MATERIALITY: Larry Poons, Thomas McDonell, Ernesto Burgos, and Christo.

MATERIALITY is grounded in a dialogue between contemporary artistic practices and Aspen's unique cultural history. By placing emerging and mid-career artists in conversation with influential figures of the twentieth century, the gallery examines how ideas evolve across generations and how artistic innovation continues to find new forms of expression. This ongoing exchange between past and present reflects Aspen's longstanding identity as a place where creativity, experimentation, and intellectual inquiry converge. This intersection provides the foundation for MATERIALITY, an exhibition bringing together works by Larry Poons, Thomas McDonell, Ernesto Burgos, and Christo.

Materials are often understood as passive tools in service of artistic ideas. The works gathered in MATERIALITY suggest otherwise. Across painting, sculpture, and installation, Poons, McDonell, Burgos, and Christo treat materials as active agents capable of shaping perception and generating meaning. Whether working with paint, fabric, resin, cardboard, or canvas, each artist pushes materials beyond their conventional roles through acts of accumulation, concealment, preservation, transformation, and recontextualization. Familiar forms become unfamiliar, revealing tensions between permanence and impermanence, control and chance, concealment and revelation. In each case, material is not simply a vehicle for expression. It becomes the subject itself.

In Larry Poons’ works, the relationship between action and object unfolds on an expansive scale. Returning to the paintbrush after decades of experimentation, Poons works across massive rolls of canvas that surround the artist within the act of creation. Moving rapidly and intuitively, he builds thick accumulations of pigment across the surface in energetic layers, emphasizing paint as a tangible substance with weight, texture, and physical force. The canvases initially function as a continuous field of action, and only later does Poons isolate individual sections, allowing compositions to emerge from the larger whole. The resulting paintings reveal a dynamic tension between chance and control, demonstrating how material itself participates in the creation of form. Poons’ inclusion in MATERIALITY also recalls his appearance as an artist-in-residence at the Aspen Institute in 1965, a period when Aspen was emerging as a unique center for artistic experimentation and intellectual exchange.

Thomas McDonell’s paintings emerge from an intensely physical relationship with both paint and support. Rather than treating canvas as a neutral surface, he begins with discarded and forgotten textiles that already carry traces of use, labor, and history. Often stitching disparate fabrics together, McDonell creates complex foundations upon which he applies paint directly with his hands. Patterns, textures, and signs of wear remain partially visible beneath dense layers of pigment, creating a dialogue between concealment and revelation. The resulting works occupy a space between painting, textile, and object, where material histories are neither erased nor fully exposed. His connection to Aspen is a personal one, shaped through longstanding family ties to the Aspen Institute and the community's enduring commitment to creativity, dialogue, and cultural exchange.

The sculptural works of Ernesto Burgos begin with materials often overlooked or discarded. Cardboard, fiberglass, and industrial substances are transformed through processes of reinforcement and preservation, becoming forms that appear suspended between construction and collapse. By hardening fragile structures with resin and responding to them with gestural painting, Burgos freezes moments of instability, elevating the provisional into something enduring. His works challenge conventional hierarchies of material value, revealing unexpected complexity within humble substances and demonstrating how transformation can emerge from the most ordinary materials. Burgos first encountered Aspen through the Aspen Art Fair in 2024, where he was drawn to the region's remarkable dedication to the arts and its longstanding tradition of fostering creative experimentation within an extraordinary natural landscape.

Few artists have demonstrated the transformative power of material more profoundly than Christo. Throughout his career, he employed fabric not as decoration or covering, but as a means of reimagining perception itself. By wrapping everyday objects, monuments, and landscapes, Christo temporarily suspended their familiar identities, inviting viewers to encounter them anew. The fabric altered not only how these forms appeared, but how they were understood, shifting attention from function and symbolism toward shape, volume, texture, and presence. Through a simple act of material intervention, objects that had become visually commonplace were rendered unfamiliar and newly visible. Christo’s work reveals how dramatically our experience of the world can be shaped by material conditions, demonstrating that transformation often occurs not through changing an object itself, but through changing the material lens through which it is seen. His connection to the Roaring Fork Valley remains one of the defining artistic legacies of the region. Through the support of collector John Powers and a community willing to embrace ambitious public art, Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized Valley Curtain in nearby Rifle, Colorado, in 1972, cementing a relationship between the artist and Aspen that continues to resonate today.

Taken together, the artists in MATERIALITY remind us that transformation often begins not with an idea, but with matter itself. Through paint, fabric, cardboard, resin, and canvas, they reveal how materials can challenge habits of seeing and open new ways of understanding the world around us. Their works invite us to look more closely at the substances that surround us and to recognize that materials are never neutral. They shape perception, carry histories, and possess the power to continually alter the meanings we assign to the world.