KENNETH KOCH
Collaborations With Artists

31 July - 5 September 1993
Wolsey Art Gallery

Kenneth Koch is one of America's foremost poets, and is generally regarded as one of the leading lights of the socalled "New York School", along with John Ashbery and the late Frank O'Hara.

These poets came together in the early 1950s, and shared the same cultural and social milieu as painters like Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock, sharing also many of their artistic ideals.

Collaborations between poets and artists, where the poet and the artist have worked on the same spatial area, playing off words against visual images so as to create new forms, is largely a 20th century phenomena, and have featured in various forms in the works of, for example, Picabia, Schwitters, Magritte and Ernst.

Kenneth Koch is regarded by many as the form's most successful practitioner, and the works on show here, brought together for the first time, include collaborations with Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Joe Brainard. Kenneth Koch has published numerous books of poetry.
In 1991 Carcanet published his Selected Poems in the UK.

The exhibition was guest-curated by Paul Violi, himself a poet whose most recent book, The Curious Builder, was published earlier in 1993 by Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY.

Click here for information about the accompanying catalogue