With You I Want to Live: Gordon Locksley & George T. Shea Collection

Gordon Locksley has amassed extraordinary holdings of contemporary art since 1960. He and business partner George Shea began their careers as art dealers, opening in 1964 the Locksley Shea Gallery in Minneapolis, representing artists who are now considered modern masters: Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Brice Marden. After leaving Minneapolis and living in Rome and Cannes, Gordon Locksley settled in Fort Lauderdale. He continues to actively collect and commission new work, some of monumental scale that will be on view for the first time in this installation.

The minimal art of the 1960s is a particularly strong suit of the Locksley collection. Gordon Locksley had a long association with Donald Judd, one of the twentieth century’s great artists. His sculpture made of industrial materials is neither representational nor referential. In addition to an aluminum wall sculpture (1985), the exhibition includes 16 pencil drawings from 1977. But it is the inclusion of an 11-panel polychromed Rain Wall (108 x 198 inches) made by Northwest American Indians commissioned by Judd for his SoHo apartment and recently acquired by Gordon Locksley, that underscores how personal and special this collection is.

Other prominent artists associated with this movement and included in the exhibition are Dan Flavin (red, yellow, blue, and green fluorescent light installation from 1987), Joel Fisher (100 drawings in pencil, charcoal, conte & found fiber on handmade paper, each 6x6 inches from 1977/83), Brice Marden (oil and wax canvases from 1971), and Robert Mangold (Four Triangles within a Square from 1974).

The exhibition also includes a 1964 installation by Robert Morris: a twelve-foot painted plywood board, stripped to its essential features which simply, yet dramatically, braces the corner of the room. This work is a recent gift to the Museum from Gordon Locksley.

The strong formalist approach is also seen in the bold and colorfully-constructed canvas (2006) by Anselm Reyle as well as Peter Halley’s thirteen-foot acrylic, day-glo, and pearlescent painted canvas (2003). The collection diverges stylistically with the bold Pop aesthetic of Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara; the graffiti artists Banksy, Nick Walker, Blek La Rat; and the Chinese artists Luo Weidong, Minjun Yue, and Wang Guangyi.

Tracey Emin’s eye-catching pink neon wall sculpture, With you I want to live (2007), immediately was realized as the appropriate title for the exhibition. The title plays on a certain ambiguity which is so much a part of Emin’s work, which is grounded within the feminist discourse that is very much the theme of the collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and includes two works by Tracey Emin – the video Finding Gold (1966), and I think it’s in my head, a blue and pink neon wall sculpture (2002).

These two exhibitions will each be accompanied by a publication featuring interviews with the collectors. With You I Want to Live inaugurates a series of exhibitions of private collections planned by the Museum. The Pearl and Stanley Goodman Collection of Latin American Art is scheduled to be on view from May through October 2010.

With You I Want to Live: Gordon Locksley & George T. Shea Collection

Künstler: Banksy , Tracey Emin, Joel Fisher, Dan Flavin, Peter Halley, Donald Judd, Blek Le Rat, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Robert Morris, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Anselm Reyle, Nick Walker, Andy Warhol, Luo Weidong, Minjun Yue, Wang Guangyi ...