December 10, 2011 – January 29, 2012

Tribute to the Triangle is group exhibition featuring artists affiliated with ParisCONCRET (Paris) and Sydney Non Objective (Sydney). MINUS SPACE will exhibit two large printed sheets of paper listing nearly 7,000 tags associated with posts on its web site from 2003-2011.

Gabriele Evertz in her studio
Image courtesy of Peter Canale & Stocan Films

November 5 – December 17, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Gabriele Evertz: Rapture. This is the Brooklyn-based color painter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new acrylic on canvas paintings conceived around the color gray.

Gabriele Evertz approaches painting as a humanist and color as a romantic. Evertz, who moved from Berlin to NYC at the age of 19, sees her work as bridging two opposing aesthetic traditions: a philosophical Northern European and a pragmatic American approach to painting. In contrast to other color painters who employ a theoretical or programmatic approach to color, she believes “color is a living thing, which gives us access to abstract ideas and concepts”.

Over the past two decades, Evertz has developed and continues to refine a purely experiential, highly saturated palette involving twelve colors. For her, the history of color organization became a tool that informs her systematic color structures. She also often uses black, white, and gray in her work, but prefers not to call them “neutrals”, which she feels is “inadequate to describe the experience of them”. Additionally, she views complementary colors within her system, such as blue and orange, not as antagonistic, but rather as “true chromatic partners”.

In recent years, Evertz has paid particular attention to the color gray, which she feels has been historically overlooked. “We need to refresh our eyes to it”, she states, “words fall short to describe it”. In her paintings on view at the gallery, gray is juxtaposed against subtle variations on the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), as well as part or all of her twelve-color system.

With a background in both painting and architecture, Evertz assigns structure to color in her work in the form of vertical stripes. The stripes span the entire height of her paintings from top to bottom, and commonly appear in varying widths as well, often within the same painting. She continually employs diagonal shifts placed between repeating sets of vertical lines, which she describes as “the origin of action in her work”. The result is an exuberant, ever-shifting color experience that elicits a sense of time in her paintings.

Throughout her career, Evertz’s investigation of color has only become increasingly more experimental, impassioned, and optimistic, emphasizing research over result. Summarizing the scope of her practice, she very concisely states, “in the absence of truth, there is art”.

Gabriele Evertz (b. 1945 Berlin, Germany) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Australia, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand. Her recent museum exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA (NYC), Heckscher Museum (Huntington, NY), Hillwood Art Museum (Brookville, NY), Columbus Museum (Columbus, OH), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen, Germany).

Her work is included in many public collections worldwide, including The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey State Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst Zurich, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wilhelm Mack Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Her work has been recently reviewed in publications, such as Artcritical, NY Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, and The Village Voice.

In addition to her painting practice, Evertz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, NYC. She is a key protagonist in the renowned Hunter Color School, alongside other color painters, including Vincent Longo, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. Over the past ten years, she has also curated several critically-acclaimed artist retrospectives and surveys of abstract painting at Hunter College, including Visual Sensations: Robert Swain Paintings, 1967-2010; Presentational Painting III; Seeing Red: An International Exhibition of Nonobjective Painting (co-curated with Michael Fehr); Set in Steel: The Sculpture of Antoni Milkowski; and Mac Wells: Light into Being (co-curated with Robert Swain).

Evertz holds an MFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Hunter College, New York, NY.

PRESS
Gallery Chronicle, by James Panero, The New Criterion, February 2012
Gabriele Evertz: Rapture at MINUS SPACE, by James Kalm, James Kalm Rough Cuts, December 12, 2011
Gabriele Evertz: Rapture at MINUS SPACE, by Robert C. Morgan, The Brooklyn Rail, December 2011-January 2012, p. 48
Gabriele Evertz: Rapture, Painters’ Table, December 10, 2011
Gabriele Evertz: Rapture at MINUS SPACE, by Peter Plagens, The Wall Street Journal, November 26-27, 2011, p. A22
Gabriele Evertz @ MINUS SPACE, by Mark Dagley, Abaton Book Company, November 20, 2011

SUPPORT
We would like to thank Andrew Wojtas and Peter Canale / Stocan Films for their generous assistance with the exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm and by appointment

Ted Stamm at his studio
101 Wooster Street, January 1980
Photo courtesy of Abby Robinson

September 24 – October 29, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Ted Stamm: Paintings, an overview of paintings, works on paper, street interventions, and other materials by the late NYC-based abstract painter. Prior to his unexpected death from heart failure in 1984, Stamm created a substantial, mature body of work that was at once responsive to the past, indicative of his time, and prescient of the future.

Ted Stamm was born in Brooklyn in 1944. At age eleven, his family moved to Freeport, Long Island, where he spent the remainder of his youth. He enrolled in Hofstra University in the mid-1960s, where he began by studying graphic design. He quickly moved into painting studying with artists Perle Fine and John Hopkins. He also studied printmaking with artist Richard Pugliese, who later introduced him to the Soho art world. Stamm moved to Soho permanently upon graduating from Hofstra University in 1968.

Between 1968-1972, Stamm produced lyrical abstract paintings consisting of poured red, blue, and pink paint on canvas. In the summer of 1972, he began to cover up these earlier works with grids-like patterns of black marks; he referred to these as his “cancel paintings”. Inspired by the late work of Ad Reinhardt, Stamm consistently used the color black in his paintings from this moment forward. He associated black with rebellion, rigor, and reduction.

In 1973, Stamm began making conceptually-driven work based on chance systems – rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel – that would determine the format and number of painting layers for a specific work. In 1974, he started working with shaped stretchers and introduced the element of line into his paintings. A year later, Stamm produced his “Wooster” series inspired by a form he had seen on Wooster Street where he lived. At this time, he also began making on his “Dodger” paintings named after the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. The curved forms and right angles used in these paintings were likely derived from the shape of a baseball field diamond. Examples of both Stamm’s “Wooster” and “Dodger” paintings will be included in the exhibition.

Increasingly engrossed by the concept of speed, the aerodynamic design of cars, trains, and airplanes, and the Modernist charge to reinvent painting for future generations, Stamm began developing his “C-Dodger” paintings in the last 1970s. The “C” in the title referred to the supersonic airplane The Concorde, which Stamm would often travel to see arrive and depart at Kennedy Airport in NYC. Similarly, his “Zephyr” paintings begun in 1979 were informed by the futuristic, stainless steel train that set a speed record for travel between Denver and Chicago in 1934. His later paintings “ZCTs” and “CDDs” from early 1980s hybridized various elements from his earlier “Wooster” and “Dodger” works and were hung low on the wall just inches off the ground. One of Stamm’s “Zephyr” paintings, ZYR-4 (1979, oil on canvas, 33 x 114 inches), will be on view in the exhibition.

During his career, Stamm was also engaged in making highly experimental works produced in collaboration with other artists and individuals. His “Tag” pieces enlisted the participation of visitors to his studio who were asked to make a mark of their choosing onto a found garment tag that was glued down onto a page in a sketchbook. Stamm would respond to this mark in a second sketchbook of the same design. Both pages were then stamped with the date and other collateral information to create a record of their exchange.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Stamm also made proto-graffiti street interventions, which he termed “Designators”. Using a small stencil of his “Dodger” shape, he painted the shape in black on buildings and other locations in NYC that had personal significance to him. When he returned to a specific site and saw that his original mark had been altered, he would paint the shape again in silver. On his third visit, he would stencil a black “T” on the silver shape. On his fourth and final visit, he would add a second “T”, this time in silver. Images of Stamm’s street interventions will be included in his show, as well as documentation by photographer Abby Robinson of his participation in the Pool Project organized by artist Russell Maltz at the C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY, in the late 1970s.

