Installation view (l to r)
Bridget Riley, Hartmut Böhm, Hans Haacke, Josef Albers
Photo: Monika Brandmeier

April 10 – July 22, 2013

Notions of space, vision and light run through the abstract art of the 20th century and interest many world renowned contemporary artists such as Hartmut Böhm, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anish Kapoor, John Armleder, Carsten Höller, Philippe Decrauzat, Jeppe Hein, Felice Varini and Xavier Veilhan.

By putting vibration along with the spectator’s perception in the centre of their works, they set up multiple resonances with optical and kinetic art, which first emerged at the Movement exhibition in Denise René’s Paris gallery in 1955, but also, more broadly, with what was later called “perceptual art” at the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.

Julio Grinblatt, Cielito Lindo, 2005-present
C-print mounted on aluminum, 40 x 50 inches

June 21 – August 3, 2013
Opening: Friday, June 21, 6-8pm

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Julio Grinblatt: Cielito Lindo. This is the Argentine-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of unique, large-scale C-print photographs depicting the clear blue sky.

An ongoing project, Grinblatt’s Cielito Lindo series stresses how aesthetic notions are generated in relation to the photographic apparatus, in particular the photographic printing process. To create this body of essentially monochromatic photographs, Grinblatt articulated the following four-step premise:

1. I took a photograph of a clear sky.
2. I sent the negative to a professional color lab.
3. I asked the printer to print a beautiful sky.
4. Repeat from 2.

Julio Grinblatt (b. 1960 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; lives Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for the past two decades, including in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Belgium, Italy, and the United States.

In 2001, Grinblatt mounted the solo exhibition Uses of Photography at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has participated in group exhibitions at museums, such as MoMA PS1, El Museo del Barrio (both New York); Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA); Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainsville, FL); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain); Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels, Belgium); Amos Anderson Art Museum (Helsinki, Finland); and Museo de Arte Zapopan (Guadalajara, Mexico), among others.

Grinblatt’s work is represented in collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX); Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR); Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville, FL); Light Work Permanent Collection (Syracuse, NY); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (both Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).

In 2012, Grinblatt co-curated the survey exhibition Notations: The John Cage Effect Today at Hunter College Times Square Gallery together with Joachim Pissarro, Bibi Calderaro, and Michelle Yun. The exhibition was discussed in-depth by writer Thomas Crow in Artforum’s Best of 2012 issue. Grinblatt is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College in New York, and he holds an MFA from Hunter College and BS from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Julian Pretto & Susan Penzner at the opening of Self-Portraits
Fine Arts Building, 1975
Photo by Marcia Resnick

September 6 – October 26, 2013
Opening: Friday, September 6, 6-8pm

Organized in collaboration with artist John Zinsser, the exhibition will examine the history and legacy of Julian Pretto’s fabled downtown NYC galleries active during the 1970s through the early 1990s. Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1945, Pretto moved to New York in 1968 where he worked for Richard L. Feigen and Sperone Westwater Fischer before opening up a series of small, eponymous galleries in Soho, Tribeca, and the West Village. His program focused on reductive abstraction and he exhibited more established artists, such as Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre, Merrill Wagner, and Marcia Hafif, alongside younger, emerging artists. He gave first solo shows to artists such as Julian Lethbridge, John Zinsser, Cary Smith, Rene Pierre Allain, Daniel Levine, and Li Trincere, among many others. Pretto died of AIDS in New York in 1995.

November 1 – December 21, 2013
Opening: Friday, November 1, 6-8pm

A solo exhibition by the Providence, Rhode Island-based artist Lynne Harlow.

* The exhibition title is informed by musician Pete Galub’s song Crying Time.

Linda Francis, We Can Build You (detail), 2012
Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 inches

Opens Thursday, June 6, 6-9pm

Suite 217 is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby.

Suite 217 is an artist run space with new exhibits every 6 weeks, as well as panel discussions, events, and screenings.

Open Saturdays and Sundays 1-6pm and by appointment.

Suite 217
56 Bogart Street, Suite #217 (2nd Floor)
Brooklyn, NY

Installation by Russell Maltz

May 5 – July 3, 2013

By the late 1970s, the term “sculpture” had come to include all manner of events (actions and performances), materials (plastics, resins, rubbers, etc.), media (photography, film, video and electronics) and modes of presentation (site-specific installations, street works, documentation, etc.). “Sculpture” as a term had been transformed into the catchall and as a discipline it no longer had an identity of its own.

Saul Ostrow’s original intention in organizing this exhibition was to re-define sculpture as a discreet object – as a concrete thing -something phenomenal, rather than textual (anecdotal) or pictorial. What terms might now be used to establish the identity of sculpture as a specific category of objects given the history of sculpture’s engagement since the 50s with certain concerns, issues, and strategies. The Gravity of Sculpture was therefore meant to be a snapshot (a family portrait) of sculpture after it had climbed down off its pedestal, plinth, or base.

The dual meanings of the word Gravity in the title are seriousness (the enormity/importance of a situation) and force, the physical attraction that one object exerts on another. All of the works in this exhibition in some manner either employ or exploit the latter as an organizing principle.

The exhibition features the works of seventeen artists: Bill Albertini, Beth Campbell, Tony Feher, Brian Gaman, Robert Gero, Jeff Grant, DeWitt Godfrey, Sarah Kabot, Peter Kreider, Russell Maltz, Curtis Mitchell, Roxy Paine, Paul O’Keeffe, Alex Seton, Stephen Schofield, Jeanne Silverthorne, and Barry Underwood.

Saul Ostrow is an independent critic and curator. He is Art Editor at Large for Bomb Magazine and the former Chair of Visual Arts and Technologies at The Cleveland Institute of Art (2002-2012.) In 2011, he founded Critical Practices Inc. (www.21stprojects.org) to promote critical discourse. Previously, Ostrow served as Co-Editor of Lusitania Press (1996-2004) and as the Editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture (1996- 2006) published by Routledge, London. As a curator he has organized over 70 exhibitions in the US and abroad. His critical writings have appeared in art magazines, journals, catalogs, and books in the USA and Europe. Since 2008, Ostrow and the artist, Charles Tucker have collaborated on a project in which they seek to construct a quantifiable “systems-network” by which to analyze the subject and content of art-works.

Vincent Como, Paradise Lost 004, 2011-present
Oil on linen, with wood, wax, and fire
26.25 x 20 x 5.5 inches

May 10 – June 15, 2013

MINUS SPACE is pleased to present the exhibition Vincent Como: Paradise Lost. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of small-scale black monochrome paintings illuminated by candlelight.

Working in a wide array of media, including installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist books, the subject of Vincent Como’s artistic practice is the color black and he draws on divergent concepts from fields, such as art history, color theory, astrophysics, science, alchemy, philosophy, religion, mythology, and the occult. Como states, “The common denominator and unifying factor in all of these fields is rooted in some form of belief and the human capacity for prehension”.

