Schlossberg’s inventive use of poetry, images, and unconventional materials on display in “Assignments and Earlier Works” at Ronald Feldman Gallery from Jan. 12 to Feb. 13 2019

New York, NY (January 2, 2019) – Fifty years after Edwin Schlossberg first exhibited work at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1968, a career-spanning show opening in New York City on January 12, 2019 will put a fresh spotlight on how Schlossberg continues to invent new ways of combining poetry, images, and unconventional materials to create original visual and linguistic worlds.

Taking place at Ronald Feldman Gallery, which has represented Schlossberg since 1978, “Assignments and Earlier Works” marks Schlossberg’s first solo gallery show since “Beneath Suddenly” in 2012. The show runs until February 13, 2019.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Assignments,” a series of new works exploring how the tension between truth and beauty can lead to contemplation, inspiration, and action. Created with acrylic paint and Scotchlite film on aluminum panels, the new works use color, form, and adjacencies that are neither fully representational or abstract to engage with the concepts of truth and beauty and suggest ways of acting and seeing that may seem unfamiliar. Works in this series include Measure Human by Ecosystem Health and Vigilant for the Rule of Law.

“Earlier Works” is a selection of 18 works, some of which have never been shown before. The paintings, sculptures, and word art capture Schlossberg’s ever-evolving experimentation with unconventional media and alchemy, including aluminum, vinyl, Plexiglas, copper, Scotchlite, highway sign sheeting, rice paper, bronze, and liquid crystal (whose colors change depending on ambient or applied temperature).

“By bringing Edwin’s latest work together with highlights from his long career,” says Ronald Feldman, “audiences now have an opportunity to fully appreciate Edwin’s artistry and innovation in pushing the boundaries and connections between art, poetry, and materials.”

The exhibition accompanies the launch of Edwin Schlossberg Art (www.edwinschlossbergart.com), the online collection of 400 artworks from Schlossberg’s influential five-decade artistic career. The works include collaborations with friends from the 1960s New York art scene, like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist, and pieces in the collections of public institutions, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Together, “Assignment and Earlier Works” and the Edwin Schlossberg Art website give audiences a look at another side of Schlossberg, who is well-known for the work of his experience design studio, ESI Design. Under his leadership, ESI Design has created large-scale interactive environments and exhibits for the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate, eBay, Comcast, and the Statue of Liberty Museum, opening in 2019.

When Schlossberg began his artistic career fifty years ago, he quickly became known for experimenting with words and images in untraditional ways. Some of his earliest works were poems written using a typewriter on aluminum foil. His first book, WORDSWORDSWORDS, with an introduction by Rauschenberg, was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in 1968. The poems were presented in an aluminum box, and the last poem, printed on four sheets of Plexiglas, broke apart when the reader picked it up. It has since been exhibited all over the world and editions are now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ivorypress Museum, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art in New York; New York Public Library; and the New Wight Gallery at UCLA.

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