In one of his few written statements about his work, Stamm asserts “my work deals with an idealism which announces and supports the advancement of the art language, specifically painting”. More than 25 years after his death, it is clear that Stamm’s persona and character, his optimism about painting’s enduring possibilities and future advancement, and his expanded practice both in and out of the studio were of great significance to his artist contemporaries. His work also anticipated the conceptual strategies and material inquiries of subsequent generations of artists who came of age in NYC during the past three decades.

Ted Stamm (b. 1944 Brooklyn, NY; d. 1984 New York, NY) exhibited his work internationally during his lifetime, including in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues, such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Clocktower, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Condeso/Lawler Gallery (all New York City), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH), Museum of Art (Fort Lauderdale, FL), Oklahoma Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, OK), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, CA), Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL), Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), Atkins Museum of Fine Art (Kansas City, MO), Akademie Der Kunste (Berlin, Germany), and Louisiana Museum (Humlebaek, Denmark).

In 1977, Stamm was included by curator Manfred Schneckenburger in Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany. His work was exhibited alongside artists, such as Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra, among others. In addition, Stamm exhibited his work at the legendary Downtown artist-founded venues 112 Greene Street (1975), Artists Space (1975, 1980), and Franklin Furnace (1977, 1980).

Stamm received awards in Painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowments for the Arts (1981-1982). His work has been reviewed in publications, such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun, among others.

Stamm’s work is included in the public collections of Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA); Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), and Western Australia Art Gallery (Perth, Australia).

CATALOG
Ted Stamm: Painting Advance 1990, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, NY, 1986 (PDF)

PRESS
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Pac Pobric, On-Verge, November 27, 2011
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Brett Baker, Painters’ Table, October 8, 2011
Ted Stamm @ MINUS SPACE, by Mark Dagley, Abaton Book Company, October 6, 2011
Best Exhibition Award, DUMBO Arts Festival, September 23-25, 2011
The Reductive Expands: MINUS SPACE will move from 175 feet in Gowanus to a Dumbo loft, by Stephen Maine, Artcritical, September 12, 2011
Gowanus Gallery MINUS SPACE Moving to Dumbo, by Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, September 1, 2011

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE would like to thank Russell Maltz, Per Haubro Jensen, Abby Robinson, Linda Levit, Serra Pradhan, and Marianne Boesky Gallery for their expert assistance with this exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm and by appointment

Doug Ohlson, PU-011, 2004-2006
Acrylic on canvas
26 1/4 x 24 1/8 inches

August 6 – September 17, 2011

MINUS SPACE is pleased to present Pointing a Telescope at the Sun, a group exhibition highlighting abstract color painting by five highly-influential NYC-based artists: Gabriele Evertz, Vincent Longo, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Doug Ohlson (1936-2010) who passed away last year at age 73.

A core concern shared among these five artists is their pioneering investigation of color and its transformative effect on the viewer. Their strategies with color range from the exhaustively systematic to the intuitively poetic to the radiantly visceral. The exhibition will feature one recent painting by each artist.

All five artists have also held decades-long associations with the renowned Art Department at Hunter College in New York City, one of the leading champions of color and abstraction – not to mention painting – among art schools in the United States. With more than 150 years of combined teaching experience at Hunter among them, these five artists have mentored countless generations of artists and have profoundly impacted the artistic discourse on the local, national, and international levels.

Gabriele Evertz (b. 1945 Berlin, Germany) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her recent museum exhibitions include Columbus Museum, Heckscher Museum, Hillwood Art Museum, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, Southwest Minnesota State University Art Museum, and Ulrich Museum. Her work is included in many public collections worldwide, including The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey State Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst Zurich, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wilhelm Mack Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to her painting practice, Evertz has also curated several major exhibitions over the past ten years at Hunter College, including Visual Sensations: Robert Swain Paintings, 1967-2010; Presentational Painting III; and Seeing Red: An International Exhibition of Nonobjective Painting.

Vincent Longo (b. 1923 New York, NY) is a both a painter and groundbreaking printmaker. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally since the 1950s. Retrospectives of his work have been held at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, and Hunter College. Longo has received awards from the National Endowments for the Arts, Cooper Union, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Institute for International Education (Fulbright). His work is included in countless public collections worldwide, including The Brooklyn Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Fogg Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, National Gallery of Art, New York Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

Doug Ohlson (b. 1936 Cherokee, Iowa; d. 2010 New York, NY) moved from the Midwest to New York City in 1961. Survey exhibitions of Ohlson’s work have been mounted at Bennington College, Hunter College, and Nell Gifford Stern Gallery. He has participated in countless museum exhibitions, including at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, American Academy of Arts & Letters, The Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Ohlson has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the City University of New York.

Robert Swain (b. 1940 Austin, TX) has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for more than 40 years. His work is represented in nearly 300 public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Everson Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, among others. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, College Art Association, and the City University of New York. Swain was the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition at Hunter College Times Square Gallery in 2010.

Sanford Wurmfeld (b. 1942 Bronx, NY) has exhibited his work worldwide in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960s. His immersive 360-degree painting Cyclorama has been recently exhibited at the Neuberger Museum of Art; Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany; and Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary. He has participated in many museum exhibitions, including at the American Academy of Art and Letters, Carnegie Museum of Art, Dayton Art Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich, Long Beach Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Museum of Art, and Tate Gallery. Wurmfeld has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, City University of New York, and Dartmouth College. He has also lectured and published widely on the subject of color.

PRESS
Weekend Update, by Walter Robinson, Artnet Magazine, October 24, 2011
The Reductive Expands: MINUS SPACE will move from 175 feet in Gowanus to a Dumbo loft, by Stephen Maine, Artcritical, September 12, 2011
Pointing a Telescope at the Sun at MINUS SPACE, NY Arts Magazine, Summer 2011
Eye to the Optical Sky, by Noah Dillon, ArtSlant, August 29, 2011
Pointing a Telescope at the Sun at MINUS SPACE, by Caleb de Jong, Thoughts That Cure Radically blog, August 24, 2011
Best in Show: “Pointing a Telescope at the Sun” at MINUS SPACE, by Robert Shuster, Village Voice, August 24, 2011
Gallery Picks: August 2011, SpruceStar Studio, August 3, 2011

SUPPORT
We would like to thank Michele Toohey and Andrew Wojtas for their generous assistance with the exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment
> directions

Carrie Pollack, Woven 1, 2011
Digital print on linen
26 x 22 inches

June 25 – July 30, 2011

My Dear Friends:

Those keynote events, which recently awakened your planet to faith and to action, have torn away the last veils of denial from the Collective Consciousness. A stone has been thrown into the water, and ripples of pure energy now spread around the globe – ushering in what will eventually become known as The Age of Conscious Choice. Doorways are opening, and magic is afoot! And we are here to explain, in detail, how they work and what they mean. This is no longer a game to be played by just the spiritual elite. What was once a privilege of the chosen few now becomes the heritage of all.

All around you, in every place, there exist Energy Gates – portals in time and space – through which a person can pass to new life and experiences. Some are visible, and some are of the mind and heart. All of them are real. Some portals exist as specific places. Simply to visit these locations is to be transformed. Other portals require energetic “passwords” or “vibratory signatures” to activate them. Still others – those connected to the highest levels of transformation – require passwords, along with “sponsorship” by an Etheric Guide, so that the unconscious or unprepared can not enter them unaware.

There are many kinds of Trans-Portals. Most are opened through the verbalization of some goal or desire for personal development. In such cases, the INTENT of the traveler becomes a blade that cuts an opening in the Veil which divides the universes. Once a portal is opened, your journey begins. A vortex draws the individual in, and certain “changes” are effected, so that transport to an adjacent universe can occur.

