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"All his art, his light works and his animals, his sculptures, and his drawings, pay homage to the cycles of the natural, to energy and time." - Paul Richard, The Washington Post, 1978

10/9/2023

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​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"All his art, his light works and his animals,
his sculptures, and his drawings,
​pay homage to the cycles of the natural,
​to energy and time."
​

Paul Richard, The Washington Post,
February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

&

The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience
“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge
that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they
are to be thoroughly believable."

Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience

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Benjamin Forgey, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience, The Washington Star, 1978.

​“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they are to be thoroughly believable.
 
Krebs customarily strikes a heroic stance in his famous city-scale laser structures, whose presence, at least at first, is so spectacular, impersonal, formal, optimistic, rational. There is, however, another side to Krebs’s art, a side that is funny, vulgar, odd, irrational – fully anti-heroic.
 
The second side of Krebs’s artistic character is featured in a small but telling exhibition of his works currently on view at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery. The exhibit even is, in its way, a retrospective view of the work of the 39-year-old artist, rather like an autobiography composed almost entirely of footnotes.

Let it be said, however, that the footnotes are first-rate. The exhibition is extremely interesting to anyone with a prior knowledge of Krebs’ major works for the light that it sheds on them. It also stands quite well on its own. Anyone for whom this show serves as an introduction is sure to emerge wanting to see and know more about the artist and the art.

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​THE FOOTNOTE here is a piece from 1943 -- Krebs again, is 39 years old – and it is a neat little thing, a hippopotamus that formed part of a zoo the four-year-old Krebs made for himself. To actually put it into a serious gallery exhibition would be sheer indulgence if the little hippo did not establish a mood of personal, and not altogether happy, reverie that Krebs apparently wanted for this off-beat little show.

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​He follows it with a porcelain tiger he made in 1956, the year he graduated from high school; a 1973 sketch on an envelope containing ingenuous ruminations upon the unfortunate fate of whales, and, to bring things up to date in the animal department, an ape drawing he made on Dec. 25, 1977 – Christmas Day and the day after the artist’s birthday.

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The ape is a beguiling, touching piece of art, a farcical plastic relief of the kind you can buy in souvenir-novelty shops, transformed by the artist into an expressive personal souvenir with brushstrokes of flecked day-glo paints, a rhinestone tear in the eye, and a tiny 3-D heart cut from Plexiglas.
 
Krebs obviously wasn’t feeling so well last Christmas, and with this piece exposes something of his personal life, touched with irony and humor. Yet the point is not simply anecdotal. 

Krebs the artist as well as Krebs the person identifies strongly with animals, they act for him, as for many artists, as surrogates for something strong and non-rational in his emotional life.

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​TO PURSUE THE animal motif one big step farther, we can look at two of Krebs’s original sketches for his large-scale laser-and-prism environment inside the huge steel, concrete, and glass Omni International complex in Atlanta. This is the very type of super-formal, super-“rational” piece that earned Krebs his international reputation. And yet as these drawings show, Krebs’ idea was to make of a configuration of the Canis Major (the Great Dog) constellation upon the vast ceiling of the place.

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These sorts of connections help to make clear Krebs’s belief that art and life are inseparable at heart, that art depends in no small measure upon harnessing and transforming the energies of personal experience. Indeed, the principal point of this show may be to enable us to see Krebs’s work whole, to unite in our minds the apparently contradictory poles of his art.
 
Krebs is, to be sure, no animal sculptor, and yet in his own unconventional way he is not far from it. His childhood interest in animals has been extended and given meaning as an important facet in his complex, multi-faceted body of work.
 
So, there are lots of other interesting connections to be made. As a certified visionary Krebs is not at all above tinkering with thoughts of the physically impossible, such as his “One Sun,” a structure to be “made” by cutting geometric holes in clouds so that the sun’s rays form a vast truncated pyramid across the landscape (the sun would then be “rayning,” he puns). Still, in his laser structures, which would have been impossible not much more than a decade ago, has he not found a way in which to make such vast and magical visions come true?

