OPENING: Vaclav Cigler at Litvak Gallery exhibition curated by Yale’s Stephen Henry Madoff

Vaclav Cigler, Clear Pyramid, 2009. Optical glass. H 13, W 11 3/8, D 11 3/4 in. courtesy: litvak gallery, tel aviv

Opening on the evening of June 24th, at Litvak Gallery in Tel Aviv, Israel, “Light and Space in the Garden of Reason,” a major exhibition of the work of Slovak artist Vaclav Cigler, is curated by Senior Critic at the Yale University School of Art Stephen Henry Madoff. In his curatorial essay, Madoff presents Cigler as speaking a similar language to Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Stella, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Anne Truitt, who were exploring “the form of the experience” as Madoff presents Morris’s stance. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, were artists such as Cigler, who Madoff connects to the Minimalists, pointing out that “he, like them, worked strictly with industrial materials, like them chose abstract over figurative forms, like them sought in sculpture the indivisible form and the whole experience, and like them lingered in the garden of reason, of rational geometric shapes.”

Vaclav Cigler, Configuration of Two Prisms, 1979. H 9 1/3, W 9 1/.2, D 9 1/2, in. (each) courtesy: litvak gallery, tel aviv

Madoff maps out the many chronological parallels between the Minimalists wrestling with form and meaning, and what Cigler was working on. When Cigler is establishes the Glass in Architecture Studio at the Fine Arts and Design Academy in Bratislava, he “begins to underwrite a syntax of forms that parallels the work being done in New York; and yet his art belies a different use of Minimalist means to autobiographically, politically, and aesthetically different ends,” writes Madoff.

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