Artist: Steve Wolfe

Luhring Augustine presents The Brutality of Fact, an exhibition of works by Steve Wolfe presented alongside materials from the artist’s archive, marking Wolfe’s fifth solo presentation with Luhring Augustine, and the first in the Tribeca location.

The installation highlights a cohesive selection of Wolfe’s meticulously crafted replicas of timeworn books, well-used vinyl records, and works on paper, which are studies for his three-dimensional pieces. Wolfe was at the center of the burgeoning downtown New York art scene of the 1980s, and his first studio was located near the Tribeca gallery. Working in the trompe-l'œil tradition, he made his detailed sculptural simulacra through a combination of techniques such as exacting drawings, screen printing, and metal casting. Wolfe’s practice was considered and labor intensive, and perhaps the most scrupulous aspect of his process was his choice of subject matter. The cultural artifacts that he selected to recreate reflect his own sensibilities, as well as those of his generation. Featuring Beat Generation and counter-culture provocateurs such as Jack Kerouac, musical icons like The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, literary legends Truman Capote, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as art world mainstays such as Piet Mondrian and Man Ray, the works in Wolfe’s oeuvre represent some of the most important writers, artists, and thinkers of the 20th century. His works pointedly illustrate traces of the object’s consumption in vivid detail – creases, folds, tears, bookmarks, stains, and scratches are the physical markings of the interaction that occurs when a book is read or a record is played.

It is significant that the tangible history of the objects Wolfe diligently captured were of his own making. The artist’s library and archive served not only as source material, they were also a creative muse. Preserved to this day, a selection of these holdings will also be on view in the exhibition. The collection is an atlas of Wolfe’s interests, methodologies, values, friendships, inspirations, and passions. Alongside his personal book and record holdings, this archive is an illuminating collection of Wolfe’s handwritten diagrams and installation instructions, loose sketches, and detailed cross-hatched drawings. The materials are contained in notebooks and folders teeming with inserts, letters, photographs, torn-out magazine articles, as well as technical remnants of his process such as screen tests and bare woodblocks, which served as the bases for the sculptures. The juxtaposition between the “real” objects and those that Wolfe created evokes questions surrounding truth and representation; with implications beyond his own body of work, it speaks to the overall role of art and cultural production. The works of the artists and writers Wolfe references, in their original forms, are part of a long tradition of culture building, knowledge dissemination, and speaking truth to power. This critical paradox, that reality can be understood through imagined worlds and created scenes, is at the core of Wolfe’s project and an engagement with his art offers a way to navigate the often-blurred line between fact and fiction.

Steve Wolfe’s (1955-2016) work has been collected by numerous prominent public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. In 2009 he was the subject of a one-person exhibition which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and traveled to The Menil Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.