​PERHAPS THE STANDOUT piece in the show is a simple-seeming concoction where a conch shell, painted red-white-and-blue and pointed with 50 rhinestone stars, hangs at the end of a little flagpole that juts from the wall. Inside the conch is a tiny music box, when you wind the shell, it turns and tinkles the first eight bars of “Home on the Range.”​

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The piece is very appealing. It manages to be simultaneously simple and complicated, ordinary, and unusual, factual and imaginative, serious and ironic, personal and universal. These are qualities that adhere, in very different ways, to his city-structures, which are commonly appreciated as sheer spectacle or as technological feats, but which actually are much more.
​

​“Home on the Range” is the title Krebs has given to an entire series of these anti-heroic pieces over the past seven years, in the last two (at the New York Customs House last fall and in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1976) he has begun to incorporate them into the structure of his large-scale works. Bringing the two together has not been an easy process, intellectually or formally, but by doing it, by letting the human blemishes show, Krebs has enriched his art immeasurably. This show is a priceless-documentation of the ups and downs the artist has experienced along the way.”

Benjamin Forgey, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978

Rockne Krebs and John Dickson at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery, 1978

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The exhibit invitation, 1978

John Dickson’s 2019 comment under The Experiment Station, a blog from The Phillips Collection, November 4, 2011, Rockne Krebs, 1938-2011, obituary by Ianthe Gergel.

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https://blog.phillipscollection.org/2011/11/04/rockne-krebs-1938-2011/
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​Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam’s studio, 1970 
Sam Gilliam in the window of his studio, Rockne’s pickup truck,
​1737 Johnson Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.
Photo by Rockne Krebs, 1970 

“I had the great pleasure to be Rockne and Sam’s studio mate in the mid to late 70s. Furthermore, my studio was the middle floor between them. Rockne was on the large expansive space on the bottom floor, with all the windows covered so it was always setup for the immediacy of his light experiments with lenses, smoke, and lasers. I remember the striking glint of reflected/refracted light that came from the part of the studio where he stored the Pi-Flower series of plexi-resin works. Sam was on the top floor with brilliant light filled walls with hundreds of feet of sopping wet canvas strung through the light-filled space…in various states of drying and recombination. Being in the middle floor meant that I had access to both artists…through their brilliance and the vernacular of each day. It was a great 5-year immersion for me as a young artist, one that has stayed with me throughout my life.” 

​
John Dickson, 2019

​Krebsiana: Witty, Offbeat, by Tobie Lanou, What’s Up in Art: The Washington Art Marketletter, February 1978

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“Krebs’s accomplishments fall in the “brilliant” category. They are intellectually arresting and exciting. You respect the artist in him trying to push out boundaries of perceptions.”
​Tobie Lanou

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“Rockne Krebs was a multi-disciplinary artist known for his
monumental laser light installations. His transparent plexiglass
sculptures likewise court symbolic passage through projection
by imaginative means. In addition, notational works on paper
provide glimpses into other levels of expression hinted at in
larger pieces. The mystic vision that Krebs delineated was
spectacular and private, exalted and hermetic, dazzling and still.”


​Mike Zahn, The Technological Sublime, 2022 
Pazo Fine Art


​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"No artist in this city has produced
work more amazing."

​
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, 
February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

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Paul Richard, Birthdays, Whales and Debts, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978

"Rockne Krebs’ exhibit, now at Fraser’s Stable, is quirky, moving, and unfamiliar. It includes neither lines of laser light, glowing planes of Plexiglas, nor slowly marching sunbeams. This exhibition is, instead, Rockne Krebs’ self-portrait.
 
No artist in this city has produced work more amazing. Rockne Krebs has drawn, in the night sky above Arlington, a perfect laser triangle whose closest point dissolved in glinting Oz-green light on the waves of the Potomac. He has sprinkled us with prism-produced rainbows and wrapped us round with fogs. But the Krebs that we know best is not the Krebs that we see here.

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​These drawings only hint at his elegant geometries, his dazzling technologies. Confessional, autobiographical, they deal with whales, the debts Krebs owes to others, with his feelings and his politics, his birthdays and his zoo.