– Channeled by Daniel Jacob

Between This Light and That and Space is a group exhibition organized by Brooklyn-based abstract painter Douglas Melini and features the work of seven artists:

Tisch Abelow (b. 1985, lives Brooklyn, NYC)
Palma Blank (b. 1979, lives Brooklyn, NYC)
Anne Eastman (b. 1973, lives Brooklyn, NYC)
Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, lives Oak Park, Illinois)
Elana Herzog (b. 1954, lives New York, NYC)
Carrie Pollack (b. 1973, lives Brooklyn, NYC)
Tamara Zahaykevich (b. 1971, lives Brooklyn, NYC)

PRESS
Between This Light and That and Space @ Minus Space, by Kris Chatterson, KCLOG, July 29, 2011
Gallery Tour – New York – July 20-21, 2011, Liselott Johnsson Blog, July 27, 2011
Between This Light and That and Space, by Sarah Schmerler, Time Out New York, July 11, 2011
Douglas Melini at MINUS SPACE, Gorky’s Granddaughter, June 29, 2011
Out with Carrie: June 25, 2011, by Carrie Chatterson, KCLOG, June 27, 2011
artBUZZ: Inner Space/Outer Space, by Angela Basile, Brooklyn (The Borough), June 22, 2011

SUPPORT
Many thanks to LMAKprojects for their assistance with the exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment
> directions

Erik Saxon, Untitled, 1973
Commercial Varathane paint and Rhoplex on canvas
24 x 40 inches

May 7 – June 11, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Erik Saxon: Select Works, 1973-2011. This is the Manhattan-based painter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature key works from seminal points in the artist’s oeuvre spanning the past forty years, including several never-before-seen grid, shaped, multi-panel, and monochrome paintings.

For the past four decades, Erik Saxon has produced rigorous abstract geometric work, including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Erik moved to New York in 1964, but returned to San Francisco in 1965 to earn his Masters degree. He permanently relocated to New York City in 1968. Between 1968-1973, he produced works that alternated between abstraction and abstract figuration. In 1973, he began exclusively making abstract work based on the grid format, initially using watercolor on paper and then industrial paint on raw canvas. One of Erik’s first abstract grid paintings, Untitled (1973, commercial Varathane paint and Rhoplex on canvas, 24 x 40 inches), will be included in the exhibition.

That same year Erik began experimenting with monochromatic works – a series of acrylic drawings consisting of white and off-white squares arranged into groups of three to five panels – but tabled the idea a year later focusing his attention instead on paintings organized around a nine square grid structure (3 rows x 3 columns). With the intention of exploring “all possible variations within the picture plane”, the new grid works contained lines, rectangular bars, and squares, as well as the three neutral (white, gray, black) and three primary colors (red, yellow, blue). The grid paintings Erik produced between 1974-1977 are a critical development and define his core concerns for the next three decades. The yellow, white, gray and raw canvas grid painting, Untitled (1975, acrylic, pencil and matte medium on canvas, 60 x 60 inches), will be on view in the exhibition.

In 1977, Erik returned to the idea of the monochrome. His first monochromes consisted of multiple square and/or rectangular panels joined together forming a single shaped painting. Several years later in 1982, he produced his first all-white painting, which was conceived as a fusion of “an interior white square with the picture plane of the painting”. Two key paintings from this five-year period, 4.W.S.1.OFF.W.R./D.CROSS_O/M_78-79 (1978-79, oil on masonite, 35 1/4 x 35 1/4 inches) and W.S.#2-6_O/L_82-3 (1982-83, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches), will be included at the gallery.

For the past thirty years, Erik has experimented broadly with the concept of the monochrome. He has worked with a wide variety of shaped painting supports, including squares, rectangles, crosses, circles, and ovals. He has produced single panel paintings, as well as diptychs and triptychs. His paintings commonly featured layered surfaces sometimes involving up to thirty successive layers of paint, which according to the artist, “frees the paint from its support enabling it to become an independent surface”.

During this time, Erik also examined a painting’s relationship to the wall, the floor, its location within the exhibition space, and the viewer. Paintings are sometimes hung at an oblique angle to the floor or with the bottom edge of a painting positioned at eye level on the wall. In addition, he has analyzed the inherent tension between individual panels in a diptych or triptych, sometimes installing them abutted together horizontally or vertically, spaced apart at predetermined intervals, or positioned on the wall at a precise distance away from each other where the individual panels no longer relate. The exhibition will include two key works from this period, the black and yellow diptych BLK.RECT.+YEL.RECT.OB._O/L_09 (2009, oil on linen, 36 x 56 inches overall) and the new off-white egg-shaped painting P.2._OFF.W._O/L_11 (2011, oil on linen,19 x 15 inches).

Erik Saxon (b. 1941, San Francisco, CA, USA) has exhibited his work internationally for the past forty years, including Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues, such as Stark Gallery, Lorence/Monk Gallery, Florence Lynch Gallery (all NYC), Modernism (San Francisco, CA), Newspace (Los Angeles, CA), Galerie L’A (Liege, Belgium), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, ME), Cincinnati Museum of Art (Cincinnati, OH), Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, IL), Brevard Museum of Art and Science (Melbourne, FL), Sunrise Museum (Charleston, WV), Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC), Wilhelm-Hack Museum (Ludwigshafen, Germany), Raum für Malerei, artothek, Kolnisches Stadt Museum (all Cologne, Germany), Kunstverein Arnsberg (Arnsberg, Germany), Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst (Landkreis Cuxhaven, Germany), Mondriaanhuis (Amersfoort, Netherlands), Museum of Modern Art (Belgrade, Serbia), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente (Segovia, Spain), and Museo Cantonale d’Arte (Lugano, Switzerland).

Erik is most closely associated with the Radical Painting Group active in NYC during the 1970s and early 1980s. The group stressed a radical return to the core concerns of painting. The group’s other participants included artists Marcia Hafif, Dale Henry, Anders Knutsson, Joseph Marioni, Olivier Mosset, Phil Sims, Doug Sanderson, Susanna Tanger, Frederic Matys Thursz, Merrill Wagner, and Jerry Zeniuk, among others.

Erik’s work has been discussed and reviewed in publications, such as Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice, New York Observer, New York Sun, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger (Germany). His paintings and drawings are included in many public and private collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA), Göteborg Museum of Art (Göteborg, Sweden), Museo Cantonale d’Arte (Lugano, Switzerland), and Museum of Modern Art (Belgrade, Serbia). His work has been collected by Wynn Kramarsky (NYC) and Giuseppe Panza (Varese, Italy).

In addition to his studio work, Erik has written extensively. His essays and criticism have appeared in exhibition catalogs worldwide and have been published in magazines, such as Artforum, Art in America, and Appearances, among others. Erik holds an MA and BA from the University of California, Berkeley, CA.

PRESS
Erik Saxon at MINUS SPACE, by Sarah Schmerler, Art in America, October 2011
Erik Saxon at MINUS SPACE, by Sarah Schmerler, Sarah Schmerler blog, June 3, 2011
Erik Saxon’s Rigorous Yet Playful Abstraction, by Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint blog, May 13, 2011
Erik Saxon, Eva Lake blog, May 11, 2011
artBUZZ: On and Off the Grid, by Angela Basile, Brooklyn (The Borough), May 4, 2011

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment
> directions

Studio view

March 26 – April 30, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Li Trincere: Elements. This is the Manhattan-based painter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature a pair of new shaped paintings and a suite of new large pastel drawings on paper.

