JOHN HENRY DONNER

I had a studio visit with this young artist in early February at Hunter College, where we met a year or so ago during one of their Open Studio events. His work at that time impressed me with its very focused choice of materials that employed a minimal agenda to explore ideas of volume, materiality, and surface. I was seeing a lot of work that evening that was material in nature, abstract or conceptual, and mostly by male artists also. Since I was conscious of the fact that the director of the Hunter College MFA program had recently retired, Robert Morris, himself a noted conceptual artist known for his specific regard for material concerns, it was poignant that such encounters were taking place, all at once, so soon after his departure. Nonetheless, I wanted to reflect upon a few of the aesthetic events I had then, and this visit not only fulfilled my expectations, it also progressed beyond them in many ways.

John is an affable and intelligent young man hailing from Buffalo, New York. He has a background as a landscape architect, and is just finishing his MFA at Hunter College this spring. What I at first saw in his work was a rigorous attention to the systematic thinking of generations gone by, and the ability to achieve a certain kind of form, both cerebral and intense, that emerges from a material sensibility in which Donner is building form from the inside out.

I have to admit at the outset that many of my expectations, the ones that were reversed here, originated from what I had seen of his work a year or so before. Generally, though I visit a lot of artists, I do not see as much of a sea change in their work as happens to be the case with graduate students. I forget that this is what is supposed to happen. They are supposed to go through a million changes in two years. The teachers and other students all have something to say about what is just emerging from their fingertips, as if the endless stream of creativity could always be quantified and judged upon emergence. If babies got a critique like this they would turn around a dive back into the womb. But an artist is self-conscious enough to take it on the chin, get up, and keep making. Donner certainly did.

The works you see above this line date to the previous year. I wanted you to see them all at once so that you could contextualize them as I did, and then move forward, as Donner has since then.