The UBS Art Gallery

Organized by the Lincoln Center/List Collection and sponsored by UBS

On view at The UBS Art Gallery, May 1 – July 25, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, May 8, 2008

NEW YORK CITY, March 2008 — In honor of the upcoming 50^th anniversary of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The UBS Art Gallery (1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York City) will present a collection of rarely seen works by contemporary artists from May 1 through July 25, 2008. On Paper: The Lincoln Center/List Collection will be the first comprehensive exhibition of works from the List Fine Art Poster & Print Program, which commissions leading visual artists to create posters and prints in tribute to Lincoln Center. The exhibition will feature more than 60 special edition prints and 10 fine art posters commissioned between 1962 and 2007 from artists such as Marc Chagall, Chuck Close, Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ben Shahn, Joel Shapiro and Andy Warhol.

On Paper will celebrate the vision of founder Vera List, whose support of emerging artists and desire to introduce the public to innovative works led to the creation of many groundbreaking pieces on view in the show. An early supporter of the development of Lincoln Center with her husband Albert, Vera List proposed a visual arts program for the new performing arts center inspired by the European posters that enticed patrons to attend the opera, ballet, theater and film.

On Paper: The Lincoln Center/List Collection is made possible by UBS.

Mrs. List visited galleries and studios meeting with artists and dealers to commission posters, leaving style, subject matter and print medium to be determined by the individual artists. Having innovative works of art promote the performances at Lincoln Center was key to the development of her idea. The List Collection program was launched in 1962 with a dynamic serigraph poster by Ben Shahn, featuring an energetic organist, that announced the grand opening of Philharmonic Hall. Other early posters by Marc Chagall, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, which publicized or commemorated Lincoln Center programming, will also be on view in the exhibition.

In 1970, the List Collection broadened its scope by publishing the first signed and numbered print edition, a lithograph by James Rosenquist of three strips of film rendered in bright primary colors. Ever since, the List Collection has produced four to six signed editions of prints each year, and has become one of the longest continually publishing print programs in the country. A highlight of the program on view at The UBS Art Gallery will be a suite of six screen prints by the abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler dating from 1996 to 2005, which constitutes the largest single-artist holding in the List Collection.

The exhibition includes works from movements spanning the last five decades of contemporary art, including Minimalism, Pop Art, Color Field and Abstract Expressionism. Jennifer Bartlett’s Houses (2005) treats a simple view of three houses, rendered using small dots of bright color, realistically and as an abstraction. Vija Celmins is represented in the exhibition by an image of water entitled Ocean With Cross #1 (2005). In this natural photo-based scene, the composition lacks a point of reference or horizon, making the subject seem both particular and limitless at the same time.

Jules Olitski, a central figure in the development of abstract and Color Field painting, uses stains and sprays of dark color in his work Mozart Nights (1992). An untitled 1996 print by the sculptor Joel Shapiro is a dynamic composition of simple black rectangular shapes and one bright blue square clearly relating to his three dimensional work. Gerhard Richter’s piece Eis II (2003), literally translated as “ice,” features a white pigment pulled down over a darker field punctuated by incidents of color.