For his new body of work, Como channeled John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), which chronicles the Biblical story of the fall of humankind, the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, and their subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The paintings in this series are produced using the classical oil painting methods and materials of the Old Masters – successive layers of warm and cool black pigment glazes varnished to a highly reflective surface resulting in a profoundly deep pictorial space. Shelves with varying numbers of lit black tapered candles are installed directly below each of the paintings. The flames are reflected in the paintings’ glossy mirror-like surfaces and leave faint traces of heat, smoke, and soot behind.

Como remarks, “The works are catalysts; manifest ideas that contain multiple meanings. They are meant to challenge the viewer’s sense of history, memory, evolution, and transcendence”. He continues by saying, “This paradise, as an intellectual or utopian ideal, has failed. It has been misplaced and forgotten”.

Vincent Como (b. 1975, Kittanning, PA; lives Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his work throughout the United States and abroad, including in Mexico, England, and Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibition include Art in General, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Momenta (all NYC); Samson Projects (Boston, MA); Illinois State Museum (Lockport, IL); Western Exhibitions, University of Illinois (both Chicago, IL); Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL); SPACES (Cleveland, OH); Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI); Art Museum of the University of Memphis (Memphis, TN); and House Gallery (Salt Lake City, UT), among many others.

Como’s work was included in two recent group exhibitions with the gallery: Neither Here Nor There But Anywhere and Everywhere (Brooklyn) and MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico). His work has been discussed in publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant, Progress Report, WagMag, The Boston Phoenix, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Journal, and Salt Lake Tribune, among others. He holds a BFA in Drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH).

PRESS
Back in Black: Vincent Como’s Paradise Lost at Minus Space, by Heather Zises, READ(art), June 14, 2013
Vincent Como @ Minus Space, by Kris Chatterson, KCLOG, June 12, 2013
Vincent Como at MINUS SPACE, by Raymond E. Mingst, Curious Matter, June 5, 2013
Vincent Como: Paradise Lost at MINUS SPACE, by Martin Cid, Yareah Magazine, May 31, 2013
Editor’s Pick: Vincent Como at MINUS SPACE, ART HAPS, May 5, 2013

Wall painting by Gilbert Hsiao

Opening Night Reception
Friday, May 3, 5-9 pm

Open Studios
Saturday and Sunday, May 4 and 5, 2-6 pm

Saturday, May 4, 12 -1:30 pm
Artist’s Talk: Phong Bui in conversation with Joyce Pensato

Location
20 Jay Street, Suite 720 (7th Floor), Brooklyn, NY, 11201

Artists
Lisa Beck
Pam Butler
Kris Chatterson
N. Dash
Amy Feldman
Robert Green
Vit Horejs
Gilbert Hsiao
Liz Magic Laser
Beverly Mclver
Sam Messer
Douglas Melini
Jennifer Nuss
Hadieh Shafie
DM Simons
Didier William
Erika Ranee
Randy Wray

Directions
Directions from F train, York Street Stop, coming from Brooklyn or Manhattan
When exiting street level, you’ll be on Jay St. Walk three blocks to 20 Jay St., which will be on your left.

Directions from A and C trains, High St Stop, coming from Manhattan
Go to the exit towards the front of the train. Go up the escalator and through the turnstile, but do not go up the first set of stairs marked “Red Cross Building”. Instead walk straight through the corridor marked “High St” and then exit the stairs after the corridor. Turn right as you leave the subway entrance and walk one block to Sand St. Cross Sand St. at the light onto Pearl St. Walk 5 blocks down Pearl to Plymouth St. and turn right on Plymouth. Walk one block on Plymouth to Jay St. and turn left. 20 Jay St. will be on your left.

Directions from A and C trains, High St Stop, coming from Brooklyn
Follow the directions above for coming from Manhattan, but exit towards the back of the train instead of the front.

Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation & CUE Art Foundation
The Space Program, co-offered by The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and CUE Art Foundation, along with a consortium of funders, including Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc., The Robert Sterling Clark Visual Arts Space Award, The Richard Florsheim Art Fund Award for Older Artists, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., and Agnes Gund, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, INC., and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, announces grants of studio space to 16 visual artists selected from more than 1,000 applicants. A jury consisting of artists Phong Bui, Rochelle Feinstein, Chris Martin, Harriet Shorr and Don Voisine selected the grantees for The Space Program.

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program is located at:
20 Jay Street, 7th Floor, Room 720
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 858-2244

Installation view

April 12 – May 24, 2013

Curated by Mark Dagley

Participating Artists:
Henry Brown, Lori Ellison, Avis Fleming, Robert Franklin Gates, Cynthia Bickley-Green, Colin Greenly, Dan Yellow Kuhne, Alix Lambert, Chris Martin, Ed McGowin, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed, Charlotte Robinson, Robin Rose, Eric Rudd, Roy Slade, Carroll Sockwell, Melissa Staiger, Robert Swain, Joan Waltemath, Thornton Willis, Ed Zerne

Ventana 244 is pleased to present BANNED IN D.C., organized by Mark Dagley. This exhibition includes the work of twenty-two artists whose connections with the Washington D.C./Baltimore art scene are multifaceted.

While the majority of artists included are alive and practicing, in several instances the work presented is historic. Forgotten artists are revisited as if anew, their legacies intact and awaiting us. Many in this small but concise exhibition grew up in the D.C/Baltimore area, walked the same streets and viewed the same works at The Phillips Collection, The National Gallery, The Hirshhorn and Corcoran Museums. Many have taught their profession there, a few still do. It is not surprising that most of these artists began their careers exhibiting in the galleries that once existed along P Street and in the surrounding Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Perhaps the residual effects of the Washington Color School can be surmised in this exhibition, albeit in a diminutive scale. However, the D.C. art scene has always had a broader spectrum, one that exists beyond the Color School. Something about the region seems to produce artists with a deeply individualistic character. Maybe it’s the southern light, the almost Mediterranean glow that sometimes descends over the city and is absorbed by the Potomac River, the marble monuments and the low lying buildings. It penetrates but also isolates the artists who have lived and worked there. Clement Greenberg, writing about Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, was correct in stating that “…and in so far as they accept the consequences of their isolation they make all the more of a moral decision.”

As the contemporary art world continues its suicidal descent into commercialism, brand identity and conformity, the artists in this exhibition suggest a different strategy. Their method is, in many cases, a type of radicalism particular to the area and its historic contingencies. This unique situation, coupled with an always hyper-personal approach, allows for ever evolving and resonate images.

A supplementary component of this exhibition is a selection of documentation on the Washington/Baltimore art scene from 1949-2012.

Installation view of Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966-2013
Hunter College Times Square Gallery, NY, 2013
Photo: Louis Chan

March 29 – May 4, 2013

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Sanford Wurmfeld: Light & Dark. This is the New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new paintings investigating the extremes of light and dark value in color painting.

For more than 40 years, Sanford Wurmfeld has exhaustively investigated the subject of color through its essential qualities of hue, value, and saturation. His specific interest in the colors black and white began in the early-1960s after encountering the work of Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (1962) and was again renewed through meeting painter Ad Reinhardt at Hunter College and seeing his retrospective at The Jewish Museum (1966).

