Kate MacGarry is pleased to announce B. Wurtz’s first solo exhibition in London. Wurtz has spent over forty years crafting simple yet deeply considered works of art. Skilfully combining existing, commonplace things with raw materials, his work is characterised by paradoxical imagery: rigorous and delicate, crude and poised, classical and totemic.
Wurtz uses found objects such as socks, plastic bags and shoelaces, alongside more traditional art materials such as wood, metal and marble. Such juxtapositions in Wurtz’s work make lowly materials icons of ordinariness. The exhibition will feature works from 1970 to the present day including Untitled (Autobiographical Sculpture), 1972, made with found wood elements that track significant events in the artist’s life to that moment. The show will also include his Garment series made during the 1980s: blocks of painted colour on flat canvas with a t-shirt motif.
‘I feel like most of my work over the years has been at least somewhat autobiographical. I think part of that comes from my interest in what it is inside of me that makes me want to make art. However, I always wanted that impulse in my work to be kept to a minimum. I am really interested in more universal subject matter, things we all share by being human.’ B. Wurtz
B. Wurtz was born in Pasadena, California in 1948 and lives in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Recent Works, Metro Pictures, New York in 2013, Bulletin Boards, Venus Over Manhattan, New York in 2012, B. Wurtz & Co. (curated by Matthew Higgs) Richard Telles Gallery, Los Angeles in 2012 and Moment – Ynglingagatan 1, Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2011. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1970 and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia from 1980.
