° 1940

Lives in Sacramento (United States).

''The extraordinary career of Sacramento regional artist Stephen Kaltenbach has been a subject of rediscovery for the cosmopolitan art world in the last few years. Kaltenbach moved to New York in 1967 after finishing graduate studies at UC Davis under Robert Arneson, William Wiley and Robert Mallary. By 1968 he was showing in a series of groundbreaking New York exhibitions that Nuclear Projectsand Other Works brings forward. The famous 1968-69 exhibition Nine at Leo Castelli curated by Robert Morris with other icons of contemporary art such as Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Kaltenbach’s grad school classmate, Bruce Nauman, included a rug-shaped felt floor piece by Kaltenbach that came with instructions that it was to be arranged, and re-arranged every day, by the gallery owner. In 1969 Kaltenbach showed in Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland and London; and in 1970 he contributed six works to the breakthrough international exhibition, Information, at the New York Museum of Modern Art. At this point the artist vanished from the New York scene and moved back to Sacramento. Kaltenbach sees the move back to northern California in 1970 as a conceptual art act much like those he had been performing in New York. “Relinquishment,” an Artforum reviewer recently observed, “is key to understanding Kaltenbach’s work and its dissolution, even disappearance.” '' - Elaine O’Brien