In 2012, Pace Gallery exhibited twelve large-scale paintings by Adolph Gottlieb completed between 1954 and 1972 in an exhibition titled Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion. The title references a 1963 article written by Martin Friedman, Director of the Walker Art Center, in which Friedman discusses the development of Gottlieb's painting during the early 1960s and his use of "a few powerful forms, nuclei suspended in tension." The 2012 exhibition included three major works loaned from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Below, we have documented installation images, press reviews, and segments of the catalogue essay by Pepe Karmel to highlight Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion.

"In 'The Red', from 1972, Gottlieb demonstrated his gift for combining absence and presence in the same composition. The small black sun set against an almost empty field recalls the emptiness of his 1959 'Aftermath'. The void is alleviated only by the appearance of the artist's 'monogram' at lower right, and by the richness of the painting's facture. The red-brown field has been applied with swirling brushstrokes, creating constant microscopic variations in density."
–Pepe Karmel in the exhibition catalogue for Gravity, Suspension, Motion

"Over the last two decades of his career, Gottlieb had demonstrated that Abstract Expressionism did not, after all, need to be a subjective style. As the critic Emily Genauer noted in 1959, he took the visual language of the age–the huge canvases, the compressed spaces, and the bravura brushwork– and used it to make a statement about the world."
–Pepe Karmel in the exhibition catalogue for Gravity, Suspension, Motion

"Gottlieb used the language of painting to evoke these qualities of the physical environment [Gravity, Suspension, Motion], determining the conditions of our existence as human beings. The artists of the next generation set out to explore them via performance, installation, and sculpture. Whether or not they chose to recognize the debt, they were Adolph Gottlieb's heirs. His legacy remains alive today in the environmental installations of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson. What they achieve with tungsten lights, fog generators, huge mirrors, and artificial waterfalls, he achieved with paint and canvas. In an era when artists felt that painting had reached its limits, Gottlieb showed how much it still had left to say."
–Pepe Karmel in the exhibition catalogue for Gravity, Suspension, Motion

PRESS:

Below is a selection of reviews and discussions of Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion in the press:

"The paintings reveal the extraordinary range of Gottlieb's these and motifs, showcasing a diversity that he first explored in the 50s and continued to modify and deepen through his late work. The exhibition includes examples from the primary series of Gottlieb's mature work–Labyrinths, Bursts, and Imaginary Landscapes–highlighting the dialogue between the three bodies of work as he made subtle but significant variations to a few familiar formats over three decades. Together, the paintings convey the persistent inventiveness that spanned Gottlieb's five-decade career."
–Art Daily, "Abstract-Expressionist Painter Adolph Gottlieb’s Mature Work on View at The Pace Gallery'', April 2, 2012

"The works' monumental prettiness seems to have a philosophical depth to it, and more than a hint of metaphysical truth. In 'Spray' (1959), this can be seen in the way in which a slightly flat-sided black oval with a gray penumbra hovers, on a rich brown ground, over a wild yellow burst."
–Peter Plagens in ''Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion'', The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2012

SELECTED ARTWORK SHOWN: