The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois

January 22 – February 26, 2012

We are delighted to announce the group exhibition MINUS SPACE at The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. The exhibition features artists Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz and Gilbert Hsiao, and is conceived around the ideas of confounding pattern, spectral color, shaped supports, and divergent painting methods.

THE SUBURBAN
Founded in 1999, The Suburban is an independently run artist exhibition space. We give complete control to the artists in regards to what they choose to produce and exhibit. Thus it’s a pro artist and anti curator site. The Suburban is not driven by commercial interests. It is funded within the economy of our household. Its success is not grounded in sales, press or the conventional measures set forth by the international art apparatus, but by the individual criteria set forth by the artists and their exhibitions. In this, The Suburban is more closely aligned with the idea of studio practice than that of the site of distribution.

–Michelle Grabner & Brad Killam

George Ortman, Sun Dance, 1997
Acrylic on bainbridge board
36 x 36 inches

January 14 – February 25, 2012

An exhibition surveying 62 years of the artist’s work.

George Ortman’s painted constructions of the 1950s and early 1960s are pioneering works. Their reductive geometry and modular color were widely seen as being at the forefront of young artists move away from abstract expressionism. Writing about the Whitney’s Young America 1960, Hilton Kramer noted that “There is only one artist [in the exhibition] who is equal to a museum showing: that is Mr. George Ortman.” Indeed, Ortman’s work was a particular inspiration to Donald Judd who saw it at the Stable Gallery and repeatedly cited its importance as an antecedent: “[In 1959] George Ortman was doing his best reliefs and had been working along that line for some time. Their worth has never been adequately acknowledged.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

In many ways Ortman’s early work forms a missing link between post-war abstraction and the geometric art of the 1960s. As such it fits neatly beside the occult assemblage of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in a progression away from abstract expressionism towards something concrete and revelatory. Judd remarks in his seminal essay on the development of the new art of the 1960s, Specific Objects that “The work of Johns and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman’s reliefs for example, are preliminaries.” (Arts Yearbook 8, 1965) Interestingly, Ortman shares with Johns and Rauschenberg a type of quotidian surrealism, as well as ties to Dada. Ortman’s link to post-war Surrealism originates in his studies at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York in 1949. The Dada connection comes via Duchamp, and is evident in the parallels between Ortman’s formal geomancy and chess. As Judd observes: “[Ortman’s constructions] seem to be games or models for some activity and suggest chance, from much through little, controlled and uncontrolled, operating on things both related and unrelated. They are one of the few instances of completely unnaturalistic art. They are concerned with a new area of experience, one which is relevant philosophically as well as emotionally.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

The current exhibition starts with Ortman’s first construction, Beginnings (1949), done while in Paris on the GI Bill. Beginnings clearly shows the artist’s assimilation of surrealist influence, taking Cornell’s boxes in a new, abstract/constructivist, direction. Journey of a Young Man (1957 is a sententious work marking Ortman’s transition from surrealism to purely geometric constructions. Like all of Ortman’s art it belies a furtive narrative figuration undergoing an analytical progression towards pure abstraction. Tales of Love (1959), the largest work in Ortman’s breakthrough 1960 exhibition at Stable Gallery, is the apogee of the relentless, reductivist constructions that Judd found so inspirational. Blue Diamond (1960) is Ortman’s most widely reproduced work and was a centerpiece of Toward a New Abstraction, the important 1963 exhibition at the Jewish Museum that defined then emerging post-painterly tendencies. (Here Ortman took equal place alongside Ellswoth Kelly, Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.) In the 1970s, as a faculty member at Cranbrook Academy near Detroit, Ortman’s work acquired a riveting elegance. Constructions such as Woodward (1974) and Eye (1977) have the unified formal presence of the best post-war abstraction to come out of New York.

In the late 1980s and 1990s Ortman turned his eye toward Detroit, seeing in the city’s tragic decay themes that were familiar to him from his work at the Tempo Playhouse, the theater he cofounded in 1953 that was the first in America to present plays by Ionesco and Genet. Pilgrim and Jefferson Avenue are two major constructions from this period. Stark in their use of silver, white and graphite, they have a lucid mechanical ferocity bearing interesting comparison to the work of Lee Bontecou. Most recently, fascinated by the geometric possibilities presented by the intersection of four inclined planes, Ortman has been working on an ongoing series of free standing pyramidal forms.

