Douglas Witmer, Things Mean a Lot at the Time, 2010
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 20 x 24 inches

March 4-27, 2010

Blank Space Gallery presents Ring The Bells Anew, an exhibition of recent paintings by Douglas Witmer. This is the artist’s third solo show in New York, and his first with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Witmer has gained increasing attention for his uniquely distilled sensibility related to his paintings’ surface and color. His recent canvases feature one or two rectangles of solid color on top of and interacting with varied gray washes that cascade down the painting’s surface. Though reductive in their attitude and appearance, the resulting works are anything but “minimal.”

Contrary to first impressions, Witmer’s compositions are not planned or diagrammed. For the artist, painting is a process of inquiry; each piece is an individual result of decisions made intuitively and directly.

The critic and art historian Vittorio Colaizzi has written, “Witmer paints the inheritance of modernist abstraction, and perhaps, metaphorically, the more ecumenical spirituality of today, in the openness of his compositions, their perpetual almost-ness, and their refusal of closure or perfection.”

About the title for this exhibition the artist states, “I am trying to underscore the idea that my paintings embody new acts of declaration using long-existing means. Taken further, it communicates a hope in the continued relevance of abstract painting.”

Douglas Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In New York his work has recently appeared at P.S.1/MoMA in the group exhibition “Minus Space,” as well as The Painting Center and M55 Art in Long Island City. Other recent venues include: Pharmaka in Los Angeles, Gallery Siano in Philadelphia, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton in Ohio, Sydney Non-Objective in Australia, and Bus-Dori Project Space in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Sydney Ball, Zianexis, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 168 cm

March 4-21, 2010

The following extract is taken from ‘Sydney Ball: prophet of abstraction’ by Wendy Walker, Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings 1963–2007, p21

The emergence at the end of the 1990s of an insistent form in Ball’s paintings – reminiscent of shapes in early drawings of rock formations from his landscape works – gave rise to the asymmetrical, ragged-edged motifs in the abstract paintings of Structures 1, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art in 2005. Striking in its formal ascetic restraint, the subtitle of Structures 2 (2007), Abstract Architecture, is an indication that Ball’s point of reference for the new series of work was architectural form in space; specifically, both the contemporary architecture of Zaha Hadid and the reductive modernist constructions of Mies van der Rohe (prior to his art studies Ball’s background was in architecture).

The dynamism of Ball’s paintings is predicated on arigorous attention to the nuances of colour relationships. His selection of colours (secondary and tertiary) is compelling for they are rarely straightforward and frequently unexpected.

From the outset, Ball has maintained that the circle motif – critical to the graphic potency of the highly-resolved Cantos – represented the Chinese symbol for infinity. In the vibrant paintings of the 2007 Structures 2 series Ball reinstates the disc within a square as a strategy (as it was in the 1960s) for the introduction of additional colour.

Ball’s oeuvre may be regarded as a succession of evolutions, in which each concept is comp-rehensively worked through and continually reassessed, so that even within series there is conscious variation. Paralleling the ambitious scale of his paintings is a continual desire to push the boundaries. This willingness to experiment and to take risks propelled his move to New York and, later, his extensive travels in Japan, China, Korea and India, where he sought out sites of spiritual and cultural significance. His journey has resulted in a remarkable body of work of which the enduringly authoritative colour paintings in this exhibition are a significant part.

Studio view

March 4-27, 2010

Francesca Mataraga, Abstrakt Painting, 2009

November 18-28, 2009

Francesca Mataraga presents her new work Abstrakt Painting at Factory 49. Abstrakt Painting consumes the gallery space with colour, combining canvases with objects, fluorescent lights, painted walls and mirror, unifying the space through the use of objects as abstract forms. In this expansive new work Mataraga explores the possibilities of three-dimensional painting in contemporary practice.

A Sydney based artist, Mataraga has exhibited work in the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize at COFA, Photospace at the Australian National University, Sydney Non Objective, the Blake Prize, the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Ivan Dougherty Gallery at COFA, the Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney, the George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne, the Year in Art at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, the Cross Art Projects and various regional galleries, national prizes and conferences.

Work by Anthony Farrell

November 27 – December 12, 2009

Sydney Ball, Azriaxis, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 118.5 x 137.5 cm

November 3-29, 2009

Curated by David Hagger

Participating Artists:
Justin Andrews, Sydney Ball, Cathy Blanchflower, Louise Blyton, Col Jordan, Emma Langridge, David Milne, Giles Ryder, Alex Spremberg, Wilma Tabacco & PJ Hickman

Reductive brings together a selection of prominent artists whose practices are concerned as much with the methodology of conception as they are with the production of the resulting work. falling under the broader banner of reductive art, the op, minimalist and hard-edged abstract works exhibited exemplify a contemporary approach to non objective art in australia today.

Reductive art is generally characterised by its use of plainspoken materials, monochromatic or limited colour, geometry and pattern, repetition and seriality, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor. reductive art is inclusive and pluralistic in its approach, including geographic location, age, gender, medium, artistic strategy, and content of work. [MINUS SPACE]

Melbourne Non Objective Project

King Colours, 2009 (work in progress in studio)

October 22-31, 2009

Also on view: Marlene Sarroff & Jacek Przybyszewski

Work by Shiau-Peng Chen

September 5-26, 2009

Kerrie Poliness, Black O wall drawing #6, 1997
Fibre-tipped pen mural
Monash University Collection
Purchased with funds donated by Mrs. Margaret Stewart, 1997

September 7 – October 9, 2009

Curated by Danny Lacy, +/- examines the minimal and the maximal, the reductive and the additive, the positive and negative, exploring the formal visual elements of pattern, repetition and grid across a wide range of mediums. Inspired by Kerrie Poliness’ geometric Black O wall drawings, +/- focuses upon works from the Monash University Collection, and selected loans, that play with formal aesthetics.

DAMIANO BERTOLI | CHRISTIAN CAPURRO | EUGENE CARCHESIO | BRONWYN CLARK-COOLEE | LANE CORMICK | MIKALA DWYER | ANNE FERRAN | MARCO FUSINATO | TONY GARIFALAKIS | BRENT HARRIS | ROBERT HUNTER | TIM JOHNSON | JOHN LETHBRIDGE | CLINTON NAIN | GEOFFREY NEES | TOM NICHOLSON | DAVID NOONAN | LOUISE PARAMOR | KERRIE POLINESS | SANDRA SELIG | UDO SELLBACH | WOLFGANG SIEVERS

September 12 – October 31, 2009

Gallery Sonja Roesch announces a solo exhibition of recent work by Gilbert Hsiao, featuring perceptually-based abstraction painted on shaped wooden panels. Hsiao has been exploring the mechanics of visual perception since the 1980s. The viewer perceives oscillation through the illusion of a continuous wave produced by the physiological experience of space and movement. Meticulously layered stripes in tightly woven structures create a musical rhythm and repose.

“Shape/Anti-Shape” showcases Hsiao’s recent exploration of the use of irregularly shaped supports as a means of organizing pictorial space. The result is a continuously moving surface, which is reinforced through the shape of the painting. Metallic and fluorescent paint is applied with a vintage compressorless sprayer, creating a textured surface that makes these paintings an absorbing experience whether viewed close up or from a distance.

Gilbert Hsiao currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany, after thirty years in Brooklyn, New York. He studied Art History at Columbia University before receiving his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany as well as in the United States, where he exhibited at P.S.1 in New York. Hsiao is a recent recipient of a fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is represented in a number of private, corporate and public collections.

Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri (Pintupi, ca. 1927–1998)
Water Dreaming, late 1972
Synthetic polymer powder paint on composition board
69.53 max. x 56.52 cm

September 1 – December 5, 2009

“It is not every day that a new kind of beauty is born,” says Professor Roger Benjamin of the University of Sydney, the exhibition’s guest curator. Such is the achievement of the painters of Papunya, who adapted the rich meaning of their image-making to a new context, reasserting with pride and intelligence the world’s oldest continuous culture.