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iHoly Shit! The waves weren’t like this in Kansas City, Rockne Krebs, 1973

The oldest work on view, a hippo made of clay, was done when he
​was 5. He also shows an envelope on which he sketched, one evening, the suffering of whales, their wisdom, and the sea.

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Krebs has been a minimalist, an advanced technologist, a conceptualist of sorts, but he is not that only. One melancholy birthday he collages a bleeding ape with sparkling diamond tears.

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What united these varied works with his weightless urban sculptures is a kind of hunger, a quality of spirit. These animals and toys, diaries and poems, are – as are his light structures – traces of the questings that have, since early childhood, driven him toward art.

He did not have it easy. Even when most polished, his art is never slick. He is no pencil prodigy, he struggles when he draws. His work, though often troubled, is at all times honest.
 
In 1965, when a newcomer to Washington, a sculpture that he made was given the first prize at the Corcoran Area Show. A rather academic work, made of painted wood and metal in a constructivist-cubist style, it is here on view.
 ​
The references of this piece to others, to Kenneth Noland and Tony Caro, are no longer of much interest. What makes it intriguing is the way that it predicts what was to come. It hints at orbs and landscape, and its title is prophetic. 

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It is called “One Sun.” Krebs had not yet worked with laser beams or sunshine [in 1965], but he was even then, perhaps without quite knowing it, reaching toward pure light.

​And not toward pure light only. His art, as this exhibit demonstrates, has always been inclusive. When he asks us to peer through his transparent planes of Plexiglas, or collages, rivers, streets and cities, to his laser works, he draws into his art as much as it can bear.

Not all his work is beautiful. Some of it
​is clunky. There is
a painted seashell
here, part flag, part star,​ part nymph, it is  at once a Bicentennial
joke and a mythic pun.
This piece,and his
laser lines, do not
look much alike, but
they rise from the same wellspring. 

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​All fine artists show us what they feel must be seen. Krebs is freer with his feelings now than he ever has been, but his motives have not changed. All his art, his light works and his animals, his sculptures, and his drawings, pay homage to the cycles of the natural, to energy and time.”

Paul Richard, Birthdays, Whales and Debts, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978

Rockne Krebs 
b. Kansas City, MO, December 24, 1938 -
​d. Washington, DC, October 10, 2011

-HK, October 10, 2023

Photos © Rockne Krebs Art Trust/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, NY
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Neo-Green, Rockne Krebs, 1987, Memorial Art Gallery - University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

9/12/2023

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Neo-Green, Rockne Krebs, 1987, Memorial Art Gallery -
​University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

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​Gallery’s aerial art will have city beaming and Laser show to light up Rochester sky, Jack Garner, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, February 19, 1987 (excerpts).

​“Art will merge with science over Rochester’s skies for six nights in May.
 
A one-of-a-kind laser show linking the Memorial Art Gallery with the University of Rochester and the city is being planned to mark the opening of the gallery’s $6.7 million addition.
 
Lasers will make abstract designs in the air in front of the gallery on University Avenue. In addition, beams of colored light will be directed between the gallery and the UR’s River Campus three miles away/
 
Another laser will be beamed west from the gallery across downtown Rochester and into space.
 
The idea “is to provide a dramatic visual symbol emphasizing the connection between the gallery and the community,” said gallery spokeswoman Deborah Rothman.
 
“We’ll have to issue an advisory for helicopters warning them not to fly too low,” Rothman said. “Otherwise, the laser beams are harmless. They’re too close to the ground for airplanes, and they won’t hurt birds.”
 
The event, titled Neo-Green: A Laser Light Sculpture, is being created by Rockne Krebs, a pioneering laser artist from Washington, D.C., who promises his greatest laser creation for Rochester….

​Three lasers will be placed on buildings at the gallery. Mirrors erected there will be used to make angles and paths of light that will play off the trees and iron gate on the University Avenue side of the museum complex.
 
A fourth laser will be operated from the tower at the library on the UR campus – and will send a beam back to the gallery...
 