Throughout his career, Ortman has made Imitations based upon classical and modern masterpieces. Included here are drawings for Heartbeat, Ortman’s first (1962) Imitation based on Matisse’s Piano Lesson, and a group of drawings from his study of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (1965). These drawings emphasize the figurative and symbolic foundation of Ortman’s art, demonstrating the mechanics of his abstraction and showcasing his extraordinary talent as a draughtsman–an interesting aside for a geometric abstractionist shared by others of his generation such as Ellsworth Kelly.

George Ortman was born in 1926 in Oakland, California. In the early 1950s Ortman showed at the cooperative Tanager Gallery on Tenth Street, then in 1957 and 1960, at the Stable Gallery. Throughout the 1960s Ortman showed at the Howard Wise Gallery. The artist had a one-person exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1965. In 1970 Ortman left to teach at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and stopped exhibiting in New York. The current show is George Ortman’s third exhibition since returning to New York in the 1990s. In 2001 this gallery presented a cycle of paintings from the 1980s based on Georges Seurat’s Models, and in 2006 an exhibition of 4 constructions and new cast sculptures.

Works by Nate Ethier

January 17 – February 26, 2012

Artists included in the exhibition are:
Roger Chamieh, Peter Edwards, Nathan Ethier

Resonant Frequencies explores the complex relationship of sound and image in contemporary art. The exhibition surveys the role that sound plays in the conceptual and aesthetic development of contemporary sculpture, painting and technologically-driven art.

Installation view of
Michael Scott: Black and White Line Paintings 1989-2011

January 12 – February 18, 2012

“Over the last twenty five years my work has taken several forms of expression, from concentric circle or target paintings, to black and white line paintings, to photographs, to cartoon-inspired drawings, to paintings that can be described as psychedelic ‘candyland’ themed landscapes, to small thickly encaustic abstractions. However, over this period of time, the most pre-dominant works are the “highly optical” black and white line paintings done since 1989. These are probably the works for which I am best known.

In 1994 I stopped making abstract line paintings but I returned to this type of work in 2002 and 2003 and then most recently in 2010 and 2011. It is this grouping of highly optical black and white line paintings around which I have built this exhibition.

I do not intend for this exhibit to be a survey show or retrospective as it is does not attempt to explain my history as an artist. Rather it presents one type of painting that I have made and returned to making over a twenty five-year period – one that has taken different forms with each re-investigation.”

–Michael Scott, November 2011

John Tallman, 7, 2011
Acrylic on urethane plastic
11 x 9 inches

January 28 – March 3, 2012

John Tallman’s process starts with the creation of a unique support cast in urethane plastic with the dimensions being about the same as a piece of paper. Each acrylic painting has a different and original starting point that denies a chronology. Letting intuition function within the language of abstract painting, subject matter that is overtly suggestive is avoided. Knowledge is acquired without the use of inference or reason and each painting ends when something new is discovered.

Debra Ramsey, Squarely Divided Times Two (detail), 2012
Tyvek, painted bubble wrap, glassine, thread, and pins.
84 x 240 inches
Photo: Andy Wainwright

January 13 – April 1, 2012

Textility is an exhibition that explores the inventive ways contemporary artists employ materials, concepts, and processes associated with textiles to convey their ideas. Many artists today are producing paintings and sculptures that resemble or reference textiles, using traditional materials like paint, canvas, wood, paper and glass. Other artists are appropriating materials and techniques traditionally associated with fiber or textile arts—cloth or thread, crochet or embroidery, for instance—and using them to convey elements like color and line. And some artists are creating work that suggests fabric or textiles to incorporate a sense of the woven, knotted or stitched. Textility, a group survey of 28 artists, will examine art that draws from and is immersed in this textile sensibility.

Textility is co-curated by Mary Birmingham, Art Center Curator, and Joanne Mattera, a New York-based artist, curator, and art blogger. “Textility” is a word the curators created to express the idea of art that has some material or conceptual quality related to textiles. Observing what they consider a trend in contemporary art, they conceived this exhibition to pose the questions: “Who is making work with fiber and textiles or work that suggests fiber and textiles?” and “How and why are artists doing this, and why now?”

The exhibition will utilize all three Art Center galleries and will incorporate a broad range of materials and media including painting, sculpture, works on paper, and installation. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Birmingham and Mattera will accompany the exhibition. Participating artists: Joell Baxter, Caroline Burton, Sharon Butler, Mary Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Pip Culbert, Elisa D’Arrigo, Grace DeGennaro, Barbara Ellmann, Carly Glovinski, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Nava Lubelski, Stephen Maine, Lael Marshall, Derick Melander, Sam Messenger, Sam Moyer, Lalani Nan, Aric Obrosey, Gelah Penn, Debra Ramsay, Susan Still Scott, Arlene Shechet, Susanna Starr, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby and Peter Weber.

Christian Megert, page 37, 1963
Mirror and acrylic on wood, under glass
57 x 22 x 5 inches

January 11 – February 24, 2012

In September 2011, James Mayor, John Austin and Hubertus Schoeller of the Mayor Gallery met with Christian Megert to discuss the forthcoming Megert exhibition. James Mayor invited Christian Megert to give his view of the origins of Zero and to explain his own contribution to the development of the group in this catalogue. What he produced is not a complete presentation. In the form of a scarce curriculum vitae, Megert recalls, without pathos, events, meetings and facts. He explains his manifesto, his own cultural-political engagement and describes the connections and relationships between the various artists’ groups in Europe after World War 2, from 1957 until their worldwide recognition. The exhibition is arranged retrospectively: two typical mirror objects from the early 60s consist of several concave or convex, slightly tilted, partly overlapping vertical pieces of mirror. From the same time are his ‘labyrinthian lightbox’, a ‘cigar box’, and a ‘glass book’. As an example from the 70s we have an ‘endless light room’ and a light-kinetic object. The two mirrored compartment -pieces represent the 80s. The works from the last two decades are, with few exceptions, objects composed of polychrome mirror, glass and wood. They should be seen in the context of Megert’s earliest, monochrome, ‘mirror shards’.

-Franziska Megert

David Smith, Zig III (detail), 1961
© The Estate of David Smith/VGA, New York

January 28 – April 15, 2012

The Wexner Center for the Arts is pleased to present David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, the first major thematic exhibition devoted to the work of the renowned 20th-century American sculptor. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition brings together approximately 80 works from throughout Smith’s career. Cubes and Anarchy, for the first time, places David Smith’s late geometric masterpieces in context with his earlier works. It reveals Smith (1906–65) as a sculptor whose identification with the working class motivated him to adopt the geometric forms of the constructivist avant-garde from the very first years of his career in the 1930s until his untimely death. Cubes and Anarchy includes some of Smith’s best-known sculptures, as well as paintings and works on paper—many provided by the Estate of David Smith, which lent not only significant sculptures but also sketchbooks, drawings, and photographs, only a few of which have been exhibited previously.

Widely heralded as the greatest American sculptor of the 20th century, Smith has often been presented as a counterpart to the abstract expressionist painters or as a draftsman in space. Most scholarship has viewed Smith’s early work as developing in a linear fashion, from the European influences of Picasso and cubism in the 1930s; to a figuratively based, highly detailed, American surrealism in the 1940s; to a lyrically abstract, expressionist expansiveness in the 1950s; culminating with the seemingly disconnected breakthrough embodied in the reduced, geometric monumentality of his final works.

Cubes and Anarchy offers a fresh interpretation of Smith, revealing geometric abstraction as a constant focus throughout his career, a leitmotif that was deeply connected to the artist’s self-definition as a working man and his need to reconcile that, through his interest in constructivism, with his pioneering commitment to forging a unique personal identity as a modern artist. From his earliest small-scale sculptures to his last monumental works, what Smith called “basic geometric form” was a powerful touchstone for the artist. The exhibition title derives from Smith’s recollection that his concept of “cubes and anarchy” stemmed from the painter John Sloan, his teacher at New York’s Art Students League in the 1920s, who exposed him to cubism, constructivism, and progressive social movements. As art critic Dore Ashton noted, Sloan “not only brought [Smith] into the modern art world, but also into the world of political commitment.”

Kyle Jenkins, Urban Geometry #328, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 30 inches

January 27 – May 5, 2012

The Ecole des Arts de Braine-l’Alleud in Belgium presents the exhibition  ”Colorific,” featuring the work of Greet Billet, Marc Chevalier, Cedric Christie, Krysten Cunningham, Cheryl Donegan, Javier Fernandez, Kyle Jenkins, localStyle, Pieter Laurens Mol, Roland Orépük, Paul Raguenes, Benjamin Rivière, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Léopoldine Roux, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi, Tilman, Jan Maarten Voskuil, and Dan Walsh.