In 1971, at Papunya, a government-established Aboriginal relief camp in the Central Australian desert, the Sydney school teacher Geoffrey Bardon provided a group of ranking Aboriginal men with the tools and the encouragement to paint. The resulting works became the first paintings ever to systematically transfer the imagery of their culture to a permanent surface.

This exhibition will be the first to focus on this founding moment, presenting some of the finest examples from the period drawn from the collection of John Wilkerson (Cornell PhD Class of 1970) and Barbara Wilkerson, never before exhibited as a group. The collection includes important works by such great names in the history of late twentieth-century Australian art as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi, and Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, and many others. The exhibition’s centerpiece is Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s staggering Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa of 1972, whose visual intricacy has been likened to a page in a medieval illumination manuscript; this work twice made Australian national headlines when it achieved world-record auction prices in 1996 and 2000.

The visual qualities of these so-called Papunya boards of which only 750 or so were ever made make them a unique body of work. Not only are these works tremendously significant as bearers of cultural meaning, but they are painted with a skill and inventiveness that has caused them to be admired and collected the world over, said Andrew C. Weislogel, the Johnson’s associate curator and master teacher, who organized the exhibition with Benjamin.

The Australian Aboriginal worldview is based on Tjukurrpa, or the Dreaming, a belief that the world was formed by creator ancestors who shaped the land, made all living things, and laid out the moral code for human conduct. The many Dreamings that relate to specific geographical features, animals, plants, and the elements are the collective responsibility of numerous Indigenous Nations who ensure their preservation for future generations in song, story, and imagery. Several of the works in the exhibition include sacred imagery and depictions of ritual objects used in men’s ceremonies that would normally be viewable only by initiated men within the Aboriginal community. However, key senior painters have granted permission for American audiences to view these works.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available from Cornell University Press. Professor Benjamin is the chief contributor and edited the volume with the Johnson’s Weislogel. The catalogue includes contributions by prominent scholars and historians present during the movements early years.

Organized by the Johnson Museum, Icons of the Desert will travel to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles (May 3 – August 2) and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (September 1 – December 5).

This exhibition and its programs at the Johnson Museum are made possible by generous grants from the Actus Foundation and the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Installation view with works by Tilman, John Nixon &
Julian Dashper (left to right)

August 23 – September 27, 2009

HICA, The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, is to host an exhibition of artists’ work from PS gallery, Amsterdam, opening on Sunday 23rd August, 2009.

Concrete Now! Introducing PS will present work from artists who have exhibited with PS, including Julian Dashper, Michelle Grabner, Gerold Miller, John Nixon, Jan van der Ploeg, and Tilman. A truly international show, bringing together artists from Europe, USA, Australia and New Zealand it will also stand as the second of a series of annual group exhibitions held by the HICA art-space which seek each year to extend the discussion around the space and its concerns with ideas of ’concrete’ as opposed to ‘abstract’ artworks.

Based in Melbourne, Australia, John Nixon is one on the country’s leading minimalist practitioners with works in collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. “The materiality of my work is part of the materiality of experience. I work from the premise that the work of art exists in a ‘real’, physical, rather than illusory world.” – John Nixon, from Thesis: Selected Works from 1968-1993, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1994

Julian Dashper was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1960. As well as being held in all the major public collections in New Zealand his work can also be found at MCA in Sydney, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has recently been the subject of a major touring retrospective in America.

Tilman lives and works in Brussels and New York. As well as his own international art practice he is Artistic Director and Chief Curator of CCNOA, Centre for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels.

Michelle Grabner is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The Art Institute of Chicago, and co-founder of The Suburban, an artist project space in Illinois. “Painting is not Painting when it props up the self or attempts to tell stories. That activity is called picture making. Painting is larger than pictures but not larger than its limitations which are severe and singular and sweet.” – Michelle Grabner

Gerold Miller lives and works in Berlin. He has held solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Vienna, Brisbane, Berlin, Zürich, Salzburg and Japan. “Miller’s wall floor, and room objects in public and private space are space-scape pictures in the best sense, because they dare to grasp for the whole – of the world, of space, of the truth, and of the chaos, ramified like rhizomes – that we call life.” Stephan Maier in: ’Gerold Miller, Reforming the Future’, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg 2001.

