H. C. Westermann: Goin' Home, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2019
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
H. C. Westermann: Goin' Home
The Museo Reina Sofía has organized, with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art, H. C. Westermann: Goin’ Home, the largest retrospective yet held in Europe on Horace Clifford Westermann
American artist Horace Clifford Westermann (Los Angeles, 1922 – Danbury, 1981) assembled a distinctive and singular body of sculptures. His works were predominantly made from wood through his masterly command of carpentry and cabinetmaking, yet he also used other techniques and materials such as metal, glass and enamelling with incredible precision. Without adhering to one particular style, Westermann was a maker of objects, of separate pieces: his sculptures, laden with meaning, often irony, result from the processing of experience, coalescing to yield specific fragments of reality.
It is the course of these fragments that the retrospective presented by the Museo Reina Sofía follows.
H.C. Westermann, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2017
Fondazione Prada
H. C. Westermann
The exhibition is structured around three thematic sections conceived and curated by Germano Celant as a whole – “Leon Golub”, “H. C. Westermann” and “Famous Artists from Chicago. 1965-1975”
Fondazione Prada will present at its Milan venue a research and information program on the Chicago art scene developed in the aftermath of World War II. The project is focused on the employment of a painting style characterized by political commitment, figurative narratives and radical graphics, and therefore rejected by mainstream New York culture – which was more interested in the abstract and impersonal dimensions of art.
The section devoted to H. C. Westermann reunites on the first floor of the Podium more than 50 sculptures of different dimensions, realized between the 50’s and the 80’s, along with a selection of works on paper.
Artforum
H. C. Westermann: Venus Over Manhattan
By Rachel Churner
Lined three deep on a massive table, the H. C. Westermann sculptures in this exhibition were stunning in their craftsmanship, blistering in their satire, and sometimes, as in the case of Walnut Box, 1964—a walnut box filled with walnuts—just plain funny. These small-scale constructions, some of the best that Westermann made, were accompanied here by forty-seven prints and drawings, two paintings, and eleven life-size assemblages.
Portrait of H.C. Westermann
Horace Clifford Westermann was born in 1922 in Los Angeles, California. He attended Los Angeles City College for two years before enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942, serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise during World War II in the Pacific. Following the war, Westermann enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, before reenlisting for a tour of duty in the Korean War. Upon his return, Westermann reenrolled at the Art Institute, and staged his debut solo exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in 1958. In 1959, he married the painter Joanna Beall, with whom he moved to Brookfield Center, Connecticut, in 1964. Westermann’s work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including recent exhibitions at the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work is held by many public institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Westermann lived and worked in Brookfield Center until his death in 1981.
“The Way I See It” features some of the greatest graphic artists of the 20th century, including Martín Ramírez, Jim Nutt, H.C. Westermann, R. Crumb, Yuichiro Ukai, and Susan Te Kahurangi King.
H.C. Westermann work acquired by the Saint Louis Art Museum
The gift introduces a number of artists into the collection, including H.C. Westermann.
Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.
H.C. Westermann is beloved for a type of sculpture that’s a potent mix of Dada and old, weird Americana. But this modest yet gripping exhibition also reveals that he was a marvelous draftsman with a sharp, satirical wit. Along one wall is a group of drawings, inspired by a road trip the artist took with his wife, that skewers 1960s fantasies of the Wild West.
A cross-shaped wooden box on a pedestal faced the entrance to this exhibition of H.C. Westermann’s sculptures, prints and drawings at Venus (formerly Venus Over Manhattan).
Lined three deep on a massive table, the H. C. Westermann sculptures in this exhibition were stunning in their craftsmanship, blistering in their satire, and sometimes, as in the case of Walnut Box, 1964—a walnut box filled with walnuts—just plain funny.
In many ways 2015 was a year of historical return for New York’s galleries, with successful exhibitions of the Memphis group (“wacky, boldly kitsch-adjacent design”), Hollis Frampton (“penetrating, conceptually-oriented photography”), and septuagenarian Lynn Hershman Leeson (“started making alliances between art and science well before trendy millennial artists”).
Even before there was Pop Art, Peter Saul was making it. Born in 1934, Saul gave birth to his idiosyncratic style while living in Paris and Rome in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Asked what one of his blazingly original assemblages meant, artist H.C. Westermann (1922–1981) replied, “It puzzles me, too. How can I explain a work like that?”
Mark Manders’s work makes a good argument for banishing the term “contemporary.” It’s a silly term.
Now on view at Venus Over Manhattan, See America First is an exhibition of over 80 sculptures and works on paper by H.C. Westermann created between 1953 and 1980.
Despite her having just closed three concurrent solo shows at the New York and L.A. locales of Venus (formerly Venus Over Manhattan and Venus Over Los Angeles) and Carl Freedman, the long, narrow space is bursting at the seams with brightly colored, electric paintings of watermelons, sharks, and bananas.
Consider that Westermann was a veteran of two major battles of the twentieth century - World War II and the Korean War - and those "charming little robots and Shaker-style objects that people call "nice" and "cute suddenly seem a lot more funereal, prosthetic, terrified.
H.C. Westermann: 'See America First: Works from 1953-1980' (through Dec. 19) No one who cares about contemporary art should miss this terrific exhibition of sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated letters by H.C. Westermann.
"See America First," a comprehensive exhibition of sculptures and drawings by the late, great H.C. Westermann, is on view now at Venus Over Manhattan. The installation features a wide range of Westermann's work, spanning from 1953 to 1980. Here are 11 Things You Need To Know about the artist before you visit the exhibition:
“Homage to American Art (Dedicated to Elie Nadelman)” is one of 38 sculptures in “See America First,” a terrific exhibition of works by the great American visionary H. C. Westermann (1922–1981) at Venus (formerly Venus Over Manhattan).
One of the latest hot young artists from America to grace these shores is Katherine Bernhardt, whose new paintings have virtually sold out at Carl Freedman’s Shoreditch gallery.
What does America look like? It depends on your perspective.
Check out our suggestions for the best art exhibitions you don’t want to miss, including gallery openings and more
NEW YORK, NY.- Venus presents See America First, an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by American artist, H.C. Westermann (b. Los Angeles, 1922–1981).
Venus Over Manhattan (980 Madison Avenue) has a show by "eccentric art world maverick" H.C. Westermann called "See America First" opening on November 2nd, 6 to 8 p.m., and up until December 19th.
