John McCracken

A progenitor of Minimal sculpture on the West Coast, John McCracken once said, “my tendency is to reduce or develop everything to “single things;” things which refer to nothing outside, but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything.” While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases at the California College of Art in the late 1950s, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces that he was to become known for. Exploring the idea of spatiality through a diverse compendium of forms and tendencies, McCracken’s oeuvre is characterized by an ever-shifting relationship to both architecture and the body of the viewer.

Emerging onto the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, McCracken’s early works were included in groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum, New York (1966), and “American Sculpture of the Sixties” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967). At this time he began to produce his signature sculptural form, “planks,” and continued to produced them throughout his career. These narrow monochromatic, rectangular board-shaped sculptures lean against the wall while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm of the viewer. In contrast to these works’ stark simplicity, his practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s demonstrate a preoccupation with irregularly shaped and multi-surfaced structures. At the end of his career, in 2011, McCracken returned to the original plank form, but fabricated in a stainless steel and polished to such a high degree of reflectivity that the works seem translucent and camouflaged, bordering on invisibility as they reflect their surroundings.

Major surveys of McCracken’s work have been hosted at  P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) in Newport Beach, University of California in Irvine, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Castello di Rivoli in Turin. McCracken’s work has been prominently featured in major group exhibitions worldwide, including “Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957-1968” at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, documenta 12 in Kassel, “The Los Angeles Art Scene, 1955-1985” at Centre Georges Pompidou, and “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968” at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Courtesy of David Zwirner