The gallery’s new pavilion will connect the old gallery complex with the neighboring Cutler Union building. The pavilion will reorient the museum to a University Avenue entrance and will hold a sculpture garden, a restaurant, a museum store and an exhibition gallery. The first exhibition with the new facility will be a show of 18th century French painting.

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​The idea for the laser sculpture came from gallery director Grant Holcomb.
 
“I felt we needed to do something that showed a commitment to contemporary art as well as historic art,” Holcomb said yesterday. “I also wanted a larger, highly visible sign of our commitment to entertaining and educating the community. I knew Krebs’ work, so I called him.”

​Krebs, 48, holds a degree in fine arts from the University of Kansas and has been active in laser art since 1967. In 1968, he showed his first piece of laser art – Sculpture Minus Object  – at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
 
“The laser beam is a modern manifestation of both an antique and basic artist’s tool: line,” Krebs said. “For me, it is both the essence and the spirit of the line. . . A laser is both energy and matter, a line that is continuously generated, traveling statically through space.”
​
​Jack Garner, Gallery’s aerial art will have city beaming and Laser show to light up Rochester sky, 1987

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Penny Knowles, Associate Director for Curatorial and Educational Affairs, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, 1987. 

Excerpts from her introduction below.

​“…I think it might be helpful in your full appreciation of him, if I could tell you a little bit more about him and, what I perceive to be, his place in contemporary art.
 
Rockne Krebs is both a pioneer of laser art and a master of contemporary environmental sculpture.
 
He was one of the first artists to recognize the potential of lasers as an art tool, a modern-day counterpart to charcoal, pen or pencil for drawing in space. The first commercial laser was only available in 1960; Rockne experimented with his first indoor pieces in 1967 and since that time –some 20 years—has produced spectacular projects in cities like New Orleans, Philadelphia and his home-base in Washington, DC.
 
But Krebs is not exclusively interested in lasers as he would be the first to tell you. He has also worked with sun-light and star-light using prisms and ‘camera obscura’; Rockne in fact has much in common with other contemporary artists concerned with enhancing our perceptions of the environment through the manipulation of natural and artificial light: I am thinking of artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Charles Ross and Dale Eldred…

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​His work, as you have seen it demonstrated in Neo-Green is extremely complex. Like other large-scale environmental artworks such as Christo’s Running Fence, it involves the orchestration of expensive equipment, many workers, paid and volunteer, and the negotiation of special permits…in the case from the FAA, and the City of Rochester.

The Neo-Green Crew

​Despite all the preparations for Neo-Green which have extended over many months, the result is not a sure thing; because it is an artwork existing in real time, and over real-time, it is full of risk. The lasers may malfunction, the atmosphere may not be perfect (and it requires a certain amount of particulate matter to be seen). The lasers and mirrors have to be constantly adjusted, and in fact, as soon as Rockne is through with the lecture, that is exactly what he will be doing.

​Finally, and this is what makes it particularly contemporary:
​the work is ephemeral. It is like a stage performance which after Saturday will exist only in our memory, and in the few preparatory drawings that Rockne has created for it.
 

​For most of us, however, the visual traces of those laser beams, delicate and evanescent in the night, weaving their web of magic over the Gallery, linking it visually and symbolically with the downtown and the University, these will be indelibly imprinted in our mind…and we will probably never experience this space without remembering them.

Monumental Drawing for Neo-Green, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY  and Study for Neo-Green, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester  by Rockne Krebs, 1986.
🎼🎶🎵🎼 click for the video on Facebook and on Instagram

And now, finally, I want to introduce you to this hard-working magician, who has certainly done his part in making our reopening such a success. Please welcome…”

Penny Knowles, Associate Director for Curatorial and Educational Affairs, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, 1987. 


Don't make light of art
​Laser Poetry by Ray Czapkowski

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Sculpture in the Sky: Rochester will be wrapped in light in ‘Neo-Green’, Jack Garner, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, May 1, 1987 (excerpts).



​“Rembrandt was a master of light, but even he could not envision an art form of light that would be used to create a work as large as a city.
Nonetheless, such a work will be used to inaugurate Rochester’s expanded and refurbished new home of the Old Masters. Starting this weekend, Neo-Green – A Laser Light Sculpture will entangle the Memorial Art Gallery in light designs in the night sky…

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​Neo-Green, the showcase exhibit for the revamped Memorial Art Gallery, will be displayed for an invitation-only crowd tomorrow night – and on a special, live Channel 21 telecast from 8 to 9 p.m…
 
The laser exhibit will then be available to the public Sunday through Friday nights, from 9 to 11 p.m…
 
The miles-long beams of green-blue light that will connect the gallery with the campus and with downtown won’t be as readily visible from a distance, but are designed in a more philosophical sense to link the Memorial Art Gallery and its parent UR campus to the host community – Rochester.
 
Neo-Green is such a large work that it can’t be totally viewed at one time, from one place.
 
“I particularly enjoy the idea that I can produce something that occupies such a large space,” Krebs said, “but can also be changed quickly and easily, as I see fit.”
 
Krebs explained that the patterns of laser light are created through a maze of three lasers generators and about 20 mirrors on buildings at the gallery and on the campus. A new “work” results when the degree of light or the angles of any of the mirrors are changed.
 
It is the ephemeral, organic quality of laser art that especially appeals to Krebs, who approaches the spontaneity of laser art as a jazz musician embraces improvisation.

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​“I started out as a sculptor in which I explored ideas about space. And space is meaningless without light.”
 
At one point, Krebs said, he constructed sculptures of transparent plexiglass. “I walked away from it, turned around, and it seemed to have disappeared. At that moment the idea was triggered to work with lasers. I liked the idea of structuring things in space that aren’t material.”
 
Krebs, 48, who built his first laser installation in 1968, said, “I’ve always said I wanted to build sculptures that people would walk through.”
 
And, in effect, Rochesterians are being invited to walk through Neo-Green.
 
Krebs wants people to feel free to stroll about the gallery grounds, examining Neo-Green from underneath the designs, which will be played off the gallery buildings and the two rows of linden trees in front of the structure.
 
He said he designs his works to be viewed up close – and not from a distance, as one might view fireworks.

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​​People also can photograph the work. Ron Baird, a photographic specialist at Eastman Kodak Co., suggests that photographers use 400 speed film, and a wide-open F stop (like F2), with a speed of one-half or one-quarter second. “But the camera must be supported on a tripod, or at least be sitting on your rolled-up coat on a rock or a ledge.”

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​If other illumination is present – such as streetlights – photographers could try one-fifteenth of a second at F2, Baird added.
 
(Another suggestion is to “bracket,” or shoot at a variety of F-stops and speeds to improve one’s chances of getting a good exposure.)

If other illumination is present – such as streetlights – photographers could try one-fifteenth of a second at F2, Baird added.
 
(Another suggestion is to “bracket,” or shoot at a variety of F-stops and speeds to improve one’s chances of getting a good exposure.)
 
Krebs said the lasers won’t hurt anyone; they’ll be out of reach. The only potential danger is if someone were to look directly down a laser beam toward the source – much like the danger of looking at the sun. But the public won’t be in a position to do that.
 
The laser beam itself is a special form of light that has been amplified by specific molecular action within the projector. The word stands for: “light amplification by stimulated emissions of radiation.”
 
White light from conventional sources diffuses in all directions, a beam of laser light travels in a tight, narrow path. For example, a half-inch beam will expand only to about three inches while traveling one mile.
 
“Lasers are only in their infancy,” said Krebs, “I could see myself working in lasers for the rest of my life.”
 
He added, though, that laser artists have met with their share of naysayers.
 
“Lasers aren’t firmly established in the arts community,” he admits. “But lasers are really only a tool to be used by the artist.”
 
“Fortunately, some of the earliest work in lasers by artists was quite strong, and much of it occurred before lasers became prominent in the entertainment field.”
 
Krebs added that laser art also has had difficulty finding acceptance because it isn’t easily “collectible,” unlike paintings that can be hung on a wall, or marble or metal sculptures that can adorn a patio.
 
In other words, Neo-Green will be here through Friday – and then it’ll disappear into thin air.”

