The Curator's Eye

The Big Show

Where can you bask in the beauty of a baker’s dozen of priceless masterpieces without spending a dime? The Wright Exhibition Space, where Seattle’s first great collectors, Virginia and Bagley Wright, display some of their most colossal works in a show slyly called Big is Better (or Some Claim). “It was a wholesale florist place,” says Virginia Wright of the three-room gallery. “We didn’t have to do much, just poke holes in the ceiling to get light in.”

Photograph by André Mora for City Arts.

There’s a stunning wall of Frank Stellas; a psychedelic James Rosenquist; a gleaming Donald Judd as unanswerably eternal as a Euclidean axiom; a vast 1981 canvas bristling with broken statuary by Julian Schnabel, who improbably became a film director (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly); and a mysterious black sculpture/painting by Robert Longo, whose falling-urbanite images helped inspire Mad Men. 

But the show’s central thunderclap is the twenty-five-foot-long 1964 Cheops Testament by Alfred Jensen, the outsider artist who was an Abstract Expressionist-era insider. The painting depicts supposedly the biggest pyramid in history, plus a circle resembling a bar dartboard that looks to have been executed by hieroglyphic scribes, and a rectangle that could represent Jensen’s mother’s open grave. Reproductions make it look like a diagram; up close you can see globs of dazzling paint like cresting waves – primal forces in an orderly ocean. “Jensen set the tone for the show,” Wright says. “I wanted to do things that were modular and about systems, because that’s what Jensen is about.”

“We hadn’t had the Longo up for ages,” Wright continues, “and the Rosenquist we’d never hung before in Seattle. He was considered the lesser of the Pop artists, but he’s somebody who I think needs to be thought of again.” She regrets letting their pal Clement Greenberg talk them into selling a bigger Pop noise, Andy Warhol’s early-’60s Do It Yourself works. “He was pretty doctrinaire, prescriptive but persuasive. In the end too narrow. The prophets have to have blinkered vision; otherwise they can’t give the deepest insights they do give.” 

But the Wrights kept their eyes wide open. Visit the space, and they’ll open yours. •

Wright Exhibition Space
(407 Dexter Ave. N., 206.284.8200), Thursday–Friday 10am–2pm