William Anastasi Art

William Anastasi (born: Aug. 11, 1933) is a Conceptual Art pioneer, but he's been largely left out of the art history books. Anastasi is an original and inventive artist, a font of ideas and objects that seemed to have influenced or at the very least anticipated the work of many of his more famous Conceptual and Minimalist contemporaries. Born in Philadelphia in, Anastasi embraced what he calls Duchamp's recipe-like approach to art-making and in the Sixties and early Seventies did four exhibitions at the Virginia Dwan Gallery, famous for championing Conceptual and Minimal art. In the first of these shows Anastasi presented "Wall on the Wall," a set of large lithos on canvas of a photograph of the very gallery walls on which the canvases were hanging. His installations, sculptures, and images (painting, drawings, photographs) vary greatly in material and form - arguably one of the reasons for his relative obscurity is that he did not develop a signature style. But certain threads run through and unite Anastasi's work, among them chance and indeterminacy, site-specificity, self-representation and self-reference, seriality and repetition, the use of ready-made and industrial materials, and of text as visual material. Anastasi's work is being increasingly recognized and reappraised, most recently with an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York (Spring 2007) of some of his earliest sculptures and drawings. His work can be found at MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY) and the Guggenheim Museum of Art.