Paul Corio, Toga Tiger, 2009
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 inches

January 27 – March 3, 2012

Artists included: Patrick Morrissey, Hanz Hancock, Mick Frangou, 
Francis Farmer, William Hughes, Paul Corio, 
Karen Schifano, 
Mark Sengbusch, 
Jeffrey Mathews, Nate Ethier, 
Allie Rex, David E. Peterson, 
Joseph Bernard, 
Stacy Fisher, Tracy Thomason, 
Ian Swanson, Linda Francis.

The grid is the mother of all things terrestrial – birthed from outer space.
Gravity = Vertical. Land = Horizontal.
The two combined form a right angle. Multiply to form a grid.
This natural geometry existed billions of years before man.
Man stands upright in defiance of gravity, though is grounded by it.
He realized the equation “vertical + horizontal equals a right angle”
and applied it to everything from architecture to fashion.

Grid List presents 16 artists, 13 working in geometric abstraction, and three working quite “gridless” (Can the grid be active behind the image?). Their conceptual fodder ranges from sports, math, science, film, graphic design and video games.

The grid has been passed down from early man: from cave walls to stone tablets to Papyrus – from agriculture, architecture and weaving to the roadways and computers of today. We feel it directly as well, gravity still drops a vertical line – rain, apples and basketballs all fall to meet the horizontal land. The right angle is alive and well today as it was at the earth’s birth.

The artist draws from the imbedded and inherent grid.

Don Voisine, Full Stop , 2011
Oil and Flashe on wood
28 x 22 inches

January 14 – February 26, 2012

The unity of the thing remains mysterious as long as one considers its different qualities as so much data belonging to worlds entirely distinct from sight, from smell, from touch, etc.
–Merleau Ponty

Theodore:Art is pleased to present the first exhibition in our new home in Bushwick: work by Dana Bell, Alasdair Duncan, and Don Voisine.

These three artists, while creating very different work, all touch on the possibilities of communicating ideas in a space outside of language. The familiarity of signifiers — form and gesture – is offered without the reliable connection of a signified or finite meaning. A viewer is confronted with evasive focus: unspoken directions, mute expressions, opaque progressions. The potential “unity of the thing” is proffered as a semblance of infinite suggestion.

Armed with a formalist’s vocabulary, an eye for the nuances of gesture, and a tendency towards dark, absurdist humor, Dana Bell has delved into cinema’s rich history and emerged with a complex study of physicalized language. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source on its head, Bell’s reductive process transforms filmic narrative, creating a semiotic study that reveals the subtle manipulations and learned artifice within human expression, while breaking the connection between narrative arc and the nuances of gesture.

Alasdair Duncan makes “signs for the future”, stand-ins; not futurological predictions, rather they are emblems of the not yet imagined. Duncan is interested in making art that reflects an expansive, confident and optimistic outlook, that the world as it is now can be made different and better. At a time when the future is represented substantially in terms of fears rather than opportunities, Duncan’s work manifests the hope of real affirmative social and material change through conditions of possibility which exist now, but which are beyond our view from the current state of affairs

Don Voisine’s paintings impress with a complexity and meditative quality that belie their scale. Space is defined by restrictions, controlled by borders, limited in access, via a very few well-chosen elements. Voisine creates uncanny spatial depth and structure through color, texture, contrast, and light. The layering and overlapping of black planes, both translucent and opaque, evoke both redaction and seduction without answer.

Dana Bell had solo shows at Kressling Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia (2010) and Louis V ESP, Brooklyn (2011). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Dvorak Sec (Prague), Secret Project Robot, The Flag Art Foundation, and D’Amelio Terras Gallery. Bell received her BFA from Wayne State University and a MFA from Maine College of Art. Bell lives and works in Brooklyn

Alasdair Duncan has had work included in numerous group shows in the UK and France, and was commissioned to make the signature artwork and signage for the 9th Congress of the New Lacanian. School. is a graduate of the Royal Academy School Post Graduate program, and received a BA from Goldsmiths College. Duncan lives and works in London. Theodore:Art will present a solo exhibition of Duncan’s work in 2012.