In 2011 Wurmfeld took up the subject of black and white, and began to produce a new body of work that upon initial impression appears to be monochromatic, but after closer examination by the viewer reveals broader chromatic breadth. Using only the subtlest tints of color within each painting, individual hues are arranged chromatically into intersecting horizontal and vertical bands of progressively varying widths. The paintings push the physiological limits of color perception and gradually reveal a kind of spectral black and white. Wurmfeld remarks, “I really want you to walk in the room and see these and think, ‘it’s just a white canvas,’ and then slowly get into it”.

Working by trial and error, Wurmfeld mixes and modifies each of the hues employed in his paintings empirically by eye without relying on any supporting scientific or mathematical system. He believes the perception of color to be a highly subjective experience and he openly embraces divergent, individualized responses on the part of viewers. He explains, “I think the semantic connotation of the viewer is uncontrollable by the artist. We each bring to the paintings some kind of baggage that is far from universal, and so each of these paintings has a different emotional content. I mean emotional as an almost visceral response, rather than a feeling you would name with words. I recognize that it’s there, but I don’t think it’s something that I’m particularly controlling for the viewer. I’m just creating something that creates a kind of visceral response in me. And then it may or may not have that kind of response in other people”.

Concurrent with his exhibition at the gallery, Wurmfeld is also the subject of a major 47-year retrospective exhibition entitled Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966-2013 on view now at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, NY, through Saturday, April 20, 2013. The exhibition was curated by William C. Agee, Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College, and is accompanied by a 160-page catalog with texts by Robert L. Herbert, William C. Agee, Bridget McCarthy, Rotem Linial, Nicoline Strøm-Jensen, Joan Reutershan, and Theresa Andrea Morrison.

Sanford Wurmfeld (b. 1942 in Bronx, NY) has exhibited his work worldwide in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960s. His solo exhibitions include Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Galerie Denise Rene, Susan Caldwell Gallery, Bard College (all New York), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Hagen, Germany), Mucsarnok Kunsthalle (Budapest, Hungary), Talbot-Rice Gallery (Edinburgh, Scotland), Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY), and Ewing Museum Gallery (Knoxville, TN).

In 1968 Wurmfeld was the youngest artist included in the landmark exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais (Paris, France), Kunsthaus (Zurich, Switzerland), and The Tate Gallery (London, England). Wurmfeld’s other museum group exhibitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy Museum (both New York), Dayton Art Museum (Dayton, OH), Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, CA), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Hagen, Germany), and Espace de l’Art Concret (Mouans-Sartoux, France), among others.

Wurmfeld has lectured and written extensively on the history of color, painting, and abstraction. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, City University of New York, and Dartmouth College. Wurmfeld’s work is included in collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum (all New York), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Sprengler Museum (both Germany), and Espace de l’Art Concret (France), among others.

In addition to his artistic work, Wurmfeld taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College from 1967-2012, where he educated and mentored countless generations of artists. Originally invited to join the faculty by sculptor Tony Smith and critic Eugene Goossen, Wurmfeld was Chairman of the department from 1978-2006.

PRESS
A Chorus of Color: Sanford Wurmfeld Retrospective 2013, by Heather Zises, (READ)art, May 2013
Sanford Wurmfeld: Light & Dark, by Margaret Graham, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2013
Sanford Wurmfeld at MINUS SPACE, NY Arts Magazine, April 2013
Brooklyn Show at MINUS SPACE: Not Everything Can Be Virtual, by Isabel del Rio, Yareah Magazine, April 9, 2013

Ted Stamm, 78W-4, 1978,
Oil on canvas,
60 x 96 inches, 152.4 x 243.8 cm
Courtesy the estate of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
(c) the estate of Ted Stamm, photo credit: Jason Wyche

March 28 – April 27, 2013

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Ted Stamm: Paintings, a survey of works from 1973 to 1981 by the late New York City-based painter. This is the second exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery. Prior to Stamm’s unexpected death in 1984 at the age of 40, the artist created a substantial mature body of work that was at once responsive to the past, reflective of his time, and telling of the future. Stamm’s practice was dedicated to complicating a Minimalist vocabulary with elongations suggestive of speed and the appearances of movement.

In 1973, Stamm began making conceptually-driven work based on chance systems – rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel. The results would determine the execution of a specific work, including each painting’s color, forms and numbers of paint layers. Friends who assisted by rolling the die were memorialized in Stamm’s titles, such as Kiffman’s Roll and Olivia’s Roll. Soon after in 1974, Stamm began making shaped stretchers for his paintings, finding inspiration in his immediate surroundings. The first of a handful of formats he developed reiterated a particular shape he had seen on Wooster Street near his home. Naming these particular paintings “Woosters,” Stamm continued to work with the shape throughout his career.

Increasingly fascinated by the concept of speed, the design of trains and airplanes as these technologies began to proliferate and improve, opening the world up to itself, Stamm began in the late seventies to develop the Zephyr and C-Dodger paintings. Aptly titled, the Zephyrs were named after the record-breaking train which traveled between Denver and Chicago in 1934. The C in C-Dodger is an abbreviation for the Concorde, referring to the supersonic airliner Stamm traveled to Kennedy airport to see. This body of work is also represented in the exhibition by Zephyr ZYR-3.1

Also included in the exhibition are examples of Stamm’s late works from the early 1980s, supporting the artist statement describing the work as representing “no beginning and no end.” While Stamm developed painting strategies based on personal experiences, certain elements and series can be seen repeating themselves. Rather than approach these reductive works as carbon-copy, though, Stamm is seen recycling and then adding important nuances exemplified in works such as ZCT-001.

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

Installation view with work by Russell Maltz (foreground)

February 15 – March 15, 2013

Curated by Dustin London

Game Show explores “gaming” as it is played out in a wide range of contemporary art practices through the work of nine nationally and internationally exhibiting artists: Jeremy Couillard, Mariah Dekkenga, Aaron Hughes, Dustin London, Russell Maltz, Michael Namkung, Michael Perrone, Jacob Sudol, and Brian Zegeer. Work included in the exhibition is influenced by, or makes reference to, board games, video games, puzzles, sports and athletics, or has a game-like mindset in concept or construction. Much of the work repurposes the parameters or structures of a game to call attention to process rather than objective, or redefines the objective entirely. Though a sense of play runs throughout the exhibition, the traditionally light-hearted nature of gaming acts as a foil for aesthetic, conceptual, or even existential concerns, using gaming as a metaphor for the complexities and absurdities of life itself.

