From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column by Getty Conservation Institute

To coincide with De Wain Valetine’s current exhibition at Almine Rech gallery, Purple TV presents with Getty Conservation Institute the short documentary From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column. From the burgeoning Venice Beach art community in the 1970s and the challenges of casting a thirty-five-hundred-pound polyester resin sculpture to the present day implications for storing, displaying, transporting, and conserving such a colossal work of art—From Start to Finish recounts the remarkable story behind the making of Gray Column, a monumental sculpture by Southern California artist De Wain Valentine.

Told largely through interviews with Valentine and his contemporaries including Richard Long, Frank Gehry, Helen Pashgian, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, his studio assistants, collectors, conservators, curators, and scientists, this documentary reveals the obstacles that had to be overcome to cast pieces the size of Gray Column, the importance and influence of Valentine’s work, and the issues related to its conservation and exhibition at the Getty Center in 2011.

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