"The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time."
-Adolph Gottlieb in "The Ideas of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness" The Tiger's Eye, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1947

In 2001, the first European survey exhibition of Adolph Gottlieb's work was held by the The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Centre Julio González. Adolph Gottlieb. A Survey Exhibition was the inaugural show displayed in the IVAM's "Sala Trapezoidal" wing and displayed 39 of Adolph Gottlieb's paintings. After its debut at IVAM, the exhibition travelled to the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid, Spain, the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, and the Jewish Museum in New York, NY through 2003.

"The paintings Gottlieb created are those of an artist who is impatient with what he knows and who is committed to an incessant exploration of possibilities.”
- Kosmé de Barañano in the catalogue's Foreward

We invite you to learn and look at the art of Adolph Gottlieb, seen through the lens of this important 2001 survey exhibition via images, essays, and archival documents.

Shown: The invitations to openings of Adolph Gottlieb. A Survey Exhibition at various venues. From left to right: IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain, Juan March in Madrid, Spain, The Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, and the Jewish Museum in New York, NY.

"Gottlieb's activity, spanning a period of over fifty years, outreaches that of any of his companions in terms of time. He was one of the first artists to develop a consistent body of paintings which, in the case of his "Pictographs" in the early forties, reworked the premises of the European avant-garde movements."
-An excerpt from the exhibition's press release

RECEPTION OF THE EXHIBITION:

The exhibition was featured widely in American and Catalan newspapers. Below are excerpts from articles written in Cultura I Espectacles and El Cultural in February 2001 as well as other international publications.

Shown: (left) Ester Pinter, ''L’Expressionisme Abstracte de Gottlieb Arriba A L’IVAM'', Cultura I Espectacles, February 4, 2001. (center) R. Ventura Melià, ''La Pintura Abstracta de Gottlieb Abre El Nuevo Espacio del IVAM'', unknown publication, February 2, 2001. (right) Rafa Marí. ''El IVAM Amplía Sus Posibilidades Con Una Nueva Sala de Espacio Versátil'', Las Provincias, February 2, 2001.

"Gottlieb reverses the usual cosmological symbolism that depicts the sun as a generative force bringing life to the dead earth. On the contrary, in his pictures it is the terrestrial sphere that pulses with creative energy, while the sun is a morbid, glowering presence.
There turns out to be no dramatic moment of conversion in Gottlieb's career, no definitive point where he leaves behind metaphysical painting and arrives at Abstract Expressionism. What there is instead is a moment of contraction: Gottlieb takes everything he's achieved in painting and squeezes it into a ball."
-Pepe Karmel in a 2001 review of the exhibition published in Artforum

"Gottlieb's large canvases have premiered in IVAM's bright hall with a trapezoidal structure divided in two levels."
-Ester Pinter in Cultura I Espectacles

"In short: we know how to feel it, we know how to read it, but there is something that worries us, something floating in the air that makes us resist an omnipotent rhetoric. But, at the same time, we have to recognize the poetic and transcendental dimension of Gottlieb's work that manifests his belief in the need to redeem contemporary experience."
-Kevin Power in El Cultural, February 7, 2001

SELECTION OF ARTWORK FROM THE EXHIBITION: