Assistants: Jennifer Bartlett, Tony Feher, David Gilbert, Wyatt Kahn & Elizabeth Murray
Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce Assistants, a curated group exhibition exploring the interconnected personal and professional lives of artists Jennifer Bartlett, Tony Feher, David Gilbert, Wyatt Kahn, and Elizabeth Murray.
The opening reception on Saturday 14 March begins at 3pm with exhibiting artists David Gilbert and Wyatt Kahn in dialogue with Daisy Murray Holman, Elizabeth Murray’s daughter and Executive Director of The Artists’ Legacy Foundation.
In a tradition dating back to the Renaissance, studio assistants play a crucial role in bringing an artist's work to fruition while receiving experience that frequently bridges formal art training to a professional art career.
Often transactional, the more rare and noteworthy relationships share both personal and professional connection and illustrate how influence and inspiration can enhance how artists on either side of the conversation think about their life and work.
In an extensive contemporary art world, the web of artists and their studio assistants easily tangles. Assistants walks one very particular line, investing in a specific thread of relationships.
Moving to New York City in 1981, Tony Feher worked for Jennifer Bartlett from 1985 through the early 1990’s; mainly based in her NYC studio but also spending time in Paris, where Jennifer lived and worked for 6 months of each year. David Gilbert grew up in Manhattan but met Tony Feher through a mutual friend related to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Gilbert worked for Feher from 2005 to 2008. Wyatt Kahn also grew up in New York City and was family friends with Elizabeth Murray, whom he assisted as a high school student in the early 2000s. Kahn met Tony Feher in 2010 when he worked a small moving job in Feher's studio, which morphed into 2 ½ years as Feher’s assistant. Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett met in the fall of 1962 at Mills College in Oakland, California. At the time, Bartlett was a senior undergraduate, and Murray was a first-year graduate student. They formed a close and enduring lifelong friendship.
Exploring the layered dynamic between these five artists, Assistants features multiple works by each, showing the progression of their individual practices while also illustrating the overlapping intellectual and aesthetic dynamics in how they viewed and navigated the world. At least one work from each artist is from the period of time when they were assisted by another.