Jack Garner,​ Sculpture in the Sky: Rochester will be wrapped in light in ‘Neo-Green’, 1987

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-HK

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The One Night Stand, Rockne Krebs, December 31, 1977 - January 1, 1978, Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD.

7/12/2023

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The One Night Stand, Rockne Krebs,
December 31, 1977 - January 1, 1978
​Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD.
Fireworks by Zambelli Fireworks.
First time ever lasers and fireworks shown together.

Video on Rockne Krebs Art's Facebook page  🎼🎶🎵🎼

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-HK

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Rockne Krebs Art on Threads

7/8/2023

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Rockne Krebs on Threads


Post by @rocknekrebs
View on Threads

-HK
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It’s a family affair, 1979. Happy Father’s Day.

6/19/2023

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It’s a family affair, 1979
Happy Father’s Day



​Photographs of Rockne’s father, Arthur Krebs, an engineer, assisting him with the construction of his public art sculpture The White Tornado for the atrium of the Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse
​in Topeka, Kansas. Commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture Program. An environmental sculpture 60 feet high with a tornado-like element on which white neon lightning bolts are placed to form a five-pointed star when viewed from below - sunlight, prisms, white neon, white painted aluminum, mirrors, and scrim fabric. 

​ 
Restoration of The White Tornado was completed by McKay Lodge Laboratory Fine Art Conservation in 2017.​


A photomontage of Rockne’s dad, Arthur Krebs, a great father,
​and granddad.

Rockne Krebs’ 1979 #publicart #sculpture The White Tornado restoration recently completed by @ohioconcenter #artconservation #TopekaKS pic.twitter.com/8SPbbW77Mz

— Rockne Krebs, Artist □□ (@RockneKrebsArt) September 3, 2017
-HK
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Smoke Drawing Series, Rockne Krebs, 1973

6/8/2023

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​Smoke Drawing Series
​Rockne Krebs, August 1973

Code Purple, Washington, DC, June 8, 2023
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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rockne Krebs (@rocknekrebs)

- HK

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Rockne Krebs: Lasers and Candle Smoke

4/18/2023

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Rockne Krebs: Lasers and Candle Smoke
 
Public Art   Works on Paper   SciArt   HighTech   LowTech  
​Art and Technology 

The other is a selection from his hitherto unknown works on paper, which someday could easily serve as the basis for a more extensive exhibition that examines how he used the oldest art medium to describe his aspirations for the newest. - Dan Cameron, August 2022

Cameron, Dan / Zahn, Mike / Pazo Fine Art, The Technological Sublime, 2022.
​

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Rockne Krebs: Born in 1938 in Kansas City, Missouri, Rockne Krebs was, by the 1970s, a major pioneer in public artworks. Krebs was one of the first artists to experiment with lasers and other light forms in his works, the first to create three-dimensional installations with light, and the first to deploy lasers in large-scale public works…

Public Art Review, Spring/Summer 2012, In Memory: Rockne Krebs 


-HK
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The Nesta Revival: A Gallery Pioneer back at Jefferson Place, The Washington Post, 1986 by Paul Richard

3/26/2023

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Photographs from the Rockne Krebs photo archive and by Carol Harrison to accompany a 1986 article by Paul Richard for
The Washington Post about Nesta Dorrance and the
Jefferson Place Gallery.


The Nesta Revival: A Gallery Pioneer back at Jefferson Place,
​The Washington Post, 1986, Paul Richard.

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The artists!
​Exhibition opening night
The Jefferson Place Gallery Reunion, Washington, DC, 1986
Photo © Carol Harrison

Back: Ed Zerne, Sam Gilliam, Eric Rudd, Rockne Krebs
Middle: John Wise, Carroll Sockwell, V.V. Rankin, Nesta Dorrance, Alice Denney, Franklin White
Front: Ben Abramowitz, Hilda Thorpe, David Moy

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Photo © Carol Harrison
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“What artists she discovered. 