For the past three decades, Li Trincere has produced shaped abstract paintings, including uneven crosses, compressed Xs, inverted triangles, and irregular trapezoids. The paintings starkly contrast the literal shape of the canvas stretcher with the depicted shape painted on it. Strongly influenced by the vocabulary of Minimalist sculpture, Li’s paintings utilize elemental shapes that function more like structures than two-dimensional surfaces. This attribute is underscored by her limited and highly-selective use of color –- one, two, or three key hues, in most cases. Summarizing her core aesthetic concerns over the years, Li concisely states: “Mass / Volume – Weight / Time – Order / Construct – Icon / Archetype”.

Li Trincere (b. 1960, NYC) has exhibited her work internationally for the past 30 years, including in Australia, Belgium, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. During the early 1980s, she was heavily involved in the East Village abstract painting scene and showed at many of the landmark venues of the time, including Mission Gallery, Pyramid Club, Kamikaze Club, and The World. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she exhibited at key galleries presenting new abstraction, such as Julian Pretto/Berland Hall, Stark Gallery, and Gabriele Bryers Gallery (all NYC), as well as the legendary Galerie Rolf Ricke in Cologne, Germany. During these critical formative years, she participated in two-person and group exhibitions alongside other pioneering abstract painters, such as Olivier Mosset, Alan Uglow, Steven Parrino, Don Voisine, Mark Dagley, Daniel Levine, Sharon Brant, Neil Campbell, and Gary Lang, among many others.

Li has received awards from the National Endowments for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Edward Albee Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and Artists Space. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Kunstforum, among others. Li’s work was included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2008-2009), as well as our group exhibition Escape from New York which traveled throughout Australia and New Zealand (2007-2010). Li holds an MFA in Painting from Hunter College, NYC, and a BFA in Printmaking from Southampton College, Southampton, NY.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment
> directions

February 5 – March 12, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Kyle Jenkins: Sunken Treasure. This is the Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States and it will feature a new site-specific painting installation.

Working in a wide array of media, including painting, wall painting, works on paper, artist books, photography, film, and sound, Kyle has developed a distinct form of intuitive abstraction that incorporates both hard-edge and organic strategies. Informed by the geometric regularity of the urban environment, the artist’s core concern has been the integration of art and architecture over the past decade.

For Sunken Treasure, Kyle will present a new wall painting, new acrylic paintings on canvas, and a suite of new paintings on paper recently produced during a residency in Denmark. The title of the exhibition stems from an ongoing series of projects planned by the artist in which the architecture of the gallery space and the art works presented within it collapse into each other. About this idea, Kyle states, “Sunken treasure is something that is there and present at the bottom of the ocean, but at the same time, it is hidden from view by its position at the bottom of the sea. The work in this exhibition will function in the same way, with no separation between the paintings, the wall painting, and the gallery space.”

Kyle Jenkins (b. 1975, Dungog, New South Wales, Australia) has exhibited his work internationally for the past 15 years, including in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. Kyle’s work was included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008-2009. His work is included in the collections of Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Qantas (both Australia), and Esbjerg Museum (Denmark), as well as countless private collections worldwide.

In addition to his artistic work, Kyle is Coordinator of the Visual Art Department and Senior Lecturer in Painting & Art Theory at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. During his career, he has curated numerous exhibitions about contemporary reductive abstraction throughout Australia. He has also played pivotal roles in the development and leadership of countless artist-run projects in Australia, including CBD Gallery, SPHERE press, Project 11, MOP Projects, Sydney Non-Objective, Non-Objective Toowoomba, i.e. gallery, and Buttons and Zippers.

Kyle is also a member of the rock bands Bloodspots and Suicide Swans. He holds a PhD in Visual Art and Theory from the University of Sydney, Australia.

SUPPORT
This exhibition has been supported by The University of Southern Queensland, Faculty of Arts Research Committee. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Left: “Why Artists Are Going Abstract: The Case of Stuart Davis”, by Winthrop Sargeant
Life Magazine, February 17, 1947, p. 78-83, © Life Magazine

Right: Loren Munk, The Roots of the New York School, 2010
Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

December 11, 2010 – January 29, 2011

MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce the exhibition Becoming Modern in America. The twofold exhibition will feature more than 20 vintage issues of Life magazine spanning the years 1936-1972, as well as two recent paintings by Brooklyn, New York-based painter Loren Munk.

Life Magazine
Life was purchased and redesigned as a weekly news publication by Henry Luce in 1936. It was the first photojournalism magazine published in the United States and its editors placed photographs on par with written text. For more than 30 years, Life was one of the most wide-reaching and influential popular media outlets in the US with its circulation reaching 8.5 million copies weekly by 1970.

Between 1936-1972, Life published more than 20 feature articles about the emergence of Modern Art in the US, including the development and public reception of geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. It is still debated today whether the magazine’s coverage of the visual arts during this time was a benefit or a detriment to the artist community in New York City.

Groundbreaking articles include its August 8, 1949 issue, in which Life published the controversially-titled article “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”. This was followed a year later on January 15, 1951 by Life’s second landmark article “The Metropolitan and Modern Art: Amid Brickbats and Bouquets the Museum Holds Its First US Painting Competition”, which featured the iconic photograph of The Irascibles by Nina Leen.

Life also profiled dozens of other artists in its pages during this period, including Piet Mondrian, George Braque, Stuart Davis, Jean Xceron, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella, as well as the critics Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, among others. The magazine highlighted key moments in the development of Modern Art, such as the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1937, A.E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art in 1938, the Museum of Modern Art’s roundtable on Modern Art featuring 15 major art critics in 1958, The Downtown Gallery founded by Edith Halpert, and The Jewish Museum’s Primary Structures exhibition in 1967.

Loren Munk
For the past decade, Loren Munk has created intricate, impastoed information paintings mapping the history of New York City’s artists, writers, venues, and movements. Becoming Modern in America will feature two recent paintings by the artist. The first painting, The Roots of the New York School, highlights the artists Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham, and diagrams the history, influences, and venues that led to the development of the New York School. Loren’s second painting, Critical America, similarly visualizes the field of art criticism as two primary streams of thought — formalistic and poetic -– and maps the influence of the key critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

Loren Munk (b. 1951, Salt Lake City, Utah) has exhibited his work in museums, galleries, and non-profit venues nationally and internationally for the past 30 years, including in New York, Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland, and Brazil. His work is included in countless public and private collections worldwide, such as the Museum of the City of New York, Metropolitan Transit Authority, Chase Manhattan Bank, Sony Music, Forbes Magazine (all NYC), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Hood Museum of Art (New Hampshire).

In addition to his artistic work, Loren has been a highly visible art critic for more than a dozen years. Working under the pseudonym James Kalm, a persona he created in the 1990s, he produces the weekly video blog The Kalm Report on YouTube, which he describes as a “blurring of criticism, historic documentation, journalism, and performance art”. He is also a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, writing the column Brooklyn Dispatch.