Don Voisine’s most recent solo exhibitions include Mckenzie Fine Art, New York and Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, Maine His work is included in the collections of the National Academy Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum and the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, MT. Voisine was elected into membership to The National Academy of Art in 2010. Voisine was elected a member of American Abstract Artists in 1997 and became President of the group in 2004. Voisine was born in Fort Kent, Maine, and moved to New York City in 1976. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Jesus Soto, Composición dinámica (Dynamic Composition), 1950
Oil on canvas
Collection Christophe Soto

A key figure of the Paris avant-garde in the 1950s and ’60s, Jesús Soto (1923–2005) is widely recognized for his groundbreaking innovations in color theory, serial composition, and movement in art. Less well-known is the wide range of styles and mediums that he explored early on. Drawing inspiration from optics and serial music, Soto employed repeating geometric forms and superimposed surfaces to convey a sense of physical displacement. In deconstructing the notion of stability, Soto radically transformed the relation between object and audience. Encouraging viewers to interact physically with his work, Soto engages them as active participants in the process of perception.

Born in the Venezuelan provincial capital of Ciudad Bolívar, Soto trained at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas. Frustrated with his country’s increasingly repressive environment, he left in 1950 for Paris, the adopted home of many Latin American intellectuals and artists, including members of the radical Madí group, as well as U.S. artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman. In France Soto entered a period of intense activity, exhibiting at the annual Salon des Réalités Nouvelles alongside other artists of the Parisian avant-garde. At the invitation of Victor Vasarely, Soto participated in the pivotal 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René, which boosted the young artist’s reputation in both Europe and Venezuela as an innovator and vital member of the Kinetic movement.

Focusing on the two decades following Soto’s move to France, the works exhibited here are grouped in five sections, revealing his investigations into new modes of artistic engagement, his contact with European artists Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and the Group Zero, and his anticipation of later conceptual strategies. From his first experiments with “dematerial-ization” to his monumental Penetrables environments of the late 1960s, Soto’s achievements in the fields of perception and interaction during this twenty-year span established him as one of Latin America’s most influential 20th-century artists.

Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970 is organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and curated by Estrellita B. Brodsky.

Installation view

January 19 – February 25, 2012

“Souterrain” will consist of new objects built in response to the gallery space, a wall painting, and recent photographs from 5 different series.

Lotte Lyon’s sculptures employ a pragmatism in the materials used, in the methods of assembly, and in the delivery of associative ideas. The two sculptures made for “Souterrain” respond to un-heroic architectural elements of the gallery space: the stairway leading from Beethovenplatz is matched with a stepped object propped against a large empty wall, and a small utility cabinet seems to have yielded a stack of boxes that could be drawers pulled out of an impossible space hidden by that cabinet. A wall painting transports the visitor from one space to the next, and a room filled with photographs makes it clear that Lotte Lyon’s staging is meant to give an impression of theatricality and performance, as much as they are referencing various Minimalist traditions.

In the catalogue produced for Lotte Lyon’s exhibition in 2010 at the Landesgalerie Linz, Midori Matsui describes the work as having a strategy of gestural, metonymical analogy, which connects the artist to an American Minimalist tradition by way of the performative elements of Robert Morris, the perceptual elements of Donald Judd and the associative elements of Robert Smithson. The element missing in this description, as Matsui points out, is the lightness in Lotte Lyon’s work, which has an important humorous element, and is carried out through the use of prefabricated two-dimensional materials, rather than solid mass. This work would just as readily find a lineage within a European tradition as well, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, and Lily van der Stokker, as examples.

Lotte Lyon has exhibited in a number of Austrian institutions, including Landesgalerie Linz, Kunstpavilion Innsbruck, Camera Austria in Graz, Secession Vienna, the Jesuitenfoyer in Vienna, das weisse haus in Vienna, Galerie Stadtpark in Krems as well as a number of alternative spaces in Vienna including LOVE_, Area 53, and Kunstbuero. Internationally, the PS1 in New York, the MMC LUKA in Pula, Croatia, and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo. She shows extensively with Galerie Aoyama|Meguro in Tokyo.

Jasper van der Graaf, Untitled,
Wall Painting
Vishal, Haarlem NL 2012

January 7 – February 7, 2012

Participating Artists: Anneke Klein Kranenbarg – Els Moes – Guido Winkler – Henriette Van ‘t Hoog – Iemke Van Dijk – Jasper Van Der Graaf – Mel Prest – Ro Hagers – Roland De Jong Orlando – Ruth Van Veenen – Sarah Klein Tineke Porck

Nancy Holt shooting the film Sun Tunnels (1978), 1976
Photo by Lee Deffebach

January 19 – April 1, 2012

Nancy Holt: Sightlines is a thematic exhibition offering an in-depth look at the early projects of this important American artist whose pioneering works falls at the intersection of art, architecture and time-based media.