Though the building where she showed
their work
– at 2144 P Street NW –
was demolished long ago,
​it has not been forgotten.
Remember how the front
stairs creaked?"
​
​Paul Richard

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Paul Richard, Art Critic, The Washington Post. Photo © Carol Harrison

​​“It is not just the art – by Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Howard Mehring, Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs – that gives the Jefferson Place Gallery show now at 406 Seventh St. NW particular importance. Nor is it just the sight, there behind the counter, of dealer Nesta Dorrance selling art again.”
​
​Paul Richard

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​Lorine Krebs, Rockne’s mother, in a small room in the Jefferson Place Gallery for his first solo exhibition in 1967.

​She is photographed with Number IV, Rockne Krebs, 1966, plexiglass, aluminum and Formica.

“The rooms upstairs were tiny – some were literally cubicles, about as high as they were wide – but they made new art look grand.”

​Paul Richard

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“What made the Jefferson Place unusual,” says Krebs, who had seven exhibitions there, “is the consideration she extended to her artists. It had been founded as a cooperative, and she ran it that way. She never told you that your work was too experimental. She focused on the artists of this city – and she stuck with them.”

​Rockne Krebs
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, 1986, The Nesta Revival: A Gallery Pioneer, Back at Jefferson Place. 
​

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ARTFORUM, 1969 full page ad for Jefferson Place Gallery exhibition.

"The first time Krebs installed his laser sculptures there
his mirrors made the walls dissolve so that the viewer felt
as if he were standing on a pinnacle, among endless,
floating lines of light, somewhere in outer space.”

​Paul Richard

Sculpture Minus Object, 1969, installed in ​the
Jefferson Place Gallery for Rockne Krebs: Energy Structures.

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- HK

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"Laser Sculptures Brighten Up the Omni" The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1977 Arnold Gallery exhibition review

1/11/2023

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Laser Sculptures Brighten Up the Omni
By W. C. Burnett Jr.
​The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 12, 1977

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The art of Rockne Krebs is internationally recognized. He has installed his “laser sculptures” in Japan, Canada and in museums and galleries at many places in the United States.
 
But seeing the forms which are created by his placing of colored beams of light is not all there is to understanding the complex ideas of the artist.
 
An exhibit in the Arnold Gallery, 347 Omni International, will furnish insights into his thinking and some entertainment as well. His drawings are architectural in character, though not strictly as formal as architectural renderings. He seeks to find order, even in random experiences, such as the breaking of sun rays through clouds. Thus many of the drawings are systematic visualizations of such experiences.
 
He also expresses emotions about natural phenomena and personal relationships, makes little jokes, explores concepts which would be totally impractical in real life and misspells quite a few words. Schoolteachers and copy editors attending the exhibit will just have to forgive him for the last failing. He gets his messages across.
 
The works in the exhibit relate to his laser sculpture installation in the Omni International, which is visible from 8 until 11 p.m. in the evenings, when the apparatus is working. It has been temporarily disrupted by freezing temperatures, which interfere with the water cooling of the laser installations.
 
In his drawings Krebs has gone beyond the laser installation. Intrigued by the shape and dimensions of the space within the Omni International, he has projected variations of light sculpture for various seasons and times of day.
 
There is also a visualization of the roof area as the “Canine Constellation,” in which lights seek affinity with the universe.
 
In yet another work, he also has envisioned “Atlantis,” an eye which is formed from light as it emerges through many prisms, and he has generally speculated on light as energy and form.
 
In considering the Arnold Gallery exhibit, it is necessary to consider Krebs’ use of laser beams as “light sculpture” in general.
 
When Krebs visited the Atlanta College of Art some years ago, he encountered a student body which was at least interested in his concepts. But some were skeptical, and one said, “Oh boy, that Krebs is just getting off too easy.”
 
The student’s attitude was an old one, that art can only consist of laboriously constructed images which are capable of being located in some easily controlled space.
 
But let’s consider these points:
*  Krebs divides space, but with lights instead of lines on paper or instead of using substances which have weight, as in much of abstract metal sculpture.
*  All art depends on light. It is really the effect of light on surfaces that we see, and if lights are turned off we really do not perceive a work of art. Krebs gives us the light itself, only a step away from the usual perceptual process.
*  He sculpturally divides space, but instead of dividing a pace which is outside of us, which is limited to a pedestal or the dimensions of a canvas, he divides the space in which we are actually standing. We are inside his sculptural space.

