For Herb - Happy Birthday | Spencer Museum of Art

Jene Highstein

1942–2013

For Herb - Happy Birthday, 1992

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: watercolor; card stock; graphite

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 15.6 x 11.2 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 6 1/8 x 4 7/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 14 x 11 in

Credit line: The Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services

Accession number: 2009.0050

Not on display

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Exhibition Label: "NetWorks: Art and Artists from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection," Mar-2011, Susan Earle, Stephen Goddard, and SMA Interns In his sculptures and drawings, Jene Highstein generates a force of maximum presence from an extreme economy of means. His shapes are rendered in either grey stone or black pigment; they seem to float above the ground (earth or paper) with a weightless grace that belies their subtly bulging mass. Although it would be impossible see the back of this evocative two-dimensional black shape, Highstein makes us believe that we could. The artist explains, “I don't work with ideal forms. When you look at a cube and recognize it as such, you're already aware of what the other side will be like. When you look at a curved form you're not certain of what the other side will be like... I deal with a spatial reality that can't be grasped in its totality...