Jan van der Ploeg is co-founder of PS gallery in Amsterdam. His “grip” paintings first showed up on the streets of Amsterdam in 1996 and he has worked extensively and internationally with galleries such as Florence Lynch New York, Raid Projects Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Amsterdam, CCSC Barcelona and South London Gallery.

Both HICA and PS are artist-run galleries with a concern for developing international dialogue while also facilitating local discussion. While the exhibition space of PS is situated in a canal house in the centre of Amsterdam, HICA occupies what might in contrast seem a remote space in the Highlands of Scotland. Concrete Now! Introducing PS will be an opportunity to demonstrate a shared positive approach to exhibiting contemporary artworks, where the presenting of works and considering of ideas becomes a moment for examining existing understandings and a testing-ground; suggesting and offering new possibilities.

Installation view

September 5-26, 2009

A Linear Construction is Andrew Gutteridge’s new optical intervention. The installation expands the field of abstraction through a numerical and linear response to the interior architecture of Conical. The gallery space is divided and mapped out through a series of lines constructed from black elastic cord. These lines dissect the space and create a physical disruption to the Gallery. As the viewer moves through the space they will have to negotiate these lines. This playful intervention of the lines within the gallery space will create an interesting ocular distortion for the viewer.

Since the completion of his Masters in 2007, Gutteridge has been developing his studio practice. He extends the vocabulary of geometric and hard edge abstraction through an engagement with sculptural forms and architecture to exploit time and duration in order to create an unfolding contemplative experience for the viewer. His work oscillates between the painted object and immersive installations. Both forms of the practice interact with the viewer and the interior architecture within the gallery space.

For this project Gutteridge has developed his previous black adhesive tape installation into a three-dimensional constructed work, by using thin black elastic cord. This new material enables the linear forms to protrude from the wall and span out into the gallery space to directly involve the viewer. Each line of cord is drawn through the gallery space and is positioned by a logical numerical response to the interior architecture. This process begins from the centre of the gallery and is then extrapolated to fill the entire space.

These installation works are heavily process driven, often set up with certain rules or parameters in order to create a desired effect or result. This particular work is limited to lines of black elastic cord strung within the gallery and is spaced out in a progressional formation from the centre of the room. The outcomes of these works are always varied, often, it is the unexpected happenings, which create the most interesting results.

In 2007, Gutteridge completed his Masters of Fine Arts at Monash University. He has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at Shifted Gallery (Melbourne) 2008, Kings ARI (Melbourne) 2008, Span Galleries (Melbourne) 2006-07 and participated in various group exhibitions in Australia and Internationally. He has also presented a series of work at Sydney Non Objective (SNO) in 2008. His work is held in various private collections and Artbank.

This is the first time that Turner Galleries has shown the work of well-known local artist Trevor Richards. Trevor’s practice comprises painting, sculpture, installation, architectural interventions and video. This exhibition presents a new series of paintings and three dimensional works which allude to architecturally modelled space.

Trevor is widely recognised for his formally structured, minimalist approach to painting that is informed by his sustained engagement with a limited range of colours and an admiration for the commonplace. In 2008 he was included in CANOA, a large touring exhibition of Australian non-objective artworks that was shown in three venues in Germany. He was also commissioned in 2008-9 to make a large work for All colours permitted as long as they don’t interfere with commerce, a major international exhibition presented in the cities of Katowice and Szcecin in Poland. Other recent group exhibitions include Fertile Soil: 50 Years of the City of Fremantle Collection, Fremantle Art Centre, 2008; Silver, Artrage 25, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2008 and AC4CA at SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Sydney, 2009.

Trevor received funding from the Department of Culture and the Arts WA towards this exhibition. He is represented in numerous local, national and international private and public art collections. A catalogue will be published to coincide with this exhibition and will be available at the gallery.