Life Articles
* Europeans Sweep Carnegie Show, December 20, 1937, p. 24

* Albert Gallatin’s Great-Grandson Sponsors a Museum of Abstract Art, May 2, 1938, p. 42

* Speaking of Pictures, This Is Art by Piet Mondrian, July 2, 1945, p. 6

* Why Artists Are Going Abstract: The Case of Stuart Davis, February 17, 1947, p. 78-83

* Radar: A Nonobjective Painter Tries to Marry Science and Art on Canvas, Jean Xceron, February 2, 1948, p. 69

* A Life Round Table on Modern Art, Fifteen Distinguished Critics and Connoisseurs Undertake to Clarify the Strange Art of Today, October 11, 1948, p. 56

* Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke, December 20, 1948, p. 22

* High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow: There Are Three Basic Categories of a New U.S. Social Structure, and the High-Brows Have the Whip Hand, April 11, 1949, p. 99

* George Braque: Great French Innovator Has Evolved a Serene Modern Art of His Own, May 2, 1949, p. 80

* Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?, August 8, 1949, p. 42

* 100 Years of American Taste: A Gallery of Popular Paintings Reveals an Unwavering Love of Realism, August 29, 1949, p. 56

* The Great Armory Show of 1913: The Most Important Art Event of the Century Threw the People of the U.S. into an Uproar, January 2, 1950, p. 58

* The Metropolitan and Modern Art: Amid Brickbats and Bouquets the Museum Holds Its First U.S. Painting Competition, January 15, 1951, p. 34

* New Crop of Painting Proteges: Dealer with an Eye for Talent Tries to Pick Tomorrow’s Stars, March 17, 1952, p. 87

* New Art at Close View: Details from the Carnegie Show Dramatize Painters’ Approaches, November 21, 1955, p. 96

* Great Recluse: Brancusi and Art Come from Hiding, December 5, 1955, p. 131

* A Boom in U.S. Art Abroad: Japan and Europe Go for Americans, May 19, 1958, p. 76

* Star Brother Act in Art: Two Italian Artists, Afro and Mirko, Make Hit Teaching in U.S. Colleges, June 9, 1958, p. 66

* Baffling U.S. Art: What It Is About, Life Presents a Two-Part Series on the Abstract Expressionists, World’s Dominant Artists Today, Part I, November 9, 1959, p. 68

* The Varied Art of Four Pioneers: Analogies with Nature Help Explain Abstract-Expressionist Work, Part II, November 16, 1959, p. 74

* Master of the Minimal: Ad Reinhardt, Honor Comes Late to a Solitary Moralist in Art, February 3, 1967, p. 45

* Shape of Art for Some Time to Come, July 28, 1967, p. 38

* A New Cut in Art: Oddly Shaped Canvases by Frank Stella Challenges Viewers, January 19, 1968, p. 44

* Fling, Dribble and Dip: Young Sculptors Pour Their Art All Over the Floor, February 27, 1970, p. 62

PRESS
Loren Munk at MINUS SPACE, by Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, January 22, 2011

Becoming Modern in America: Life Magazine 1936–1972 & New Paintings by Loren Monk, by Sarah Schmerler, Time Out New York, January 14, 2011

Gallery Chronicle, by James Panero, The New Criterion, January 2011

A Loren Munk Report, by Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint blog, December 12, 2010

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

View of Robert Swain’s studio, NYC

October 23 – December 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the solo exhibition Robert Swain: Primary Research.  This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will focus on his life-long investigation into color sensation.

In 1969, Robert began developing his own color system, the centerpiece of which is a 30-part hue (color) circle.  When joined with the attributes of value (the lightness or darkness of a color) and saturation (the pureness of a color), his system grew exponentially over the following decades to now include 4,896 distinct parts.

Robert Swain: Primary Research will feature an array of material facets from his color inquiry, including a 30-part hue circle painting, original hand-painted and numbered color charts from the early 1970s, jars of premixed and color-calibrated acrylic paint from his exhaustive paint library, a suite of portfolios containing digital inkjet prints serving as color studies for potential paintings, a set of small brushstroke painting studies, as well as other related ephemera including color chips, mixing spoons, and more.  The exhibition will also include two paintings spanning 30 years: a grid painting entitled Untitled 801 (1978, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches) and a brushstroke painting entitled Untitled 9-25-8 x 13-25-7 x 23-25-6 x 27-25-6 (2010, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches).

Regarding the development of his color system, Robert states “I became interested in color in the early 1960s.  There wasn’t a great deal of written information about it, but I work intuitively.  I started to look at color and to make charts and experimental work trying to understand the phenomenology of color.  I don’t look at the work as being objective.  I simply look at it as a way of trying to get into the subject matter of color and to understand it through experience.  And all of this was done visually.  It wasn’t done mathematically.  It wasn’t done in some kind of progression.  It was simply done by painting color charts, looking at them, and deciding in that moment of looking if they were correct or not.”

About his increasing interest in color over the years, he continues, “One thing that fascinates me about color is that each individual color has its own connotation, which can be perceived as emotional or can affect you in some particular way.  One of the things I strive for is to try to bring out the uniqueness of color itself as an expressive force.  Color is involved with radiant energy.  It’s not passive, and in that sense, when you look at color, it’s actually transferring energy into your physical self.  One of the things you try to do is isolate some kind of vehicle, some kind of configuration that allows color to speak of itself and for itself.”

ROBERT SWAIN
Robert Swain is one of the most influential artists of his generation.  He was born in Austin, Texas, in 1940, and grew up in Arlington, Virginia.  During high school in the late 1950s, he spent his summers in Guatemala and Nicaragua working on the Pan-American Highway.  He attended The American University in Washington, DC, where he later received a BA in Fine Art in 1964.  During his undergraduate studies, he spent two years in Madrid, Spain, studying at the University of Madrid. In 1964, he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and worked as a studio assistant to the American Modernist painter Karl Knaths.  Robert moved to NYC in 1965 where he permanently settled in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.

In 1966 Robert began his first color-based work followed a year later by his first work utilizing the grid.  He participated in his first group exhibition, Light and Line, organized by John Baldwin at the legendary Park Place Gallery in NYC in 1967.  That same year he met Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith who became his close friend and mentor for many years.  In 1969, Robert began to develop his own color system, a project that continues until today.

Robert has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for more than 40 years.  His paintings have been including in countless landmark exhibitions.  He participated in the seminal exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1968.  The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais, Paris, France; Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland; and The Tate Gallery, London, England.  Robert exhibited in The Structure of Color curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, in 1971.  In 1974, he mounted his first solo museum exhibition at The Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, New York.  In 1974, he participated in Color as Language curated by Kynaston McShine and organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled throughout Central and South America, including to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.  His work was also twice included in the Corcoran Biennial at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1969, 1998).

Robert’s work is represented in nearly 300 public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Everson Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, among others.  He has completed major commissions for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, American Republic Insurance Company, Schering Laboratories, Harris Bank, Travenol Laboratories, Tupperware World Headquarters, and the University of Buffalo.  He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1989), New York State Council on the Arts, and the City University of New York.

In addition to his artistic work, Robert has taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College since 1968, where he has influenced and mentored countless generations of artists.  For his teaching, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1998.

Robert is also currently the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain curated by Gabriele Evertz at Hunter College Times Square Gallery located at 450 W. 41^st Street, NYC.  The exhibition dates are October 7 – November 13, 2010.  The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with texts by Gabriele Evertz, Professor of Art, Hunter College; William Agee, Professor of Art History, Hunter College; and artist and MINUS SPACE founder Matthew Deleget.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artist Gabriele Evertz for her incredible assistance with this exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Robert Swain: Hunter College Times Square Gallery & MINUS SPACE, by Stephen Maine, Art in America, February 2011
Robert Swain at Hunter College and MINUS SPACE, The Kalm Report, December 6, 2010
Gallery Chronicle: On “Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain, 1967–2010” at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery, by James Panero, The New Criterion, November 2010

Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM, 2010
Installation view with painting & wall painting

September 18 – October 16, 2010

MINUS SPACE is very excited to announce the solo exhibition Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM.  This is the Amsterdam-based artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a site-specific painting installation.

For his exhibition, Jan will present two new acrylic on linen paintings featuring intricate black and white patterns.  The patterns are informed by a number of diverse sources, including Maori weavings, Islamic ceramic tiles, Portuguese azulejos, and Italian architectural marble designs, among others.  The paintings will be installed directly on top of an ambitious floor-to-ceiling wall painting covering all four walls of the gallery.  The wall painting will consist of narrow vertical red, green, and blue stripes that repeat at regular intervals throughout the space.  We will also have available a new limited-edition print by the artist (Untitled, 2010, silkscreen on paper, 50 x 40 cm, edition of 25) as part of his exhibition.

About Jan’s work, artist, curator and writer Michelle Grabner states, “…his paintings expand the best of contemporary non-objective work in their shear boldness and fearless scope, the entirety of the painting’s dynamics are always greater than the architecture that supports them…The impact of van der Ploeg’s paintings is located at the intersection of sensation and thought, between the work’s graphic visual impact and its conceptual underpinnings. His paintings are welcomingly antagonistic to narrative. Signifying instead a powerful commitment to the commingling of the familiar, new and strange potentials of color and form.”

Over the past two decades, Jan van der Ploeg (b. 1959) has exhibited his work extensively in both solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, including at venues such as The Suburban (Chicago), Smart Museum (Chicago), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Gemeentemuseum (The Hague), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Galerie Asim Chugthai (Berlin), Konsortium (Dusseldorf), Centre d’Art Neuchatel (France), Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (Brussels), Sarah Cottier Gallery (Sydney), Goddard de Fiddes Gallery (Perth), and Hamish McKay Gallery (Wellington).

Jan’s first solo exhibition at MINUS SPACE in 2006 was the gallery’s inaugural exhibition.  His work was also included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008-2009.

In addition to his artistic work, Jan founded and directs PS, a highly-regarded exhibition space and program based in Amsterdam.  Committed to new abstract and conceptual art, PS aims to provide a platform for the work of upcoming international artists in an environment that exists between the conventions of an artist-run space and a commercial gallery.

SUPPORT
Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM is generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Julian Dashper in New Caledonia, July 2008

August 7 – September 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the memorial exhibition Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life. The exhibition marks the one-year anniversary of the New Zealand artist’s death and it will feature a single work by Julian entitled Future Call, as well as written tributes to him by more than 70 artists internationally.

Julian Dashper is one of the most significant reductive artists of his generation. He was one of MINUS SPACE’s earliest international collaborators and supporters, starting around the time of our inception in 2003. Julian has had a core presence in our project ever since. Renowned for his generosity to others, he was highly esteemed both as an artist and individual, and is dearly missed by his family, friends, and the community of artists. As evident in the written tributes to him by artists to be included in the exhibition, Julian’s practice extended well beyond the walls of his studio. He was a “husband, father, friend, partner, collaborator, teacher, mentor, and advocate”. His life and work directly impacted hundreds of artists and others around the globe. His influence and legacy will continue for many years to come.

For Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life, MINUS SPACE will present Julian’s work Future Call consisting of a single telephone installed in the gallery that is periodically called from New Zealand, which is 16 hours ahead of New York City, only to be left ringing and unanswered. Traditionally completed by Julian, Future Call will be performed throughout the exhibition by Julian’s wife, artist Marie Shannon.

In addition, more than 70 artists and other individuals from around the globe contributed texts to the exhibition, including personal notes, memories, anecdotes, criticism, correspondence, poems, and elegies:

Soledad Arias, Marcus Bering, Channa Boon, Ralf Brög, Henry Brown & Millicent Borges Accardi, Mary-Louise Browne, Vicente Butron, Melanie Crader & Mick Johnson, Christoph Dahlhausen, Kasarian Dane, Judy Darragh & Rosanna Albertini, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget & Rossana Martinez, Ali Duffey, Daniel Feingold, Linda Francis, Alicia Frankovich, Zipora Fried, Andrea Gaskin, Daniel Göttin & Gerda Maise, Michelle Grabner, Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery, Vaughan Gunson, Jenny Halliday, Lynne Harlow, Miriam Harris, Gilbert Hsiao, William Hsu, Simon Ingram, Kyle Jenkins, Ian Jervis, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, James Juszczyk, Steve Karlik, Mark Kirby, WJM Kok, Keira Kotler, Elodie Lesourd, Stephen Little, Joshua Lux, MariaMaria, Jackie Meier, Moreno Miorelli, Dane Mitchell, Victoria Munro, Geoff Newton, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Salvatore Panatteri, Carrie Patterson, Nathan Pohio, Gwynneth Porter, Mel Prest, Linda Roche, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Rene Rusjan, Erik Saxon, Karen Schifano, Marie Shannon, Sandra Smith, Barbara Strathdee, Clary Stolte, Robert Swain, David Thomas, Mandy Thomsett-Taylor, Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg, Machiel van Soest, Erica van Zon, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Isha Welsh, Marcus Williams, Emi Winter, Rachael Wren, Patricia Zarate, and others.

Fittingly, Julian Dashper was born on February 29, 1960 (leap year day). During his career, he mounted more than 140 solo exhibitions of his work worldwide, including in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 2001, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to be an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. A 25-year retrospective of Julian’s work, entitled Midwestern Unlike You and Me, curated by Christopher Cook and David Raskin, traveled the United States during 2005-2006, making stops at the Sioux City Art Center, IA; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, NE; and Ulrich Museum of Art, KS. Julian’s work was included in our comprehensive group exhibition MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008-2009. Julian died on July 30, 2009, and is survived by his wife Marie Shannon and their teenage son Leo.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank artists Marie Shannon, Victoria Munro, and Jan van der Ploeg for their tremendous assistance in organizing this exhibition. We would also like to thank all of the artists who contributed heartfelt texts to the show. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Summer Group Shows, by Robert Shuster, Village Voice, August 25, 2010
Julian Dashper: It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, by Tana Mitchell, PROCESS Blog, August 18, 2010
Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, James Kalm Report, August 8, 2010
A Must-See, Artlog, August 7, 2010
Artlog’s Top Art & Culture Picks, Huffington Post, August 4, 2010
Be Prepared to Go With the Flow, by Adam Gifford, New Zealand Herald, July 31, 2010

Steve Karlik, Flip, 2010
From the Tension and Compression series
Glass sheets with enamel paint
18 x 48 x 1/4 inches

August 1-22, 2010

Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Main Campus Building
1241 NW Johnson Street
Portland, OR 97209

M5 explores the intersections and mutual interests of five artists who have exhibited at Brooklyn’s MINUS SPACE: Don Voisine, Patricia Zarate, Steve Karlik, Nancy White and Rossana Martinez, combined with two of the Northwest’s most historically relevant abstract practitioners Francis Celentano and Mel Katz.

“The connection between these artists is direct since Katz was once Karlik’s professor and Celentano is a pioneer of the Op Art movement first coined in the 1960s, though perceptual art has existed prior and since. Also, since so many Portland artists are interested in these ideas surrounding minimalism, perceptual and reductive art practices I felt it was valuable to expose these two groups to one another,” says Jeff Jahn, curator of the exhibition.

MINUS SPACE is an international web platform, itinerant international curatorial program and Brooklyn alternative space who in 2008 had its five-year retrospective at P.S.1. Curator Jeff Jahn is co-founder of PORT, an online catalyst of critical discourse focused on contemporary art in Portland. Jahn is a curator, cultural historian, critic and artist who has been published and exhibited internationally.

Since its founding in 1909, Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) has become a leader in innovative educational programs that connect students to a global perspective in the visual arts and design. In addition to its nine Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees, PNCA offers graduate education with an MFA in Visual Studies, as well as an MFA in Applied Craft and Design developed in collaboration with Oregon College of Art and Craft.