Since the late 1960s, Nancy Holt (Tufts Class of 1960) has created a far-reaching body of work, including Land Art, films, videos, site-specific installations, artist’s books, concrete poetry and major sculpture commissions. Nancy Holt: Sightlines showcases the artist’s transformation from the perception of the landscape through the use of different observational modes in her early films, videos, and related works from 1966-1980.

This retrospective exhibitions has been organized by Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University and curated by Alena J. Wiliams. An eponymous publication is available for purchase through the Gallery.

January 6 – February 18, 2012

Ward Jackson was born and grew up in Petersburg, Virginia. He studied painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute of the College of William and Mary, now Virginia Commonwealth University, earning his Master’s Degree there in 1952. While still in school Jackson began the correspondence with Guggenheim curator Hilla Rebay that would eventually lead to his long tenure with that institution. In a series of letters he sent drawings to her for comment and received critique and encouragement. Following graduation Jackson spent a summer studying under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Mass., settling in New York in the autumn of that year. Jackson’s student work had already attracted the attention of painter and critic George L.K. Morris who invited him to contribute to an American Abstract Artist annual exhibition in 1949. Morris, a founding member of the AAA, took Jackson under his wing and the two developed a close collegial relationship which lasted until Morris’ death in 1975. Jackson later was invited to join the group and was for many years its recording secretary.

Ward Jackson had his first solo exhibition in NYC at the Fleischman Gallery in 1956. In the early 60′s, inspired by the work of senior painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Jackson moved away from the gestural style that had marked his work of the ’50′s, developing his signature style of austere, hard edged geometric compositions on square and diamond shaped canvases. In 1964 he showed a group of black and white diamonds in an important exhibition at the Kay Mar Gallery that included such figures as Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Don Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella, and which marked a pivotal moment in the early development of minimalism. For the rest of his life Jackson expanded upon this personal and rigorous approach to abstraction, developing his ideas in the hundreds of 4 x 6 inch “drawing books” that he always carried with him.

Ward Jackson continued to exhibit widely in NYC and throughout the United States as well as in exhibitions in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan. Some of the high lights of his career were solo exhibitions in the late 1960′s and 1970′s at the Graham Gallery, NYC, French and Company Gallery, NYC, and the short lived but seminal John Daniels Gallery, (founded by Dan Graham and David Herbert), NYC, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg. As winner of two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowships; Ward Jackson had two solo exhibitions at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts during the 1970′s. In the 1980′s into the 90′s, Ward Jackson developed an active career in Europe with numerous solo exhibitions in Germany, in Berlin at Galerie Adlung & Kaiser, at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. He continued to have a foothold in the New York art world throughout the 1980′s and 90′s, with regular exhibitions at the John Woodward and Marilyn Pearl galleries in Soho.

Posthumously his work has been championed, by Lisa Dennison who included his painting in the 2004 Guggenheim Museum exhibition; Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present. In 2007 Ward Jackson had a comprehensive memorial retrospective at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn NY, which included a catalog with an essay by Stephen Westfall and a panel discussion with Westfall, Jed Perl, Phong Bui, and Matthew Deleget. The show received several good reviews and was immortalized in a you-tube virtual tour with his artist nephew; Julian Jackson by the James Kalm Report. An informative interview about Ward Jackson’s work and life is available at the Minus Space blog: Ward Jackson – Heat at the Edges, A Conversation with Julian Jackson, by Matthew Deleget In 2008 Gary Snyder included Ward Jackson’s paintings in “New American Abstraction 1960 – 1975″ at his gallery in NYC. Gary Synder and David Richard Contemporary in Santa Fe, included Ward Jackson in “1960s Revisited” in the 2010 exhibition and catalog in Santa Fe where Jackson’s work was singled out in a favorable review. David Richard Contemporary is now representing Ward Jackson’s work.