Jeremy Couillard’s videos are experienced from a first person point-of-view as we wander through the deserted video game space of the creator’s psyche. The work is a lo-fi spiritual journey through microcosms and macrocosms, ruminations on an imagined apocalypse, the universe, dreams, and how video games and media alter the nature of our memories and innermost experiences. Brian Zegeer’s video, Pull My Daisy, an adaptation of the 1959 Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie film, takes on a similarly cosmic feel when digital game sounds weave in and out of complex prismatic visuals. The work is a reenactment of the original film, set in the derelict former apartment of Allan Ginsberg (who starred in the film), where Zegeer was squatting at the time. The work is comprised of collaged stop-motion animations, embracing Frank’ and Leslie’s departure from conventional narrative structures. Aaron Hughes’ stop-motion animation, Person Pinball, uses humans in real spaces that act as the makeshift components of a pinball game that he plays from a rooftop overhead. Figures humorously roll and bounce their way through the streets of Brooklyn as they rack up points in Hughes’ attempt to “win” the game.

In her video and sculptural work of the same title, Puzzle, Mariah Dekkenga assembles a jigsaw puzzle that she has altered by painting each piece a different color, forcing her to organize and fit pieces together based on shape rather than image. The endeavor transforms a game of leisure into an absurd act of endurance while also recontextualizing what it is to make a “painting.” Dekkenga’s finished puzzle will share the floor with a site-specific installation by Russell Maltz from his Ballpark Series, taking its aesthetic cues from the green and white color scheme of baseball fields. The work repurposes standard construction materials such as PVC pipes and plywood sheets into formal stacked arrangements relating to the architecture of the gallery space. Paint is applied as “material on material” and defines areas or zones, transforming these raw materials into “painted objects.” The piece is then disassembled by others (usually construction workers) who reclaim it for its original purpose in the erection of buildings and structures. The work fosters a discussion of painting in terms of process, duration, and time, and calls attention to both the physicality of materials and the poetics of their potentiality.

Michael Perrone’s Plane Plan Paintings are a series of abstract oil paintings based on diagrams for folding paper into airplanes. Straightforward instructional diagrams are transformed into spatial pictorial constructions. Conversely, potential airplane forms are kept insistently flat to the boldly graphic surface of the painting, creating a fluctuating tension between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality. The paintings redefine the initial objective where purely formal relationships between color, shape, edge, and surface are ends in themselves. Dustin London’s work takes a similarly formal approach in a series of abstract drawings referencing sporting fields, video games, kite making, and board games. A cryptic and idiosyncratic logic guides an internal order where relationships between line and shape, space and flatness, create constellations, mazes, puzzles, aerial diagrams, and perspectival spaces, sometimes all simultaneously. Each piece becomes a meditation on line and space.

Drawing on the language of sports training and athletic performance, Michael Namkung’s work explores the sensory experiences of drawing under physical strain, often to the point of failure. Through performance, video, installation, and the participation of others, he investigates questions of process, materiality and perception, specifically in terms of their relationship to the body. Namkung will be leading an audience participation based performance for the duration of the opening reception. In a piece made specifically for the exhibition, musician Jacob Sudol plays games with the notions of participation and interactivity. In an interactive piece written for the toy piano, the piano “plays” itself through computer controlled playback of toy piano samples until someone sits down to play the piano, at which point the computer analyzes what is being played and plays back something that sometimes goes along with what that person plays and sometimes not at all.

Electronic music performance by Jacob Sudol and FLEA: Tuesday, February 26, 7pm FIU Assistant Professor of Composition and Director of Music Technology Jacob Sudol and his FIU Laptop and Electro-Acoustic (FLEA) Ensemble will give an electronic music performance where musicians react to one another in real time within certain parameters, creating a musical “game” between performers.

Performance by Michael Namkung: Tuesday, March 5, 6:30pm

FIU Assistant Professor of Drawing Michael Namkung will be doing a drawing performance exploring themes of process and exhaustion, materiality and perception following Amelia Jones’ 5pm lecture, “Queering Performance and Performing Queer: The Histrionic Performances of Nao Bustamante.”

Linda Francis, We Can Build You, 2013
Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 inches

This winter Brooklyn painter and writer Stephen Maine sat down with artist Linda Francis to discuss her involvement in the fields of new music and performance within the greater context of her painting practice. A transcript of their conversation follows.

Stephen Maine: For a while, Linda, you were involved with avant-garde music and performance as well as painting. Can you talk about correspondences between those two disciplines?

Linda Francis: Musicians talk about color, too.

SM: I didn’t know that.

LF: Not color qua color, but COLOR.

SM: Coloration?

LF: Perhaps that’s the term. I’m a little fuzzy on remembering because it’s been a long time.

SM: I’m really not correcting you—

LF: You could! You could. Please do.

SM: I still don’t know what it means.

LF: It means—let’s say when we look at a visual color, it has a kind of hue, overtones and undertones, the same way music does. You look at a red, you kind of see an aura of blue. The thing that it’s next to gives it an aura of something else.

SM: Afterimage?

LF: Musicians have the same thing. They’re talking about the suppleness of the tone, the kind of character that comes out of whatever instrument is being played, that gives it color.

SM: Timbre?

LF: I don’t know.

SM: First, there’s the tone, the note itself—which might be analogous to hue.

LF: Yeah yeah.

SM: Then there’s amplitude, or volume.

LF: Yeah.

SM: Then there’s morphology, like a sound that gets big and then trails off—has a shape. Timbre refers to what you’re talking about regarding—

LF: Oh, timbre!

SM: Like, “tim-ber”

LF: Timbre, okay.

SM: The particular kind of voice the instrument has. A middle C on a piano is different from a middle C on a tuba. Does a tuba even hit a middle C?

LF: I don’t know. I really don’t know a lot about instruments.

SM: Oh, great. What are we doing here?

LF: Well, what are you writing about? What it means to artists to—

SM: I’m writing about painters’ relationships to different kinds of avant-garde music.

LF: Well I can just tell you what I think about that, in those terms, really fast. And that is: we use the same formal mechanisms. Exactly the same. As a matter of fact— I’ll describe this one performance I did. Basically, Cage is doing the same thing that we’re doing. We’re manipulating formal relationships. That’s what he’s doing. He was doing it according to chance but in a certain way we do the same.

SM: Okay, but Cage scored everything.

LF: Yeah, but it’s how you score it. Have you ever seen those things? There are many people who scored on graph paper — Oh, Morton Feldman, you know his stuff?

SM: Yes.

LF: He scored things on graph paper. Not on the usual staff, with the clef or whatever.

SM: I’m trying to make a distinction between music that’s scored in some fashion and music that’s not—meaning improvisational.

LF: The big thing when I was involved in music was improvisation. Feldman is a perfect example of that. And who else—let me think—everybody…

SM: Can you describe how improvisation worked in Feldman? Was a lot left up to the individual instrumentalists?

LF: You would see a paper, and the paper would have instructions on it. Depending on how they annotated that, that’s what the musicians would take off from. I never played anything, but I painted with it.
Anyway, sometimes they would have, you know, whatever kind of scoring they would have, very often it was nothing but an abstract sign, or it was some instruction like “get up and walk around” [laughs] or “get up and sit down” or do this or do that, or nothing… It would be a place where they would start, and it was incumbent on every musician to improvise their position. It was amazing—because everyone had to be so on it, so working in the second. They didn’t have a score in their heads that they were trying to emulate. They really were challenged every minute. And they came from jazz, I think.