PNCA is actively involved in Portland’s cultural life through exhibitions and a vibrant public program of lectures and internationally recognized visiting artists, designers and creative thinkers. With the support of PNCA+FIVE (Ford Institute for Visual Education), the College has a partnership with the nationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Craft. For more information, visit www.pnca.edu.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artists Jeff Jahn and Steve Karlik for their tremendous work on this exhibition. Our additional thanks goes to the staff of the Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space, Pacific Northwest College of Art, for their assistance.  MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Interview with Jeff Jahn, ArC: Art & Concept blog, August 19, 2010
First Thursday Picks August 2010, PORT – Portland art + news + reviews, August 3, 2010

Work by Emmanuel Van der Meulen

June 26 – July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the first installment of the Brussels, Belgium-based Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art’s (CCNOA) most recent initiative 30/30 – Image Archive Project (IAP).

Conceived by artist and CCNOA Chief Curator/Artistic Director Tilman, the exhibition will feature a diverse group of small works by 9 international artists, including Delphine Deguislage (Belgium), Clemens Hollerer (Austria), Atsuo Hukuda (Japan), Andrew Huston (USA), Camila Oliveira-Fairclough (Brazil/United Kingdom), Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (France), Emmanuel Van der Meulen (France), Jan Maarten Voskuil (The Netherlands), and Lars Wolter (Germany).

With 30/30-IAP, CCNOA seeks to establish a collective collection that will showcase the mesmerizing breadth and depth of approaches reductive artists are currently pursuing on the international level.  The project’s title refers to the size restriction for all works to be included in CCNOA’s emerging registry, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm.  This will enable CCNOA to easily travel the project worldwide (museum in a suitcase).

30/30-IAP is administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with artists CCNOA has collaborated with over  the past 12 years, as well as newly invited artists from around the globe.  CCNOA is currently planning forthcoming 30/30-IAP exhibitions at artist-run venues in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand,  and the United States.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Hartmut Böhm
Untersuchungen eines Quadratsystems, IV, 1964/68
Silkscreen on paper, 40 x 40 cm
Photographer: Grzegorz Zabłocki

May 8 – June 12, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Hartmut Böhm: Graphic Systems, Prints 1965-1975. This is the Berlin-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City and it will feature ten silkscreen prints produced between 1965 and 1975.

For more than fifty years, Hartmut Böhm has been working in installation, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work focuses almost exclusively on the aesthetics of systems that highlight the relativity of perception. Böhm’s practice is organized around four primary areas of investigation: Systems (serial structures), Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity), Gestalt (partition and outline), and Concept (linear principles and infinite progressions).

Perception is the dominant facet of the work he produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which includes the prints on view at MINUS SPACE. About his work of this period, Böhm states, “It was about investigation, comprehension, and perception as active learning…it wasn’t about optical sensations.” Böhm views the systems in his work as pictorial strategies, rather than metaphysical vehicles pointing toward the realm of utopia. He continues, “The fascination for me lies in the simultaneous logical combining of the visible and invisible elements, and their derived principal separation from that same logic.”

A comprehensive interview with Hartmut Böhm, his first in English, was conducted by Matthew Deleget and published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004. Böhm’s work was recently included in the group exhibitions Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in 2009, and MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008.

Hartmut Böhm is one of the most important European reductive artists of his generation. He was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1938, and studied with Arnold Bode, the founder and curator of Documenta, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel. Böhm produced his first systems-based work in 1959. Several years later, he was included in the seminal constructivist exhibition Nouvelle Tendance: Propositions visuelles du mouvement international at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 1964. The exhibition heralded in the Op, Kinetic, and Zero Art movements.

Böhm has mounted more than sixty solo exhibitions and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions internationally. His work is included in nearly seventy public collections worldwide. The Chelm Museum Collection of Contemporary Art in Chelm, Poland, mounted a retrospective of Böhm’s prints in 2008.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Mark Dagley, Final Sequence, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 10 x 10 inches

April 22 – May 8, 2010
Floor Talk: Wednesday, April 21, 12noon

The Engine Room
Massey University
East End Block 1
Wallace Street
Wellington, New Zealand
T: 801 5799 x62170
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12-4pm
web site

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the group exhibition Escape from New York at The Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, from April 22 – May 8, 2010.

Curated by Matthew Deleget, the exhibition surveys reductive strategies by 29 artists living in and around New York City. Each artist will present a single small work, as well as an open letter to the local community of artists.

Escape from New York originated at Sydney Non Objective, Sydney, Australia, in 2007, and later traveled to Curtin University in Perth in 2008 and Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University in Melbourne in 2009.

Participating Artists:
Soledad Arias, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Bibi Calderaro, Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Julio Grinblatt, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Steve Karlik, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Manfred Mohr, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Robert Swain, Li-Trincere, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer & Michael Zahn

Also on view at The Engine Room: Collective Monochrome: Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a BIG THANKS to artists Simon Morris (NZ) and Billy Gruner (AUS) for traveling the exhibition to Wellington. Additional thanks goes to the staff of The Engine Room and Massey University for their support of the exhibition.

MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2010
Black gesso & silverpoint on 300lb Arches hot press paper
30 x 22 inches

March 27 – May 1, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new exhibition of drawings by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Grabner works primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking, and her practice is commonly organized around straightforward mathematical systems.

For her exhibition, Grabner will present a new series of drawings made from black gesso and silverpoint on heavyweight paper. In contrast to her other work, Grabner thinks of her drawing practice as “purely playing — it’s curiosity.” She continues saying, “The drawing just has to be executed, I have to play through it. I’m working on a lot of silverpoints right now; they’re not painting, but in their presence, I see them as an extension of painting.”

Michelle Grabner has exhibited her work extensively, including in North America, Europe, and Australia. Her work has been presented at museums, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Kunsthalle (Bern, Switzerland), Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Smart Museum (Chicago, IL), Mary and Leigh Block Museum (Evanston, IL), Naples Museum of Art (Naples, FL), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, MN).

Her work has been reviewed widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Musée d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Daimler Art Collection (Berlin, Germany), and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC).

Michelle Grabner is also a professor and chairperson of the Department of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in Chicago, and an MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

In addition to her artistic work, Grabner and her husband, artist Brad Killam, founded and direct The Suburban, a very well regarded, experimental exhibition space in Oak Park, Illinois. Grabner has also written extensively for publications, such as ArtForum, Modern Painters, Frieze, and X-tra.

In collaboration with MINUS SPACE, Grabner recently organized the online VIEWLIST project There are many things in the air and all of them are for free, published in May 2009. Her work was also included in the group exhibition Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in August 2009.

A comprehensive interview with Michelle Grabner by Saul Ostrow appears in the March 2010 issue of Art in America magazine.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Daniel Göttin, Installation Proposal for MINUS SPACE, 2010

February 6 – March 13, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new immersive installation by Basel, Switzerland-based artist Daniel Göttin entitled Network 45 with Signs. For the past 20 years, Göttin has focused on making temporary, site-specific interventions that examine the subjective nature of perception. His installations, always consisting of common industrial materials, such as tape, carpet, and paint, playfully respond to the specific characteristics of an architectural site and activate the viewer’s relationship to it.

For Network 45 with Signs, Göttin will create a black tape wall installation throughout the entire gallery. At select intervals throughout his installation, he will also install a series of abstract “signs” made of aluminum foil on laminated cardboard, which were informed and inspired by his recent residency in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Daniel Göttin has mounted nearly 60 solo exhibitions and projects since 1990 at museums, galleries, and non-profits worldwide, including throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, and the United States. His work has been presented, commissioned, collected, and written about widely over the past 20 years. In addition to his artistic work, Göttin, along with his partner, artist Gerda Maise, also directs Hebel_121, an experimental exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland.

