The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps
Group Exhibition
The Menil Collection, Houston
March 24–August 13, 2023

The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps is an extraordinary chance to see the impressive curatorial record of the legendary Hopps, who curated over 250 exhibits during his career. He was a friend of Craig Kauffman, and the two are linked to early exhibits of abstract art in Los Angeles, as founders of Syndell Studio and Concert Hall Workshop, which produced the 1955 show Action: Painters of the West Coast. Co-founder of Ferus gallery, along with Ed Kienholz, Hopps was the earliest champion of Kauffman’s work, and produced the highly influential 1958 painting show at Ferus, as well as a 1963 show which debuted Kauffman’s paintings on plastic.

Plastic World
Group Exhibition
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt Am Main
June 22–October 1, 2023

The Schirn is dedicating a themed exhibition to the exciting history of plastics in the visual arts. PLASTIC WORLD presents objects, assemblages, installations, films and documentaries and opens up a broad panorama of the artistic use and evaluation of plastic that reflects the respective social context. The spectrum ranges from the euphoria of pop culture in the 1960s to the futuristic influence of the Space Age and the trash works of Nouveau Réalisme to eco-critical positions of recent times; it includes architectural utopias and environments as well as experiments with material properties.

Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection
Group Exhibition
Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA, Los Angeles
April 2–October 1, 2023

The exhibition Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection explores the art of various Southern California artists who “began to create works that investigate perceptual phenomena: how we come to understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light, seen directly through other materials, reflected, or refracted.” Many, like Craig Kauffman, used industrial materials—including sheet acrylic—in in their work. Light, Space, Surface draws on LACMA's collection. The exhibition features works by some of Kauffman’s colleagues: Robert Irwin, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Mary Corse, Ron Davis, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and others.

Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris
Donald Judd, Craig Kauffman, Robert Morris
January 19–March 31, 2018
London

Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris is Sprüth Magers’ second curated exhibition presenting Craig Kauffman’s work displayed alongside his influences and contemporaries. The show presents six works from Kauffman’s fertile period of 1966–71, when he addressed the issues of structure and form in painting, the use of industrial materials, painting’s relationship to the wall, and dematerialization. His work is contextualized by the inclusion of work by Donald Judd and Robert Morris, as well as supplemental materials from the Kauffman archives.

Craig Kauffman: Works from 1962–1964 in Dialogue with Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp, Craig Kauffman, Francis Picabia
April 30–June 25, 2016
Berlin

In Sprüth Magers' inaugural exhibition with the Craig Kauffman Estate, the gallery presents a selection of early works on paper and plastic pieces from the 1960s. Following a period of travel in Europe from 1959 to 1961, Kauffman returned to his native Los Angeles to commence work on several series that looked to his personal interests in the historical avant-garde. Foremost was a reworking of the nude as machine that took place some decades earlier by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Their shared interests in new materials and the mechano-erotic human form inspired Kauffman to react against the abstract painting of the 1950s.