Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to present the first historical exhibition of Multiples, Inc., the art publishing company founded by Marian Goodman and a few partners in the 1960s. The show, curated by Dieter Schwarz, will open on Tuesday, January 12, 2021 through Saturday, February 27, 2021 and will be accompanied by a complete catalogue of the editions.
During its existence, Multiples, Inc. published seminal editions with some of the most important artists of the 20th century over a period of almost three decades between 1966 and 1992. The exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery New York gathers for the first time a selection of over 150 editions published by Multiples, Inc. in collaboration with over 70 artists. On view will be works in a broad variety of media ranging from objects, works on Plexiglas, jewelry, and furniture pieces to an extensive selection of prints, portfolios and artist books.
Multiples, Inc. was founded in 1965 in New York by a group of five partners, some of which had already been producing editioned banners with contemporary artists as part of the Betsy Ross Flag and Banner Company. Multiples, Inc. opened its first gallery on Madison Avenue (close to 74th Street), where it exhibited its own editions as well as those of various other U.S. and European publishers. In 1966, Multiples, Inc. published its first portfolio, Four on Plexiglas, with works by Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, and Larry Rivers.
The 1960s were the high times of multiples; artworks were not conceived as single objects but as objects to be published in several examples, often using new materials and contemporary manufacturing techniques. Producing artworks in editions allowed a democracy of distribution, permitting them to be offered at lower prices, in turn making current developments in the art world available to a larger audience. While in its initial phase, from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, Multiples, Inc. placed a strong emphasis on publishing three-dimensional works by artists such as Arman, Richard Artschwager, Marisol, and Man Ray. Multiples, Inc. also produced the first multiples of Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, and Robert Smithson. Marian Goodman played the main role in artist relations, and during this era, the publishing company also enthusiastically supported emerging Pop artists Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, amongst others.
In 1970, Multiples, Inc. published the famous Artists & Photographs box that assembled editions from a number of artists whose work used photography in various unconventional ways, including Dan Graham, Richard Long, Robert Morris, and Bruce Nauman. The box contained a selection of brochures, offset prints, and other types of printed matter which artists used as appropriate media. Published in an edition of 1200 copies, the box—which was initially a commercial setback—is now considered an artistic landmark.
While many publishers emerged in the U.S. and in Europe in the 1960s, not all of these organizations remained active into the future, whereas Multiples, Inc. survived the initial impetus of the new medium and went on to increasingly produce prints in the 1970s and 1980s. The art publishing company edited a number of more classical print portfolios, featuring some of the period’s greatest printmakers—Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha. Multiples, Inc. was one of the main publishers of Sol LeWitt prints, and it launched the first series of etchings by Robert Wilson and editioned the furniture created for his stage sets. Besides commissioning works from U.S. artists, Multiples, Inc. worked with European artists including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Jan Dibbets, and Richard Hamilton.
For a brief time in the early 1970s, Multiples, Inc. also maintained a branch in Los Angeles. In 1974, Marian Goodman assumed sole ownership over the company, and in 1977 she also opened Marian Goodman Gallery. Even with the inauguration of the new gallery on 57th Street, the publication of editions under the Multiples, Inc. imprint continued with artists John Baldessari, Dan Flavin, Richard Tuttle and Tom Wesselmann, among others. During its existence, over 80 objects and over 800 prints were published in collaboration with more than 90 artists. In 1992, with no hint of pathos, Multiples, Inc. concluded production with prints by Richard Artschwager and Lawrence Weiner.
The Multiples, Inc. exhibition stands as a historical survey of the pioneering art publishing company, which in turn established the intellectual and artistic trajectory of what has become the Marian Goodman Gallery. An extensively illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with a new essay by Dieter Schwarz, and original texts by Harold Rosenberg and Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. The catalogue will include a historically complete list of all the Multiples, Inc. editions, as well as many documents illustrating its wide-spanned history.
A special version of the exhibition dedicated to the seminal Artists & Photographs box and related works will be shown at Librairie Marian Goodman in Paris, in the Spring of 2021.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Dieter Schwarz (b. 1953, Switzerland) is a curator, author and consultant for modern and contemporary art, based in Zürich. He studied German and French literature, and Linguistics and Comparatistics. From 1983 to 1985, Schwarz conducted research in Paris on a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, leading to a publication on Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1985, he became Curator at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and served as Director from 1990 until 2017.
As a curator, Schwarz has organized numerous exhibitions and publications on art, from early Modernism to the present day, and with a particular emphasis on recent American, Italian and German art. He has published essays on numerous artists such as Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Forrest Bess, Matt Mullican, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Gerhard Richter, Fred Sandback, Thomas Schütte, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle and Lawrence Weiner. His most recent book is a monograph on Sol LeWitt’s Folds & Rips.