SM: This is Feldman you’re describing?

LF: Oh everybody, not just Feldman. All the young people who were writing.

SM: Give me some names?

LF: I worked with a composer named Gregory Reeve. Somebody told me he died. I haven’t seen him since I was 20 so I don’t know. He worked with a lot of people Through him I met Fred Rzewski, I met Phil Corner. He worked with MEV [Musica Elettronica Viva]—did you ever hear of them?

SM: No.

LF: It was an electronic music ensemble. There was the S.E.M. Ensemble — that you must have heard of, right?

SM: Uhhhhhhh…

LF: They came from Columbia. Malcolm Goldstein, the violinist?

SM: No…

LF: Oh! Fantastic violinist. You really gotta know this guy. I sure he’s still somewhere… [laughs] Terrific improvisational brain.

SM: In this kind of improvisation you’re talking about, what’s the dynamic between or among the various musicians? Is it like a jazz ensemble, where they’re kind of independent from one another, each with their own voice, and each solo fills a certain duration of time?

LF: There’s a form there. It’s not a rigid form, but it’s about saying when you come together, so lets say you can improvise from this point on the score to that point, they would do things like that. They would say, okay, point B, and you would go from point B to, well, to wherever you went. It really taxed an audience, and it taxed the people who would be playing.

Let me describe Red Gongs to you, which is the one I did with Gregory [Reeve]. I don’t where you would find documentation about this. I’ve been very bad about most parts of my life. But you could probably find it somewhere. I don’t know about him, though. I haven’t dealt with him and I don’t know where he is. I think he’s dead.

In any case, he did a piece called Red Gongs that was named after Calder. [Alexander Calder, Red Gongs, painted aluminum and copper, 1950.] Just the idea of pieces passing, pieces having a kind of structure that was very variable, was really important to him and everybody else at the time. Red Gongs was scored. I did it three times with him. Once it was at Hunter, once it was at Town Hall, and once it was at the University of New Hampshire.

SM: And your role was—producer? Stage manager?

LF: No, my role was painter. Okay? It was scored for two percussion sections, an entire orchestra, and “painter.”

SM: Oh weird. That is so weird.

LF: [laughs] So this is what “painter” did: “painter” erected a gigantic—well over 12 by 10 feet—a frame over which I stretched clear plastic. I mic’d the back of it. I used phosphorescent paint. It was tacky as hell, but it really was—it was a thing. This was erected on stage, a proscenium stage. And audience sees the orchestra and the painting. I didn’t obscure many people. So you could see the whole orchestra, or most of it, and the painting was right there.

SM: The audience sees the painting and sees you?

LF: I’m facing the painting and the audience is behind me. I’ve got buckets of paint. Buckets of paint. And giant brushes. And every time I make a stroke they can hear it.

SM: That’s far out.

LF: It was great. The scoring of this particular piece—

SM: What was the sound like?

LF: Of the brush?

SM: Yeah.

LF: Wonderful. It was different depending on what I did. If I was fast, it would actually be a “whoosh.” The slower it went, you’d hear like a drag. I don’t know how to describe that.

SM: So it was percussive, among other things.

LF: Among other things. And it was very loud so that it really kept up with the rest of the orchestra. It didn’t overshadow it. His sound people figured that out. This was my idea to do that, but his sound people figured out how to adjust the tones of it.

SM: Is there is a recording? Or a video?

LF: There might be, I don’t know.

SM: In what year was this?

LF: I don’t know [laughs]. I’m not sure. I’ll look back and see if I can find anything.

SM: Well, were you still living in New York when this happened?

LF: Oh yes. I was always living here. I’m from here. But this had to be the 60s. Where in the 60s? It was when I was in school, and I left school in ’69 so it had to be something like that—middle 60s to late 60s, something like that.

SM: So post-E.A.T., all that Rauschenberg stuff.

LF: Oh yeah. We could probably zero in on it if I go through all my junk. My archives, my boxes of garbage.

SM: Sounds like it could be fun…

LF: Could be moldy. I’ll probably get an allergy attack.

SM: Thinking about correspondences between painting and music—audience, rhythm—I never thought the connection would be this close. That’s amazing to me, to actually mic your paintings for a performance…

LF: Let me tell you about the Town Hall scene! It was during that piece, Red Gongs, but in the lobby, before you get into the auditorium. I don’t know if Town Hall has been changed or not but anyway, there’s a big lobby inside, an internal, you know, lobby — in the lobby —

SM: Anteroom?

LF: Yeah, as you come in, after you gave your tickets, you came in and there’d be a big—place to hang out.

SM: Sure.

LF: Right, Okay? So, then you’d go into the—whatever it was called—

SM: We’ll use “lobby,” that’s good.

LF: But there’s a name for it, I don’t remember.

SM: We could call it an anteroom, we could call it a—

LF: No! Its not that, it’s an actual, formal name, like an intermezzo, an inter— When you’re at an opera, and you go out and have a coffee—it’s the same deal. Except this doesn’t have coffee.

SM: Ummmmm.

LF: Anyway, it’s that. I put two boxes in that space and they were, I’m not sure how big they were but probably three by three [feet] square. At the time, you’ve got to realize, this was the 60s, we didn’t have florescent things, like we didn’t have things that were far out. It was just the beginning of all those things. I made a box that had a fixture inside it so it glowed. The box was just white plexi. And I invented that! I invented that before it was invented but I never thought it was anything. I just thought, okay, this is a good idea.

SM: So like a translucent white Plexiglas box emanating light?

LF: Right. Then down the way, in this same space, place, was another box the same size with holes in it, in which I had—this is a Neanderthal technique—which I had put a gigantic basin in the bottom with a block of dry ice, and so smoke poured out of the holes [laughs].

SM: it was perforated with a lot of holes?

LF: Yeah, it was just that, what do you call it, that stuff people hang stuff on, with little holes. Masonite with holes.

SM: Pegboard.

LF: Pegboard!

SM: Pegboard.

LF: Painted shiny white, and all this smoke pouring out of it. Very cute. But the point of all this is that all these things—

SM: How close, these two boxes, they were close together?

LF: Not that close. They were far enough apart so that they were just objects that people would mill around, and things would happen.

So the point is the equation of sound with all kinds of light. And space, and particles basically, ether and sound. Now earlier you mentioned the electromagnetic spectrum. The visible spectrum is part of the larger electromagnetic spectrum and you go down some and you get radio waves. Interestingly enough, it’s only limited by our own apparatus. Presumably there are various types of animals that can hear x-rays, that can see x-rays, et cetera. So it’s the same continuum. At one point I made some paintings where I was trying to determine the frequency of the color. So—what kind of tone it would have as a sound. It’s not a science that you can— it’s nothing that you can talk about. You could make these conjectures, but you don’t know.

SM: Your imagination is essentially speculative.

LF: My approach has always been pretty conceptual without thinking of it as conceptual. It’s just thinking things through.

SM: When I think about the correspondences between music and painting, rhythm comes to mind. As you know, Cage was anti-regular-rhythm. He was interested in rhythmic structures but not the regular beat of jazz. He said something very funny, he said that a regular rhythm is convenient and useful when he had to catch a bus, say…

LF: [laughs] So good.

SM: …but that he didn’t associate it with the interesting parts of his life.

LF: He said to me once, I had made a poster for him when I was in school. I didn’t know him but I was conscripted to make this poster. That’s how I met him. And this poster had some sort of strange floating strange shapes, forms that were “formless.” And they happened to be brownish red. That’s all it was, floating strange shapes and the information. And he wanted to meet me because, he said, he looked at this stuff and said, oh she must know that I’m a mycologist—his hobby was finding mushrooms.

SM: He made a little living at it, for a time.

LF: Yeah! So when we met he said did you know I did this, and I said no and he loved that! Because that’s the kind of correspondence that he loved. I didn’t really know him at all. Things that are chance that turn out to be serendipitous, that aren’t chance, in a sense. He really understood intuitively, I don’t think it was an intellectual decision, but I think he intuited that chance has rules and they will happen, and that’s why he did that very famous piece where he threw the I Ching. Some of the last things he did, I remember, were readings at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s and other places. He took a computer and he would feed in some gigantic pieces of literature or poetry by other people—or even the phone book, I think he did one time—and he would feed it in, mix it up, print it out and read it. It would be in line form. He would read it and you could sit there and listen to it and make sense of it.

SM: Really.

LF: Not in a linear way, but in an associative way. Very much like how poetry works when it’s good, actually. So it was amazing because the idea is, well, what is knowledge, and how do you know something? What I’m trying to say is that in my way of thinking chaos is exactly that. People talk about chaos—by the way, I have to tell you that I had an exhibition in 1982 in Denmark that was called “The Order of Chaos.” And that was before people were talking about it here. I was always interested in contradictions.

SM: You mean, before the popularization of chaos theory?

LF: Before everybody had computers, actually.

SM: Right. 1982 was what, ten years before personal computers became mainstream.

LF: There were two books about it. One was a paper and one was a book. Anyway, the idea is that “the order of chaos” is a not contradiction. That’s what I’m getting to. Cage really got that. That chaos is orderly. Randomness is orderly.

SM: The one time that I saw Cage perform was with Merce at St. Mark’s. Merce did a solo piece and Cage was upstairs, on the balcony…

LF: I produced that.

SM: The one with the broomstick and the folding chair?

LF: It was a window pole.

SM: A window pole… okay.

LF: We were in the audience.

SM: This blows me away! I can’t believe it!

LF: That was a performance to benefit Danspace.

SM: [laughs] That’s right. This is incredible.

LF: I can’t believe that you actually….

SM: I remember it vividly.

LF: This is great, right? And Merce threw the pages as he danced…

SM: And Cage… played that stick— I mean he played it on the floor, all the way around [the balcony], and then there was a pause, we can’t see him, we know he’s up there…

LF: You want to know how it started?

SM: There was a pause…

LF: Okay, go ahead.

SM: …and then we hear a folding chair, the unmistakable sound of a folding chair scraping the floor boards. It got a big laugh, as I remember.

LF: He loved it.

SM: It was very, very funny.

LF: He loved it. He loved that performance. He loved doing it. But I’ll tell you how that happened, if you want to know.

SM: What year was that? Let’s talk about years, c’mon. Mid-80s, right?

LF: It had to be. I was still living in the city then. I have a photograph of Merce doing some things, in time, so he’s blurred. I remember taking that [photograph]. Anyway, I went to John because by that time I knew him sort of well, and I called him and said you need to do a Danspace benefit, and of course they would love it if Merce would come, would you do it with Merce? He said I don’t know. I said John. He said okay, we’ll do something. I said okay, good—just do something, you know? [laughs] And aside from giving him the date and time to show up I never said another word to him. I can’t remember who was the director of Danspace at the time, but I said you just have to not worry, that’s all, just don’t worry. They’ll show up and whatever they decide to do, I’ll make it happen. She says okay, good. So there’s a period of time and they had to do something.

So [before the performance] John comes in, I’m standing around, Merce is already like standing like this [blank expression]—

SM: Looking up, looking around—

LF: Yeah, looking like he wasn’t there. He always used to do that! He had a sheaf of paper in his hand. They were the pages he danced with. They were instructions to him for something else. I don’t know what. To this day, I don’t know what they were. He told me they were instructions for movement but he never used them.

So he’s standing there looking around and John was there—I think we always got along because the two of us always smiled a lot [laughs]. John is standing there with a grin. I said you ready? He goes, yeah, let’s go up on the balcony. This is like a half hour before the performance. We go up, he looks around and says do you have a pole of some kind? I say yeah, I have a window pole. We go over to one of these giant poles to open the top windows. And they have metal tips. He just lit up. He goes, I want that! So I got someone to get it down.

SM: I love this. Talk about just using what’s at hand.

LF: That’s the point—he would never do anything else. But I think he’d thought about it before, about what the church looked like what the space itself looked like. I said so what’s going to happen? He said I’ll just stay up here during the whole performance. I said perfect. We had a tech person with him, I said just tell him if you need anything else. He said I probably won’t. I said but he’ll be here if you need something. And that was it. Then they announce it, and Merce shows up, I’m going like—please, God! [laughs]… and they start to perform.

…I told you about the mushrooms because I wanted to describe a perception I had because of his talking about mushroom hunting. He told me many times he got really ill, really ill because he would eat something that was poisonous. He would joke about it, but from that I learned about his risk taking. His whole enterprise was risk taking, the whole thing was. When you go that far into randomness and devote yourself to that, you are in the risk zone at all times. And you can go past it, and he really went past it. What could you do more than that—putting your life in harms way? He was one of those who like risks. That’s what I think. He never said that to me, but I felt that from him, that it was important to push as far as he could push.

Alan Uglow, Portrait of a Standard (Blue), 2000
Silkscreen on canvas, 84 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches

February 19 – March 23, 2013

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Alan Uglow, organized by independent curator and writer Bob Nickas. On view at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space, this will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States in over a decade.

Alan Uglow was born in Luton, England, in 1941, and died in New York in 2011. Attending art school while still in his early teens, and drawn towards non-figuration, Uglow felt that abstract art was less appreciated in Britain than in the United States. Finishing his studies with degrees in painting and printmaking, Uglow eventually visited New York City in 1968. He moved there permanently the following year, settling initially on Greene Street, and by the mid-1970s, on the Bowery, along with other like-minded artists, when the only amenity in either neighborhood was affordable space.

Working in series that evolved gradually over decades, Uglow always remained faithful to his central vision, his practice unaffected by the increasingly commercial demands of the art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. All his work is characterized by a meticulous, even intuitive, attention to scale and composition, with particular consideration paid to the placement of the paintings in relation to the wall and surrounding space. Executed with up to forty layers of paint, these include delicate nuances that fluctuate depending on available light and the viewer’s perspective. Early inspirations for Uglow were as diverse as Alberto Giacometti and Jo Baer, and included Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Ad Reinhardt. Yet his works contain their own distinct and instantly recognizable aesthetics, offering new, unexpected lines of vision and subtle dialogues between center and edge, presence and absence, cadence and calm, tension and simplicity.

The present exhibition includes Standard paintings from the mid-1990s and Portrait(s) of a Standard from 2000, the latter, large-format silkscreens depicting the Standard(s) at an angle. Both the paintings and prints are installed on wooden blocks. Also included are the proportionately smaller Hanging Standard #27 (Silver #2) from 2007 and Stadium Series #6 (Yellow), a 1996 horizontal painting hung only inches above the floor. A two-part, freestanding painting from 2004, Torwand (Red) / Torwand (Blue), contains round cut-outs, offering anterior and posterior viewpoints, which simultaneously reveal and disguise their surroundings appearing inherently playful. Uglow’s motivation for this work derived from structures developed for soccer practice, a game he found inspiring. Other works in the show continue the artist’s exploration of proportion, color, and line, and include two of his final paintings, completed in late 2010, T-3 and Untitled, as well as three photographs from 2009 of a dead moth, which, having landed, happened to breathe its last on one of Uglow’s drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by David Zwirner and Radius Books, containing an essay by Bob Nickas and interviews with the artist from the 1990s.

A forthcoming solo show of Uglow’s work, curated by Joao Ribas, will be on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from May 10 – July 14, 2013.

Work by Alan Uglow has been featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, most recently in 2012 in the group show Stand still like the hummingbird at David Zwirner, New York. In 2010, his work was the subject of two large-scale surveys, concurrently on view in Germany at the Museum Wiesbaden and the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld. Other recent solo exhibitions include the CCNOA – Center for Contemporary Non- Objective Art, Brussels (2006) and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2004). His first museum solo exhibition was held in 1992 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

His work is represented in private and public collections internationally, including the Cincinnati Art Museum; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; High Museum, Atlanta; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Sammlung Lafrenz, Hamburg; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

February 28 – March 30, 2013

Dekkenga works out the compositions of her paintings in Adobe Illustrator. After applying an impasto underpainting, she uses herself as printer to transfer the composition to the painting surface. The procedure produces a thing that levels action and stops movement, making it impossible to retrace a series of painterly moves.

The title of the show comes from Peter Halley’s 1984 essay The Crisis in Geometry. In the essay Halley distinguished the “soft geometries” of computers and electronic entertainment from the “hard geomotries” of the prison and the factory. Soft geometries, he contends, occur in the cultural feedback loop of simulation.

Emi Winter, Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
180 x 150cm

Opens February 23, 2013

A solo exhibition by the Oaxaca, Mexico-based artist Emi Winter.

The exhibition includes paintings of the past two years (2011-13) and describes the recent evolution in Emi Winter’s work from abstract to figurative. This transition itself reveals the artist’s fascination with flexibility, ambiguity and adaptability. She often combines contradictory elements – such as flatness and depth, historical and modern, violent and sensual, or beautiful and ugly – to form a harmonious whole, either in single works or collectively as in this exhibition.

As their titles suggest, even the abstract paintings can be evocative of natural environments or experiences: Boreal, Bosque, Lluvia en el valle, A flor de piel, Vena cava. The pictures are constructed by overlapping marks and colors, applied by a combination of wet washes, brush strokes, spray marks, and their respective drips. These layered lattices sequentially cover and mask one another, their openings allowing the space below to penetrate the surface or to permit a view into its depth. The resulting image is mysterious, complex, luminous – a harmonious balance of colors and forms in spite of the occasionally aggressive gesture or fierce palette.

During 2012 these abstract marks coalesced into recognizable forms, and three paintings at the heart of this transition are in the exhibition: Clown, Axolote, Terre. These near-monochromes are formed in an explosive splash or wild action, their big abstract gestures anchored by deep eyes and frenzied mouths. Both humorous and sinister, these characters tauntingly and confrontationally scrutinize the viewer.

While Axolote and its peers depict ambiguous, almost prehistoric presences, the subsequent portraits Boy and Lady are charged with human character and nuanced emotional expression. They are specific and unsettling despite being rendered in big, quick brushstrokes; their mask-like white skin both attractive and eerie. Maximiliano is Emi Winter’s most recent iteration in this evolution: a recognizable historical portrait whose subject’s innate contradictions are only exaggerated by the contemporary palette and absent expression.

Uniting these ostensibly divergent strains in Emi Winter’s work, the exhibition only deepens their impact. The duality and continuity seen in the figurative and abstract work is perhaps the most explicit expression of the artist’s own experience. As the divergent and contradictory influences in her life tend to describe a hybrid identity, so do the paintings in this exhibition complete each other to make a new whole. Collectively they depict an experience not easily described.

View of Linda Francis’ studio, New York

February 15 – March 23, 2013

MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce the exhibition Linda Francis: We Can Build You. This is the New York-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new large-scale oil paintings on wooden panel.

Over the past forty years, Linda Francis has been fascinated by the limits of human knowledge and has referenced concepts from fields, such as astronomy, physics, mathematics, and philosophy in her work. Her paintings and drawings investigate the relational aspect of form, possibility as a variable of viewpoint, and the paradox of appearances that combine the physiological and the geometric.

Regarding the source material for her new body of work, which merges painting, digital, and printing processes, Linda states, “I’m working with images from the skin of one of the Space Shuttles that failed in the 1990s. Microscopic scale. It’s from the heat shield that broke down. At the time, a friend of mine was working with NASA on fixing that problem. He was doing the electron microscopy of the skin of the heat shield. And he sent me this little Xerox, and said you know, I saw this, and I thought of your work…It is the surface of something metallic. It’s a crystal formation. But at the same time, it looks like a biological membrane with points on it. In architecture the outer cladding of a building is called a ‘skin’. And I keep thinking that any skin might look like that. So I play with it, and I do things like take the skin and I overlay it with itself a few times. I get different interference patterns.”

She continues, “So I make this new suite of works, very simply organized, overlaid once, then twice, three times. And it looks three different ways. And the funny thing about it is when you blow it up – this is what’s so great about painting – when you make it into an image or when it’s big enough, it becomes something that looks like it’s from a microscope on the one hand, but on the other hand, it becomes materially real. So you think of it as body-like, or relating to the self. And the reason you do, I think, is because the things we make are the things we are. So the things that work naturally, the organizations that work naturally, the way we see things, the way things function, are all related.”

An in-depth interview with Linda Francis by artist and writer Benjamin La Rocco appears in the current February issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Linda Francis (b. 1943 in Bronx, NY) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She has mounted solo exhibitions at MINUS SPACE, MoMA PS1, Nicholas Davies Gallery, Condeso Lawler Gallery, Damon Brandt Gallery, Hal Bromm Gallery (all NYC), William Paterson University (NJ), University of Alabama (AL), New Arts Program (PA), Galerie Ghislain Mollet-Vieville et J.P. Najar (Paris, France), and Gallery Per Sten (Copenhagen, Denmark).

In 2012, Linda was included in the group exhibitions Neither Here Nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere at the gallery and MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Other recent group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allegra LaViola Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery (all NYC), and Non-Objectif Sud (Tulette, France).

Linda is the recipient of awards from The Terra Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Hunter College. Her work has been written about by critics including Yve-Alain Bois, Ken Johnson, Tiffany Bell, Carter Ratcliff, David Shapiro, Michael Brennan, and Ben La Rocco, among others, in publications such as Flash Art, Arts, Artforum, Art Press, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Artnet Magazine, Art in America, Artcritical, and The New York Times.

Her work is included in the collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, University of Alabama, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Nordjyullands Kunstmuseum, Rogalund Kunstmuseum, Schlumberger Collection, Equitable Collection, and Philip Morris Collection.

PRESS
Linda Francis, Art Orbiter, February 27, 2013
Brooklyn Events: Linda Francis Exhibition ‘We Can Build You’ at Minus Space, by Isabel del Rio, Yareah Magazine, February 25, 2013
We Can Build You by Linda Francis, Design Porteur, February 24, 2013
Linda Francis: We Can Build You Opens at Minus Space, NY Arts Magazine, February 15, 2013
Linda Francis with Ben La Rocco, The Brooklyn Rail, February 2013
Brooklyn Art in 2013: What to Watch, by Paul D’Agostino, The L Magazine, January 2, 2013

Installation view of Cris Gianakos’s Kerameikos

January 25 – March 2, 2013

Curated by Katerina Nikou

Participating Artists: Maro Fasouli, Cris Gianakos, Rowena Hughes, Alexandros Laios

The Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents on the gallery’s first floor the group show entitled “The Architectural Object” curated by Katerina Nikou.

In the group show The Architectural Object, four contemporary artists, through different approaches and experiences, interpret the coexistence of architecture with the object in contemporary reality, as well as its expression into different conceptual structures.

In this content the notion of “architectural” object acquires a multifaceted dimension and is treated as a condition that evolves and transforms constantly and is mainly defined by space and its components. Theoretically, an “architectural” object could be a book, a photo, a drawing or even a piece of furniture or a combination of objects and forms that are located in a closed or an open space.

Maro Fasouli, Cris Gianakos, Rowena Hughes and Alexandros Laios, establish their own artistic expression and pose questions to the viewer concerning the notion of the object, its relation to it and its use as a means of understanding spatial knowledge. …

Cris Gianakos experiences the archaeological findings of a historical space (the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos) as elements of a minimalist sculpture that could have been created in a contemporary era. The artist, through 21 images, articulates the dynamics of an entity composed of the uniqueness of single objects that create a site specific installation. Each photo has its own historical integrity, it can be re-interpreted and lead to new interrelationships regarding the “transformation” of the architectural object. …

Through a global perspective the “architectural” objects can be detected in different narratives of contemporary culture and cultural production with affiliations to monumental buildings and fine art installations and mainly in references connected to the social production of space.

Installation view

January 27 – March 24, 2013

Julian Dashper born on 29 February 1960, in Auckland, New Zealand, was regarded as one of New Zealand’s most well known contemporary artists. In 2001 he was awarded a senior Fulbright fellowship to be based as an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Dashper’s work from the last 25 years has recently been the subject of a major touring retrospective in America (the first ever such exhibition for a resident New Zealand artist), curated by Christopher Cook and David Raskin. Dashper’s work focuses on the histories, theories and more general or popular ideas of abstraction (in particular abstract painting), conceptualism and minimalism as a working methodology. The geographical positioning of New Zealand globally and how this country receives and disseminates visual information is also a core subject in Dashper’s work.

His practice manifests itself in various forms, including paintings, unique photographs of paintings, found objects which he infuses with abstract images, various multiples plus limited edition CD and 12˝ poly-carbonate recordings of impromptu performances he has been involved with or heavily orchestrated. Respectful, even affectionate references to local culture and art history are always present in Dashper’s work, whilst his own adaptations of abstraction, conceptualism and minimalism fully acknowledge their lineage within international art.

Dashper is represented in all the major public collections in New Zealand: mca, Sydney; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen Germany; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; The University of Auckland Art Collection; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Julian Dashper died on July 30, 2009.

Donald Judd, born Donald Clarence Judd on June 3, 1928, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, the artist served in the United States Army in Korea, then attended The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia; the Art Students League, New York; and Columbia University, New York, where he received a B.S. in Philosophy, cum laude, in 1953. Judd’s first solo exhibition was in 1957 at the Panoras Gallery, New York, the same year he began graduate studies in art history at Columbia University. Over the next decade, Judd worked as a critic for artnews, Arts Magazine, and Art International; his subsequent theoretical writings on art and exhibition practices would prove to be some of his most important and lasting legacies.

Beginning in the 1960s, Judd exhibited regularly and widely at galleries in New York as well as across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. During his lifetime, major exhibitions of Judd’s work occurred at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1968, 1988); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1975); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1987); and The Saint Louis Art Museum (1991), among other museum exhibitions. More recent exhibitions have taken place at The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan (1999); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004) among others. In the early seventies Judd started making annual trips to Baja California with his family. He was very affected by the clean, empty desert and this strong
attachment to the land would remain with him for the rest of his life.

In 1971 he rented a house in Marfa, Texas as an antidote to the hectic New York art world. From this humble house he would later buy numerous buildings and a 60,000 acre (243 km2) Ayala de Chinati Ranch. These properties are now maintained by the Judd Foundation. In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation, Judd purchased a 340 acre (1.4 km2) tract of desert land near Marfa, Texas which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell. The Chinati Foundation opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art found tion, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. Judd’s work in Marfa includes 15 outdoor works in concrete and 100 aluminum pieces housed in two painstakingly renovated artillery sheds.

Donald Judd died on February 12, 1994.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with contributions by Steffen Böddeker, Rudi Fuchs and WJM Kok.

Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

February 8 – August 4, 2013

The first solo exhibition in a New York museum by the globally renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui, this show will feature over 30 works in metal and wood that transform appropriated objects into site-specific sculptures. Anatsui converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between sculpture and painting, combining aesthetic traditions from his birth country, Ghana; his home in Nsukka, Nigeria; and the global history of abstraction.

Included in the exhibition are twelve recent monumental wall and floor sculptures, widely considered to represent the apex of Anatsui’s career. The metal wall works, created with bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, are pieced together to form colorful, textured hangings that take on radically new shapes with each installation. Anatsui is captivated by his materials’ history of use, reflecting his own nomadic background. Gravity and Grace responds to a long history of innovations in abstract art and performance, building upon cross-cultural exchange among Africa, Europe, and the Americas and presenting works in a wholly new, African medium.

Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands, Brooklyn Museum.