His paintings and drawings can be found in numerous public collections including; The National Museum of American Art Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., The Brooklyn Museum of Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, CA, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University MA, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Va., Edward Albee Collection, British Museum, London, and in Germany at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, the Museum Morsbruch, Leverkusen, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

In addition to his long career as a painter, Jackson was the archivist and the director of the viewing program at the Guggenheim Museum for nearly 40 years. Two visible legacies from this long involvement is the remarkable group of photographs that Jackson curated from the archives on permanent display in the cafe of that Museum illustrating the history of the Museum and its’ associated artists, and an art work in the Guggenheim collection by Dan Flavin dedicated to Ward Jackson and commemorating their time working at that museum together. In 1969 Jackson joined forces with publisher Roger Peskin and staff photographer Paul Katz to found an experimental folio publication, ART NOW New York. This interesting venture paired loose 8 1/2 x 11 inch prints of art works recently exhibited in the galleries with brief statements solicited from the artists. Over a four year run ART NOW New York published the work of well over a hundred of the most significant figures of that period, from Jasper Johns and Brice Marden, to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Smithson. ART NOW gradually developed into the ubiquitous and well known ART NOW Gallery Guide for which he served as advisory editor until 1998.

Widely known for his encyclopedic knowledge of art and artists, Ward Jackson was an active, opinionated, and informed participant in the New York art world that he so loved. He passed away in February of 2004.

- Julian Jackson / Rene Lynch

Starting January 24, 2012

Joining the worldwide celebration of the centennial of John Cage, Norte Maar will collaborate with E.A.T. to present Cage Transmitted: Celebrating + Playing John Cage. The twelve evenings of performances of music, poetry, theater, visual art, and dance, occurring once each month, will span the calendar year of 2012. Most of the performances will take place in the front room of Norte Maar’s apartment gallery, and will be broadcast onto the street and live streamed on the web.

Bernard Frize, Suite Segond 100 No 3, 1980
Household paint on canvas
51 x 64 inches

 January 14 – March 10, 2012

The Indiscipline of Painting is an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to now. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, it considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years. It goes on to demonstrate the way in which the history and legacy of abstract painting continues to inspire artists working today.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brings together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside other lesser known artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré, Mary Heilmann and Jeremy Moon.

The Indiscipline of Painting is a collaborative project between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. The exhibition travels to the Mead Gallery and opens on the 14 January 2012, running until 10 March 2012.

As part of The Indiscipline of Painting, Newlyn Art Gallery has commissioned John M. Armleder to make a major new work. John M. Armleder is at Newlyn Art Gallery 8 October 2011 – 3 January 2012.

The exhibition will be showing works from the following 49 artists (in alphabetical order):

Tomma Abts born 1967; John M. Armleder born 1948 ; Tauba Auerbach born 1981; Martin Barré 1924 – 1993; Francis Baudevin born 1964; Daniel Buren born 1938 ; André Cadere 1934‑1978; Ingrid Calame born 1965 ; Keith Coventry born 1958 ; Michael Craig‑Martin born 1941 ; Karin Davie born 1965; Peter Davies born 1970; Gene Davis 1920‑1985; David Diao born 1943; Moira Dryer 1957 – 1992; Bernard Frize born 1949; Michelle Grabner born 1962; Tim Head born 1946; Alex Hubbard born 1975; Katharina Grosse born 1961; Peter Halley born 1953; Jane Harris born 1956; Mary Heilmann born 1940 ; Jacob Kassay born 1984; Richard Kirwan born 1969; Imi Knoebel born 1940; Bob Law 1934‑2004; Sherrie Levine born 1947; Jeremy Moon 1934‑1973; Olivier Mosset born 1944; Carl Ostendarp born 1961; Blinky Palermo 1943‑1977; Steven Parrino 1958-2005; David Reed born 1946; Gerhard Richter born 1932; Bridget Riley born 1931; Ruth Root born 1967; Robert Ryman born 1930; Sean Scully born 1945; Frank Stella born 1936; Myron Stout 1908-1987; Daniel Sturgis born 1966; Cheyney Thompson born 1975; Niele Toroni born 1937; Richard Tuttle born 1941; Dan Walsh born 1960; Andy Warhol 1928‑1987; Peter Young born 1940; Heimo Zobernig born 1958.

The exhibition has been selected by British artist Daniel Sturgis, and curated with Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives and Sarah Shalgosky, Curator, University of Warwick.

View of Carrie Pollack’s studio, Brooklyn, NY

January 13 – February 25, 2012

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Carrie Pollack: Witness. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of new paintings consisting of digital prints on linen.