​The images and scrawled commentary in this exhibit are sometimes poetic. But their greatest contribution is in the area of sharpening our own perceptions.
 
Krebs has made a major accomplishment out of the childhood pastime of looking at the clouds. For example, he shows us a “sun pyramid,” a fantasy structure which would be built over the hours of a day as the earth moves and the rays shine down through the clouds.
 
It’s an exhibit which reawakens the pleasure of using imagination and speculating about “things.”
 
W. C. Burnett Jr.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 12, 1977

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“Philip M. Smith has succinctly described this drawing as, “a mathematically developed astronomical plot of the sun at Atlanta GA for the Omni International Project.” This cosmic view of the Atlantis project includes the artist’s commentary on the splendor of “rayning,” the appearance of beams of sunlight through an opening in the clouds that are, Krebs informs us, technically known as crepuscular rays."
 
Stephen Goddard, Associate Director, Spencer Museum of Art, 2013
Rockne Krebs: Drawings for Sculpture You Can Walk Through, Spencer Museum of Art
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Sun Cage for "Atlantis,” Rockne Krebs, 1973 (detail)

​Krebs created the word Rayning to describe how he saw the sun’s rays breaking through clouds.
 
Drawing text excerpts: “RAYNING – a definition. All know the sun is supreme as far as life on this sphere is concerned. It is our light, our energy. Granted that other factors of value must be considered, but in any hierarchical ordering the sun must surely REIGN supreme.”
 
“I am of course not the first to acknowledge the SUN RAYNING.” – Rockne Krebs, 1973

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“ATLANTA – The bellhop calls them sunflowers, the desk clerk calls them rainbows. They are spectra made by sunbeams passing through the thousand prisms the Rockne Krebs has fastened to the skylights 14 stories overhead. They drift alone, or in small groups, apparently at random through the Omni International as long as there is light…
​
No pigments are as pure as these colors made of light – the reds and emerald greens and mysterious midnight purples – that visit the walls, the leaves of the indoor gardens, and your lap. They vary in intensity from the ghostly to the brilliant. Though they seem to wander aimlessly as clouds, they obey Newtonian optics in the placement of the prisms, and the cycles of the sun.”
 
Richard, Paul. The Washington Post, November 8, 1976. Brilliant Hues of Sunbeams by Day, Piercing Darts of Lasers by Night.

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Omni International Great Space (ALPERT), Rockne Krebs, 1973
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Brilliant Hues of Sunbeams by Day, Piercing Darts of Lasers by Night
By â€‹Paul Richard
​The Washington Post, November 8, 1976
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© Rockne Krebs Art Trust/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, NY
© Rockne Krebs Art Trust/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, NY

Omni Great Space Mid-Summer – Atlanta, Sept. 1972, Rockne Krebs

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Photo © Al Stephenson for The Washington Post

Rockne Krebs in the laser booth for his public art piece at the Omni International in Atlanta, Georgia, 1976.
Photos © Al Stephenson for The Washington Post
“Hues of Sunbeams by Day, Piercing Darts of Lasers by Night”
by Paul Richard, Washington Post, 1976

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- HK

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The Technological Sublime  - Beverly Fishman, Rockne Krebs, and Ruth Pastine (exhibition catalogue)

1/1/2023

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Pazo Fine Art is pleased to present The Technological Sublime,
an exhibition of works by Beverly Fishman,
Rockne Krebs, and Ruth Pastine.

September 17 - November 10, 2022

These three artists each calibrate finely-tuned qualities of light and space through their unique approaches to the dynamics of media and spectatorship. The exhibition is accompanied by a 80 page catalogue with essay by independent curator and critic Dan Cameron.

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Digital exhibition catalogue click here.


Print copies are available through Pazo Fine Art 
The Technological Sublime - Beverly Fishman, Rockne Krebs, and Ruth Pastine


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-HK
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