Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Scott Burton, Richard De Vore, and Buckminster Fuller in both the main exhibition space and the project space.

The centerpieces of the exhibition will be two Buckminster Fuller prototypes: an original 10-foot Fly’s Eye Dome and a Rowing Needle designed by Fuller (1895—1983) for his own use. These two archival objects will be installed side-by-side in the gallery’s main exhibition space, and will be accompanied by drawings (by Fuller), photographs, and a selection of artworks from Fuller’s collection, including works by Willem de Kooning and Joseph Albers. Our exhibition will run concurrently with Buckminster Fuller: Starting With The Universe at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dymaxion Study Center at the Center for Architecture. In addition, a 26-foot Fly’s Eye Dome will be on view at LaGuardia Park (between Bleecker and West 3rd Streets), the result of a partnership between Max Protetch Gallery, the Center for Architecture, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Juxtaposed with the installation of Fuller-related works at the gallery will be seminal sculptures by Scott Burton (1939—1989), including a rare Rock Chair, a suite of rusted steel furniture, and a tableaux of smaller granite tables arranged in the gallery’s project space.

Finally, a selection of late works by Richard De Vore (1933—2006) will be on view. These ceramic vessels were among the final group of works to leave De Vore’s studio before his death in 2006, and this marks the first time that any of these works will be on view in New York. The exhibition coincides with Richard De Vore: Retrospective and ‘Last Works’, a major retrospective of De Vore’s career at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (catalogue available).

Burton, De Vore, and Fuller, taken together, speak to the position that Max Protetch Gallery has taken throughout its 35-year history vis-à-vis the cross-pollination of art, craft, architecture, and design. When the gallery moved to New York and began showing works by major and emerging architects, it became committed to blurring the boundaries between these previously separate fields of esthetic inquiry. Since that time the categories themselves have become more porous, and artists and architects frequently draw from each other’s repertoires to generate forms and processes.

In his own way, each of these three American figures has not only traversed different categories, but also joined them. Scott Burton’s works fuse sculpture, furniture and performance into objects that can function in each of those contexts at once. Richard De Vore began as a practicioner in the American Crafts Movement, but before long his clay vessels shared many concerns with abstract painting and sculpture; his works too tread the line between function and purely esthetic object, and therefore bring to mind a host of anthropological echoes through their use of clay, their forms, their relationships to landscape and flesh. And Buckminster Fuller can perhaps be regarded as the forefather of thinking fluidly about boundaries, and crossing them. His work as an innovator in architecture, engineering, manufacturing, and philosophy have conjoined idealism and materialism in a way that has proved crucial to our understanding of the times in which we live.