Daniel Göttin’s installation Network 42 (2008) is also still on view in the café at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate in Long Island City, NY. It was originally created for the exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, which was on view at the museum from October 2008 – May 2009.

SUPPORT
The exhibition Daniel Göttin: Network 45 with Signs is supported by Abteilung Kultur, Basel, Switzerland. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

December 12, 2009 
- January 30, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new exhibition of seven album covers designed by Josef Albers (1888-1976) for Command Records between 1959-1961. The exhibition will also include additional Command Records album covers designed by other artists, such as Charles E. Murphy, Barbara Brown Peters, and Gerry Olin, as well as photographic reproductions of materials from The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation’s archives.

About Command Records
“This is the most unusual record you have ever put on your turntable. It is a unique mixture of entertainment, excitement, beauty and practicality.” — Persuasive Percussion (1959) liner notes

Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light (1905-1978), a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Light went to extraordinary technical lengths, and often great expense, to create recordings of the absolute highest quality possible that took full advantage of new technical capabilities of home audio equipment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Light specifically perfected stereo effects that bounced sounds between the right and left channel speakers, which was called a “ping-pong effect”.

On each album sleeve, Light would include lengthy technical descriptions about each song, the musicians, the depth and breadth of the sounds, and how they were recorded. In order to fit his descriptions, he doubled the size of a standard album sleeve and enabled it to fold open like a book, thereby inventing the gatefold-packaging format. The gatefold sleeve became highly popular in following decades.

Light’s first Command Records LP, Persuasive Percussion, which featured an Albers cover, was a highly successful popular hit. The album was listed as one of the 25 best-selling albums of the modern era by Joel Whitburn. For further information about Light, please see the Enoch Light web site (www.enochlight.com).

Josef Albers’ Designs
Command Records was distinguished by its highly modern, boldly graphic, abstract album cover designs. Charles E. Murphy was the label’s art director and he worked closely with a number of artists, including Albers, Barbara Brown Peters, and Gerry Olin, on designs for the label. Enoch Light’s daughter, Julie Light, first made the connection to Albers -– she studied with him at Black Mountain College.

Albers’ designs for Command Records in 1959-1961 came at a pivotal and highly-productive point in his professional career. In 1958, at age 70, he had just retired from his position as chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University. In the short period between 1959-1961, he completed many, large-scale public commissions, including for the Corning Glass and Time & Life Buildings in New York City; the Manuscript Society Building in New Haven, CT; and St. Patrick’s Church in Oklahoma City, OK. Several years later, in 1963, he published his seminal book Interaction of Color.

By 1959, Albers had been working on his Homage to the Square series for nearly a decade. He would continue to work on this series until his death in 1976. His designs for the Command Records, however, were a bit of a stylistic anomaly for him. Although references to music do appear in his work 25 years earlier, in works such as Keyboard (1932) and his Treble Clef series (1932-1935), his designs for Command Records prominently featured new formal elements for the first time, specifically circles and grids of circles. There are only two other instances of Albers using circles in his work: first, in the Christmas/New Year’s greeting cards he designed for his personal use (1952, 1957); and second, the sand-blasted glass door panels he designed for the Todd Theater in Chicago (1957).

Albers designed the following seven album covers for Command Records:

* Provocative Percussion (Volume 1), 1959
* Provocative Percussion (Volume 2), 1960
* Provocative Percussion (Volume 3), 1961
* Persuasive Percussion (Volume 1), 1959
* Persuasive Percussion (Volume 3), 1960
* Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky – Ravel, 1961
* Leonid Hambro and Jascha Zayde, Magnificent Two-Piano Performances, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, 1961

About Josef Albers
Josef Albers (1888-1976) was an influential artist, teacher, and writer. He is widely known for his painting series Homage to the Square (1950-1976), his innovative publication about color theory Interaction of Color (1963), and the legacy of his teaching at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University.

Interestingly, a short biography about Albers was included on many of the Command Records albums he designed. It read: “JOSEPH ALBERS is one of America’s foremost contemporary painters, was born in Westphalia, Germany in 1888. After studying in Berlin, Essen and Munich he taught at the famous Bauhaus school from 1923-1933. When the Bauhaus was closed by order of the German government in 1933 Mr. Albers came to the United States to head the Art Department at Black Mountain College where he remained until 1950. After leaving Black Mountain, Mr. Albers took over the direction of the Department of Design at Yale University. At the present time, Mr. Albers lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.”

For further information about Josef Albers, please see The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation’s web site (www.albersfoundation.org).

PRESS
Albers’ Record Jackets: Doing an Artful Job, by Joseph Masheck (The Brooklyn Rail, December 2009/January 2010)
Josef Albers Cover Art (Generation Next blog, January 18, 2010)
Josef Albers for Command Records (The Silver Lining blog, February 4, 2010)
Josef Albers Album Covers (AisleOne blog, February 4, 2010)
Josef Albers (Crew Design blog, February 5, 2010)
Josef Albers Album Covers (Bridging the Gap blog, February 6, 2010)
Tangents: Gordon’s Psycho, Gordon’s Miami, Albers’s Covers (Disquiet blog, February 12, 2010)
MINUS SPACE: Josef Albers (Workpath blog, February 12, 2010)

SUPPORT
We greatly thank the wonderful staff at The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, especially Nicholas Fox Weber, Brenda Danilowitz, Oliver Barker, and Andres Garces, for their tremendous support of this exhibition. We would also like to thank artists Mark Dagley and Gilbert Hsiao for their assistance.

MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Douglas Melini, Untitled (Abstract Painting No. 14), 2009
Acrylic on canvas with hand-painted frame
23 x 19 inches

October 24 – December 5, 2009

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new solo exhibition by Brooklyn painter Douglas Melini. Douglas will be exhibiting a group of new acrylic on canvas paintings with hand-painted frames. Known for his use of densely visual patterns, Douglas’ new work continues his decade-long investigation into pattern and color. In contrast to his previous work, which utilized asymmetrical all-over fields of pattern, his new paintings elicit a kaleidoscopic effect and feature single, bilaterally symmetrical forms constructed from juxtaposed grid and stripe patterns.

His new paintings also feature a new visual element not present in his previous work: elaborate, hand-painted frames. Douglas views the frame and painting in his new work as a single object. Resembling a frieze, the painted frame defines the outside perimeter of the painting, acts as a viewfinder for the forms depicted in the painting, and enables the painting’s surface to function as an interior space.

Douglas Melini has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, White Columns, Danese Gallery, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Southfirst (all NYC), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX), Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Rocket Gallery (London, UK), DaimlerChrylser Contemporary (Berlin, Germany), and Illeana Tounta Gallery (Athens, Greece), among others. In 2008, Douglas was awarded a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been featured in the New York Sun, New York Observer, Artnet Magazine, Mallorca Magazin, and P.S.1 Newspaper, and included in corporate and private collections worldwide, including The Daimler Collection, The Progressive Corporation, The Phillip Schrager Collection, and Wellspring Capital Corporation.

In addition to his artistic work, Douglas has also curated several exhibitions over the past several years, including The Difficult Shapes of Possible Images at ZieherSmith Gallery in New York (2007) and I Can Read in Red, I Can Read in Blue, I Can Read in Pickle Color Too, a VIEWLIST project for MINUS SPACE (2009). Douglas holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, CA, and a BA from the University of Maryland, MD.

TEXT
Douglas Melini: In Conversation, by Matthew Deleget, November 2009.

PRESS
Brooklyn: MINUS SPACE & Tompkins Projects, KCLOG, November 19, 2009

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!