Robert Cottingham
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Tandem Press 1743 Commercial Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53704
press release: An American Alphabet
Tandem Press Apex Gallery, 1743 Commercial Avenue, Madison, WI 53704
March 2-April 12, 2018. Reception for the artist: Wednesday, April 4, 2018; 5-7 PM
Tandem Press Apex Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 AM-5 PM; Saturdays 10 AM-1 PM
Tandem Press is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Robert Cottingham – An American Alphabet at the Tandem Press Apex Gallery. In 1996, Robert Cottingham approached Tandem Press about undertaking the creation of “An American Alphabet.” During a residency in March 1997 he did two lithographs of the letters F and K. He returned that October and added D and J to the portfolio. In 2012, Tandem Press completed this incredible project. In addition, Robert Cottingham wrote about the origins of each letter and both the images and his writings appear in an illustrated catalogue which accompanies the exhibit.
When Robert Cottingham was twelve years old, he had an epiphany. He calls it a “seminal moment,” a major experience that set the course for what he has been doing ever since. The moment took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York when, wandering through the galleries, he encountered Edward Hopper’s painting, “Early Sunday Morning.”
Cottingham recalled the experience during a lecture he gave in conjunction with a visit to Tandem Press. He stated: “It was the first time I realized that a painting could talk to you. Here was something that was feeding back to me. I had discovered another language-a silent language. It not only determined how I would paint- that I would be a realist painter- but it determined what I would paint.” He later found further influence and inspiration in the graphic styles represented in works by Piet Mondrian, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, and the urban atmosphere of George Tooker.
Over the years, he arrived at a conclusion about the direction his art would take. It harkened back to his encounter with Hopper as well as his professional experience. “I had decided by now that I was interested in the urban subject matter. I would stay in the city because that was where I was from. Basically, I’m an American landscape painter and this is my landscape.”
It also was at this time that Cottingham, recalling his childhood visits to Times Square, began to sense that there was something going on above eye level on the streets. It manifested itself in the signs above the storefronts and building entrances. It was a whole world of communication, “messages being fired back and forth above the store windows.” It reflected what he characterizes as “a golden age of outdoor signage,” something that is an integral part of the American experience. It led to the series he calls “An American Alphabet.”
He gathered material for the series after he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974. He took a Greyhound bus excursion through the Northeast, photographing in 27 cities and gathering thousands of slides in the process.
The slides provided the visual text for the alphabet series. Cottingham initially did two sets of the series, paintings in oil, and then gouache. At Tandem, he approached “An American Alphabet” series in a gradual way, anticipating that he would work on the project over a period of years. While he has focused on other media throughout the course of his artistic career, Cottingham has noted that he is no stranger to printmaking. Since 1972 he has done nearly 80 prints. He enjoys the collaboration that comes with doing prints and the fact that it allows him to get out of his studio.
For Cottingham, “An American Alphabet” is a cultural and historical document, something that captures a part of the human-made environment. “I’m not interested in the age of things,” he says. “I’m interested in the fact that they’re disappearing.” He also sees an aesthetic dimension in what he is doing with the letters in the series. “I think of them as formal arrangements. They’re almost an excuse to make an image and play with form, color, and line.”
Robert Cottingham (b. 1935) was born in Brooklyn, New York and received his BFA degree from the Pratt Institute. He later studied art at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Although he is known for his photorealistic depictions of signs, storefront marquees, railroad boxcars and letter forms, Cottingham does not consider himself a photorealist artist. His imagery, while derived from the photographs he takes, expands on the photographic image, it does not replicate it. Works by Robert Cottingham are in the collections of every important museum in America and Europe including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Boymans-von Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Hamburg Museum, Germany; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Tate Gallery, London, England; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A retrospective of Robert Cottingham’s print work was organized and exhibited by the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC in 1998. In 2016, the Butler Institute of American Art held a major, career-spanning exhibition of Cottingham’s paintings.
The Tandem Press Apex Gallery has been made possible through the generosity of Apex Property Management who donated the space, and Paula and David Kraemer who funded the renovation of the space.
Tandem Press was founded in 1987 and is affiliated with the Department of Art in the School of Education at the UW-Madison. It brings in internationally renowned artists who use its facilities to create editions of prints and interact with graduate and undergraduate students. The Press is one of only four professional presses affiliated with a university in the United States, and is internationally renowned, with Tandem prints hanging in museums and corporations across the country, Europe and China.