ART/New York Videotapes Series Announcement Card

A historical 1980s announcement card published on the occasion of Videotapes of the 1982-83 Art Season ART/New York.

• Features a who’s who list in New York artists including, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden and Nam June Paik.
• Offset printed folded announcement.
• This work is presented unframed.

Keith Haring rose to prominence in 1980s New York within the East Village art scene alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Jenny Holzer. He bridged the gap between the art world and the street, graffiting city subways and sidewalks before committing to a studio practice. Haring united the appeal of cartoons with the raw energy of Art Brut artists such as Jean DuBuffet as he developed a distinct pop-graffiti aesthetic that comprised energetic, boldly outlined figures against solid or patterned backdrops. His major themes included exploitation, subjugation, drug abuse, and the threat of nuclear holocaust; Haring boldly engaged with social issues, especially after receiving an AIDS diagnosis in 1987. Today, his work sells for seven figures at auction and has been the subject of solo shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Broad Museum Los Angeles and the Albertina Museum in Vienna, among other key institutions.

Julian Schnabel (America, b.1951) is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer, best known in the art community for his hasty rise to fame after the exhibition of his famous Plate Paintings at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979. Encouraged to draw by his mother during his childhood in Brooklyn, Schnabel’s artistic interest piqued as a teenager when he encountered the art of the Mexican muralists. After earning his BFA at Houston University in 1973, Schnabel enrolled in the very prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum, and began his career as an artist. Rapidly achieving notoriety in the late 1970s, Schnabel became the infamous star of the internationalist Neo-Expressionist movement in the 1980s, with his works on unusual materials such as velvet, and garnering as much attention through his brash remarks and self-aggrandization as through his art. Along with fellow Neo-Expressionists David Salle (American, b.1952), Eric Fischl (American, b.1948), and Sigmar Polke (German, 1941–2010), Schnabel’s art can be seen as a reaction against the cool compositions of Minimalism and Conceptualism, in its rough texture and violently expressive return to addressing the human condition in painting. In 1996, he began a career as a filmmaker with Basquiat and his movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly based on the novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby had a great success. Since 2010, a selection of his Polaroids taken since 2002 has been held in London, Milan and Paris, which are repainted to underline the highlights of the pictures. He still lives and works in New York.

Robert Rauschenberg was a prominent member of the American Post-War avant-garde. The artist’s sculpture-painting hybrids, known as Combines, broke through the two dimensionality of the canvas at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the scene. His seminal Neo-Dada work, Erased de Kooning (1953), consisted of ritualistically wiping out an original drawing he purchased from the famed painter. “I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones,” he once said. “Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.” Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, TX, he was drafted into the Navy during World War II where he served as medical technician in San Diego. After the war, he traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian on the GI bill, where he met his future wife, Susan Weil. The pair went on to attend the Black Mountain College in North Carolina alongside John Cage and Merce Cunningham. After settling in New York in 1949, Rauschenberg began questioning the nature of painting through works such as Bed (1955) and Monogram (1955–1959), which utilized commercial imagery and mass produced objects. Many of the artist’s ideas foresaw the emergence of Andy Warhol and Pop Art in the 1960s. The artist died on May 12, 2008 in Captiva, FL. Rauschenberg’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.

Brice Marden is a contemporary American painter known for his subtle explorations of color and gestural lines. Like Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin, Marden’s canvases are the product of an ongoing investigation into the nature of abstraction and the medium of painting itself. “A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation,” the artist mused. “Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.” Born on October 15, 1938 in Bronxville, NY, Marden received his BFA from Boston University in 1961 and his MFA from Yale University in 1963, where he was taught by both Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. Marden’s early Minimalist works, such as The Dylan Painting (1966), gave way to the influence of Chinese calligraphy and the creation of his first gestural works—Cold Mountain paintings—during the late 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, The Museum of Modern Art mounted the large-scale exhibition “Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective,” which traveled on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art. The artist currently lives and works between Hydra, Greece and New York, NY. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.

Nam June Paik was an American-Korean artist widely credited as the founder of video art. “I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock, and as lyrically as Jasper Johns,” he declared in his 1969 manifesto. Born on July 20, 1932 in Seoul, Korea, he moved with his family to Japan at an early age, going on to study classical piano at the University of Tokyo. Later moving to Germany, he met the musicians John Cage and Karl Stockhausen, as well as the artists George Maciunas and Joseph Beuys. For his first solo show, “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television,” held at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, he used magnets to alter or distort multiple television screens. It was in 1964 in New York that he first began combining his visual and musical interests together. Collaborating with cellist Charlotte Moorman, he created one of his most influential works, TV Cello (1971), a performance piece which transformed a stack of televisions into a musical instrument. The artist was the recipient of several awards, including the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion in 1994 and the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award in 2001. He died on January 29, 2006 in Miami, FL. Today, Paik’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.