LARRY RIVERS: (RE)APPROPRIATIONS

“I’ll try to put it another way,” he said. “When I look at a thing, it isn’t
love of reality, or feeling for objects or people, or love or death or
anything like that that I’m trying to express. It’s the looking itself that
interests me. Working from that is my way of painting.”

- Larry Rivers in Conversations with Artists, Selden Rodman 1961

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is honored to present a dynamic exhibition of works by Larry Rivers
spanning from the mid-1950s to the late 1990s. The exhibition surveys a broad range of
inventive methods and materials employed by Rivers over the course of his career: intimate
works of graphite, collage, large-scale paintings, life-size sculptures and foam-sculpted reliefpaintings.
Just a dozen blocks south of the artist’s former studio on 14th Street, the gallery is
proud to host the exhibition in its new downtown location at 15 Rivington Street. This is the
fourth Larry Rivers exhibition since the gallery began representing the Rivers Estate in 2008.

At first glance, Larry Rivers’ diverse and varied visual modalities may appear disparate. Almost
immediately Larry Rivers developed a unique artistic language of interdisciplinary practices.
From Rivers’ early flirtations with Abstract Expressionism he would go on to trail-blaze the
appropriation of pop imagery and incorporate newly available materials into his working
vocabulary. Materiality was but one aspect of the artist’s heterogeneous interests: history,
poetry, politics, sexuality, fashion and the private & public spheres. An erudite and
autodidactic thread runs through his visual investigations. Employing such tropes as master
copying and “vocabulary lessons” as a basis for art-making, he often returned to those works
as generative for his own point of departure. With the aid of historical distance and curated
juxtapositions this exhibition re-contextualizes and clarifies the creative diversity of Larry
Rivers’ oeuvre.

Rivers was born in the Bronx as Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg. He changed his name to Larry Rivers
in 1940 as he moonlighted as a jazz musician while studying music theory and composition at
the Juilliard School of Music. He began painting in 1945, studying with Hans Hofmann and at
New York University. The artist’s work has been widely exhibited and collected throughout the
world. Within the last four years, seminal works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art,
the Whitney Museum, the City Museum of New York, the Smithsonian Museum and the
Brooklyn Museum. His paintings are included in major museum collections, including the
Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American