An Extended Gray Scale

Jarl Mohn, in collaboration with Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, is pleased to present a site-specific installation of Marcia Hafif’s monumental 1972–73 work, An Extended Gray Scale. Completed in 1973, and shown only once as-intended during the artist’s lifetime, we are delighted to offer the unprecedented opportunity to experience one of Hafif’s most essential works, exhibiting for one month only, in the artist’s home state. Born in Pomona, California in 1929, Hafif grew up in Laguna Beach and Claremont, California, and attended Pomona College. Upon graduation in 1951, Hafif moved to Rome, where she would live and work as an artist for nearly eight years before returning to Southern California to pursue an MFA at the University of California at Irvine in 1969. Moving to New York in 1971, the artist could not have arrived at a less auspicious time. In her important 1978 Artforum essay, “Beginning Again,” Hafif describes the circumstances and thought process of that time, which led her to deconstruct the practice of painting down to its fundamental materials and techniques. Over the next five decades, until her passing in 2018, Hafif embarked on a systematic exploration of the possibilities of pigment and process, ultimately yielding 27 comprehensive series of works throughout her lifetime, which she dubbed, The Inventory. Pivotal to this development was her iconic An Extended Gray Scale, a single work completed between 1972 and 1973, a recording of every tonal variant she could perceive between white and black on a series of square cotton canvases (eventually amounting to 106 panels). Hafif posited an empirical, positivist set of terms before embarking on An Extended Gray Scale: “After color, black and white, the artist’s gray scale, as many gradations as I could determine by comparison and sight becoming a set of 106 22” x 22″ oil paintings, white to black. Plans were made, and drawings, for the many ways in which these paintings could be seen: one long row, two, three, four, or merely a section of the whole.” An Extended Gray Scale was presented, partially, at La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, 1975 and MoMA PS1, New York, 1990. It was presented publicly for the first time, in its totality, at Unlimited at Art Basel in 2015, and for the second time at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland in 2018. Marcia Hafif’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. Recent exhibitions, include: Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2021, 2018, 2016; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, 2020; Tate Modern (film programme), London, 2019; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2019; MAMCO Genève, 2019; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California, 2018; Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2018; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2017; Laguna Art Museum, California, 2015; and the Hammer Museum Biennial, Los Angeles, 2014. Her full body of work includes photography, sculpture, film, and installations, and is represented in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; MAMCO Genève; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

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