Rosenberg & Co
Art Concret Reliefs | Léon Tutundjian September 28 – December 22, 2023
Léon Tutundjian, installation view
The Armenian born artist Léon Tutundjian began his artistic education studying ceramics at the Istanbul School of Fine Arts. After arriving in Paris in the early 1920's, Tutundjian found work as a potter, which afforded him the financial ability to explore the Parisian avant-garde circles and cultivate his singular style. Throughout his lifetime, Tutundjian consistently fell back on his skills as a ceramicist for financial support, and despite seemingly abandoning pottery in his personal practice, the principles of ceramic production fostered a material dedication that remained central to his artistic practice throughout his oeuvre.
Tutundjian's emphasis on material is evident in the Tachisme techniques he explored in his early works on paper. This dedication, however, is most apparent in the wood and steel reliefs he created during the early stages of the Art Concret movement. Through these three-dimensional constructions, Tutundjian utilized a series of steel cylinders and bars to form cantilever compositions that exemplified a severe set of aesthetic ideals—later summarized by the Art Concret movements foundational text.
Image : Léon Tutundjian, Sans titre, 1929. Relief on a two-leveled panel.
| Though Tutundjian's official association with Art Concret began in 1930, his aesthetic connection to their ideals began as early as 1928 when the artist started exploring geometric abstraction through a series of works on paper. Within the following year, Tutundjian created approximately thirty mixed-media reliefs composed of cement, scrap steel, and wood mounted on board. The resulting compositions utilize the same material literacy that characterized his earlier works, alongside the refined consideration for balance that came to define his Art Concret works on paper.
Visible in the untitled relief, pictured above, Tutundjian's mixed media works employ delicate balance to exude a sense of lyrical premeditation. This tangible forethought was the defining characteristic of the Art Concret movement: to create a systematic format for non-figurative art. |
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Léon Tutundjian, Sans titre, 1929. Relief on a two-leveled panel. |
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The calculated materiality of these reliefs captured the attention of his contemporaries, specifically Jean Hélion, Theo van Doesburg, and Jean Arp. Notably, when describing a circular relief from 1929, Jean Arp pronounced it to be "the most beautiful thing I have seen in a while." Tutundjian's reliefs were considered to be so emblematic of the tenets of Art Concret that one was chosen to be the centerpiece of the movement's singular publication. Tutundjian's association with the Art Concrete movement was short lived, lasting only two years. The reliefs that Tutundjian made during this period, however, are superlative examples of the artist's severity and refinement, and are considered the most prolific of his career. Today, a number of these works are held in important public and private collections of modern art, including the Centre Pompidou and the Musée de Grenoble in France. |
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Léon Tutundjian, is accompanied by an eponymous catalogue featuring essays by Juan Manuel Bonet and Pierre Arnauld with an introduction by Marianne Rosenberg. September 2023 | $25 | Softcover 141 pages | ISBN 979-8-3507-1727-3 To purchase the catalogue, click http://www.rosenbergco.com/publications/21 Rosenberg & Co. 19 East 66th Street New York, NY 10065 212 202 3270 Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser. Hours: Monday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm |
