fetish” works with highly polished surfaces. The exhibition, which opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art on November 23, 2021, is one of the most comprehensive ever assembled of these artists and highlighted works that explore perceptual phenomena via interactions with light and space. Drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Light, Space, Surface featured a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to immersive environments.
Inspired in part by the car and surf cultures that dominated Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s—as well as a multitude of other sources—many Los Angeles-based artists pioneered new technologies and utilized the revolutionary materials developed in the region’s growing aerospace industry, including sheet acrylic, fiberglass, and polyester resin, to produce the reduced, crisp, and clean forms essential to their works. While there was no single defining aesthetic among this varied and loose-knit group, these artists, from Mary Corse and John McCracken to Fred Eversley and James Turrell, shared a common interest in investigating how we understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light, whether seen directly or refracted, reflected, and/or viewed through other materials.
“Transforming the viewer from passive observer to active participant, the reflective surfaces, glossy finishes, and shimmering colors of these works demand close examination and multisensory engagement. Placing emphasis on the experience of the object rather than the object itself, these artists ask us to consider not what we see, but how we see.”
—Allison Kemmerer, the interim director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Mead Curator of Photography, and senior curator of contemporary art
Learn more at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
March 9–April 17, 2021
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by William Eggleston and John McCracken—the first time these two iconic American artists have been featured together. On view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York, True Stories places Eggleston and McCracken into dialogue around their expressive use of color and light, and their distinct versions of American vernacular culture.
When considered together, these works reveal synchronicities between their unique visions:
John McCracken’s pedestal works and planks can be likened to everyday objects while William Eggleston’s photographs convey pure color and form. Found within McCracken’s imbued spirituality and Eggleston’s embrace of the spiritual banal are stories of the American psyche, from the heroic to the mundane.
Learn more here.
November 16, 2018–April 14, 2019
Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. (2018–2019) looks at the emergence, development, and legacies of Minimalism from the 1950s to the present day. It considers how artists in Asia, the United States, and Europe have explored ideas of presence and absence, often informed by Asian philosophies such as Zen Buddhism. The exhibition features major works by over sixty artists, including Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, John McCracken, Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, and Haegue Yang.
Led by National Gallery Singapore, the exhibition features over 150 works from across four continents that explore the history and legacy of this groundbreaking art movement, which continues to inform a wide range of art forms and practitioners across the world today.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by the exhibition curators and international contributors, alongside conversations with artists, opening a forum for contemporary readings of this dynamic, multivalent, and pivotal movement.
Learn more at the National Gallery of Singapore.
January 27–August 5, 2018
Taking its title from the classic Bruce Brown surf movie from 1966, Endless Summer offers a snapshot of the seductive minimalism that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Influenced by a distinctly Southern California culture of automobiles, surfboards, and slick commercial products, the West Coast artists of the Finish Fetish aesthetic and the Light and Space movement sought to capture the enigmatic interchange between industry and atmosphere. Distinct from the East Coast variant of minimalism that was emerging at the same time, the West Coast artists embraced new materials such as fiberglass, plastic, and resin instead of steel, iron, and lead, and they reveled in the vagaries of perception rather than objective facts.
Featured Artists in the exhibition include:Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, and Edward Ruscha.
Learn more at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
June 19–August 28, 2016
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of MoMA PS1, which was established in a former school building in Queens in 1976, the museum invited back its founding director Alanna Heiss to organize a show paying tribute to its inaugural exhibition, Rooms. Titled FORTY (2016), the show brought together the work of about forty artists, each of whom had been instrumental to the institution’s early years and many of whom had also participated in Rooms (1976).
FORTY features work by Cecile Abish, Laurie Anderson, Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Daniel Buren, Colette, Ron Gorchov, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, David Hammons, Jene Highstein, Nancy Holt, Bill Jensen, Richard “Dickie” Landry, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, John McCracken, Mary Miss, Max Neuhaus, Richard Nonas, Brian O’Doherty, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Howardena Pindell, Robert Ryman, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Judith Shea, Charles Simonds, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, Michelle Stuart, Lawrence Weiner, Doug Wheeler, Jackie Winsor, and Robert Yasuda.
Learn more at MoMA PS1.
May 1–September 27, 2015
Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See (2015) took the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborated on the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon.
America Is Hard to See reflects the Whitney’s distinct record of acquisitions and exhibitions, which constitutes a kind of collective memory—one that represents a range of individual, sometimes conflicting, attitudes toward what American art might be or mean or do at any given moment. By simultaneously mining and questioning our past, we do not arrive at a comprehensive survey or tidy summation but rather at a critical new beginning: the first of many stories still to tell.
Learn more at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
January 31–March 5, 2015
This exhibition placed two complementary, yet significantly autonomous aesthetic positions in dialogue: that of Florian Hecker, the German artist and computer composer, and that of American sculptor John McCracken. The works of both artists probe the experiential capacity of the exhibition space—a white cube—through somatic and conceptual interjections. McCracken’s luminous, monochromatic Planks rest between the floor and the wall, occupying a hybrid position as both painting and sculpture and acting as a bridge between the world of the physical and that of the cognitive.
In a sharp counterpoint, Florian Hecker dramatizes space, time, and the perception of sound through his computer-generated sound pieces under live exhibition conditions. The structures of his compositions unfold in a specific constellation of loudspeakers hanging from the ceiling. Series of sometimes pointillist, sharp, extremely dynamic, specifically acoustic experiences simultaneously evoke sensations, memories, and associations of three-dimensional, unpredictable intensity. Viewer, sound, and the exhibition space itself, whose auratic definition has been pierced, become an amalgamation, which does not provide any ideal perspective of the compositions, despite all of its formal and structural clarity.
Learn more at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–)
John McCracken
John McCracken
John McCracken
John McCracken
John McCracken
John McCracken
Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition of McCracken's work at David Zwirner in New York in 2013, this publication charts the evolution of the artist's diverse oeuvre. The book encompasses both well-known and lesser-seen examples of his work from the early 1960s up until his death in 2011 including sculptures, paintings, and sketches. Featuring an interview with the artist by Anne Reeve and new scholarship by art historian Robin Clark, it also includes reproductions of archival and documentary material discovered during the curatorial process, from sketches by the artist to gallery invitation cards, early catalogue covers, and historic photographs, as well as installation views of the show.
John McCracken occupies a singular position in the recent history of American art with work that melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. He developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin to create the smooth, highly reflective surfaces he has become known for.
Published by David Zwirner Books