Carrie Pollack describes her work as “a catalog of her memories”. In it she examines what we as individuals consciously or unconsciously choose to remember, and how our memories of people, places, and events degrade and change over time. Begun after the death of her father in 2009, Pollack’s new paintings are both poetic and existential, and they investigate the notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as uncertainty and contradiction. She deliberately intends her paintings to function “more as conversations than as statements”. Her imagery can often appear both familiar and unknown at the same time spanning both abstraction and representation.

The source materials of Pollack’s new paintings can be found in long meditative walks she takes daily with her dog around her Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. She carries her camera with her religiously, which she uses as a research tool to record the fleeting nature of her immediate environment. Each day Pollack takes dozens of photographs, which as of late have focused on deteriorating advertising posters, faded graffiti tags, vacant lots, worn textiles, and the fleeting quality of the sky, as well as other elements in transition and flux.

Pollack in turn organizes her photographs – now numbering in the thousands – into several distinct categories: posters, skies, newspapers, and textiles, among others. She spends weeks pouring over her images, intuitively arranging and rearranging them, looking for shared relationships between them. Once she identifies an image of essential interest, Pollack reduces it down to gray-scale in Photoshop, occasionally adjusting its contrast if needed to bring the image into a neutral state. She then prints upwards of one hundred test images with her large-format printer onto a wide array of supports, including newsprint, paper, canvas, and linen. The printing process is intentionally laden with glitches and hiccups, which she readily embraces. She remarks that the technology “adds its own interpretation of the image”, which reflects the way one’s mind continually tries to understand, interpret, and find meaning in the past, present, and future.

In the concluding steps of her process, Pollack prints a final image onto linen in a size that is unequal – sometimes larger, sometimes smaller – to the dimensions of the painting stretcher that will support it. As a result, the printed image often appears misaligned at first glance. Sometimes an image will wrap around the sides of the stretcher bars and onto the back the painting. Other times an image will be completely isolated within a much larger field of raw linen on the surface of the painting. These choices starkly contrast the digital quality of the image with the physical materiality of the painting itself, which directly parallels and exemplifies the complexity of memory.

Carrie Pollack (b. 1973) has exhibited her work throughout the United States, as well as in Germany and Belgium. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Between This Light and That and Space curated by artist Douglas Melini at the gallery this past summer. Pollack has also recently exhibited at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Monya Rowe Gallery, and David Krut Projects, all in New York. She has also produced editions with Daily Operation in New York and Sonnenzimmer in Chicago, IL.

Pollack has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been discussed in publications, such as Time Out New York, Metropulse, and The Daily Beacon. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and a BFA from Alfred University, Alfred, NY.

PRESS
Carrie Pollack at MINUS SPACE (image reproduction), WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide, February 2012
Carrie Pollack @ Minus Space, KCLOG, January 28, 2012

January 21 – February 26, 2012

On January 21st, 2012, The Green Gallery will feature Michelle Grabner’s new body of paintings in the exhibition, “Cottage Work,” a title that implies an association with the informal and practical traditions of craft, particularly weaving.

Conceding to the traditional linen support of painting her on-going interest in the minimalist grid, found composition, and domestically orientated textiles, Grabner explicitly imbues painting and its Twentieth Century abstract conceits with the literal artifacts of weaving and the representation of warp-and-weft material construction in the new work. Evoking the long-debated critical relationship between the fine arts and craft this work more profoundly underscores the poetics of all elemental visual language construction.

The new series of paintings on panel embed woven patterns that Grabner creates by pulling out the warp and weft threads of burlap, linen, and needlepoint canvases. Encasing them in the traditional painting medium of gesso, these paintings feature a monochromatic vocabulary of grid patterns and material reliefs. A series of recent gingham pattern paintings will also be shown. These paintings mark Grabner’s return to the domestic and representational tenants shaping her “backdrop” paintings from the 90s. Critic Barry Schwabsky writes that, “Her paintings refer to the traditionally feminine realm of the domestic by way of the metaphorically loaded imagery of fabrics and textiles–not only blankets and curtains but rugs, clothing, and so on.”

Grabner’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Contemporary, New Art Examiner, Art Issues. In February 2010 she was the subject of a 10-page interview by critic Saul Ostrow for Art in America. She is currently included in “The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now,” an exhibition organized by the Tate St. Ives and traveling to the Warwick Gallery in 2012. She is also currently included in “on-going minimalism” at Rocket, London. Her work is included in the permanent collections at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.