Michel Tombroff “Drive” • solo exhibition

     How did a car ride affect art history forever?

     Through a series of artworks entitled Suburban Sublime exhibited in 2022 at the LKFF Art Projects Gallery, Michel Tombroff took us on a journey to relive an event that precipitated art’s transition from modern to postmodern :
     In 1951, sculptor Tony Smith made a car ride on the unfinished construction site of the New Jersey Turnpike. Smith later described this event, in a 1966 interview by Art Forum, as a truly revelatory experience.  Inspired by this interview, Tombroff embarked the spectator on dark freeway segments, interchanges, bridges and passes to reflect on Smith’s epiphany:

     The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.
(“Talking with Tony Smith”, Interview with S. J. Wagstaff Jr., Artforum, Dec. 1966)

     This anecdote, one of the most celebrated in the history of art in the second half of the 20th century, had a profound effect on the artists of the 1960s. Some critics even claimed that it precipitated the transition from modern to postmodern, and from modern to contemporary. Suburban Sublime was Tombroff’s first attempt to grasp the significance of this event.

     Brussels-based artist Tombroff explores the legacies of modernism and postmodern art in his work. […] Tombroff has created a series of three-dimensional paintings drawing on Smith’s references to the intersections of art, urban planning, and the sublime, inhabiting the aesthetics of 1960s monochromatic shape paintings by artists such as Frank Stella. (James Voorhies, Curator, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL)

     DRIVE is the continuation of this project. Where, as Voorhies stated, Suburban Sublime was three-dimensional and monochromatic, DRIVE focuses on flatness and color, echoing Tombroff’s focus on exploring the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism.