San Francisco, CA | Walkthrough of Forms Unbound: Peter Young and Maren Hassinger at Gallery Wendi Norris

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles) has built an expansive practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subject of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. Wire rope has played a prominent role in Maren Hassinger’s artistic practice since the early 1970s when, as a sculptor placed in the Fiber Arts program at UCLA, Hassinger used the material to bridge the gap between the two disciplines. The artist often takes a biomimetic approach to her material, whether bundling it to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting it in cement to create an industrial garden. Within the past five years, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone), Dia Bridgehampton, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Aspen Art Museum. Her work is currently installed at Dia Beacon and at Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton. Hassinger will be honored with an upcoming two-person survey alongside Senga Nengudi at IVAM, Valencia, as well as participation in an upcoming exhibition at The Met. Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum, NYC, among others.

Peter Young (b. 1940, Pittsburgh) grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Pomona College for two years before moving to New York in 1960. Young’s paintings have continuously defied categorization since his early New York years showing with Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy. He has been described variously as the first post-modernist painter, as well as a minimalist and an abstract surrealist. From the beginning, his paintings have addressed the rigid formal criteria of minimal art that prevailed in the 1960’s. Following his first two solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1970 at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery, Young then exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Oil & Steel Gallery in Tribeca in 1984. Through Bellamy’s interest in Young’s work, it came to the attention of then P.S.1 Director, Alanna Heiss, and in 2007 the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center dedicated a comprehensive survey exhibition to the artist’s work, accompanied by a monograph, focusing on the period between 1963 and 1977. His work has been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Guggenheim, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; as well as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom; Rolf Ricke, Cologne; and Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany. Peter Young’s work is featured in collections, including the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; the American University, Washington D.C.; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; University of Texas, Austin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

About Gallery Wendi Norris: Gallery Wendi Norris is a leading international art gallery with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The gallery holds decades-long relationships with 20th-century luminaries such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon, artists whose nomadic and visionary practices interrogated the aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical movements of their times. The gallery also represents María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, Eva Schlegel, Peter Young, and other contemporaries, artists whose work similarly flows across disciplines, continents, and generations as they speculate on the present moment. Opened in 2002, Gallery Wendi Norris remains committed to its founding principles of rigorous programming, development of artists’ legacies, public accessibility, and cultural significance. To those ends, the gallery hosts visiting academics, sponsors artist talks, and publishes highly-researched books with original contributions from international scholars. The gallery actively supports artists in engaging new audiences through influential commercial, biennial, and institutional collaborations. Pioneering an offsite exhibition model in 2017, the gallery produces public-facing artworks and shows wherever they might reach the widest viewership and provide the deepest impact. Working in concert with major museums, private collectors, and innovative curators, Gallery Wendi Norris builds enduring, well-represented collections for its respected array of international clients.