Abstraction, architecture and the everyday in the recent work of Trevor Richards, by Carolyn Barnes
The French philosopher Jacques Rancière highlights the restricted basis of modern art, the idea of artistic independence framing all ways of making, seeing and judging art in modernity. Certainly, most theories of modernist abstraction represent art as something to be experienced in and of itself, but the idea that art should conform to a single possibility and direction collapsed decades ago. Current societies are formed around differentiation, diversificationand distributed systems, people’s sense of the specificity of their needs and desires increasingly driving contemporary society in contrast to the uniform, centrally-imposed standards and processes that emerged in modernity. Indeed, Trevor Richards’s current work shows that contemporary abstraction involves wide-ranging renegotiation of modernist models, leading to unforeseen, particular and distinct outcomes in the work of individual artists.

In Richards’s work, the mixing of abstraction, everyday objects and site-specificity has long addressed the relationshipbetween human experience and place. Historical context is also a factor in his current work. The outward appearance of his latest paintings and sculptures is reminiscent of 1960s hard-edged abstraction. Yet closer consideration of the paintings in particular reveals a systematized approach to composition, contravening the role of formal invention as a guarantee of authenticity in modern art. The visual reference to a hard-edged aesthetic draws attention to the changing conditions for the production and interpretation of abstract art over the past four decades, contemporary abstraction being critically engaged in the world in exploring the diverse uses of aesthetic form.

Like much of Richards’s work over the past ten years, his current paintings start with a grid. Each work is comprised of a network of different coloured diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines, each one unit wide. The lines are organised according to the basic stipulation that each should travel from one edge of the canvas to another, or at least appear to do so. It was artists of the neo-avant-garde who assiduously employed numerical and other conceptual sequences as generators of form, rejecting modernist values of aesthetic truth and intuitive creativity. Richards’s paintings are too ebullient to be taken for artistic negation. Although they employ an approach to art-making grounded in process, the resultant works are not so systematic that they suggest some pre-determined end. Rather, Richards’s paintings evoke the complexity and disorder of everyday life in which intent plays only a partial role and most intentions
are only partly realised.

The paintings have a strong and immediate visual impact, but don’t aspire to the formal resolution sought in 1960s hard-edged abstraction. Localised optical effects introduce inconsistencies of depth and viewpoint, suggesting that understanding space and form involves the mind as well as the anatomical machinery of vision. The optical illusion of the paintings is replaced by actual space and form in the sculptures, enabling a more straightforward spatial consciousness. Together, the paintings and sculptures explore the role of architecture in creating and informing our experience of the world. The paintings reveal the basis of architectural form in conventions of graphic representation such as isomorphic drawing, highlighting the role of geometry as a reference point for the field. The realisation of the grids in both two and three dimensions explores the interplay of surface, space and objecthood in architecture.

Sensory experience is vital to the reception of Richards’s work, its grammar of colour and form highlighting the immanence of perceptual phenomena. Recently, the sensory has returned as an important critical framework in debates that seek to understand the social world and people’s place in it, challenging the previous concentration on semiotics and deconstruction. For Brian Massumi, the sensory resists interpretation in sitting outside social signification, suggesting the scope for abstraction to interrogate human experience. Richards’s current work—which depends on the apprehension of similarity and difference—encourages a mode of critical visual thinking that challenges the increasingly superficial terms in which difference is represented in our globalised society of spectacle, the combination of simple formal means and optical illusion forcing the viewer to look hard at what is presented. That the spotlight is turned on architecture highlights its dual life as something that people bring into being only for it to become a primary context in which they act. Richards’s paintings and sculptures, which establish a multi-level dialogue with the gallery architecture, underscore the implications of this duality in respect of art, architecture being a primary context for art’s presentation.

For Richards, architecture embeds abstraction in everyday life. He wonders whether his recent works are an unconscious response to the patterned, terrazzo floors of his house in Fremantle. Previous series of works have engaged the industrial architecture and surroundings of his studios. Ben Highmore argues that all serious efforts to explain the nature of everyday life have to begin with an aesthetic foundation. Arguably, today’s everyday and artistic cultures have their roots in the 1960s. The symbolic languages of consumer and media culture became increasingly pervasive during this period, eclipsing established patterns of meaning provided by the family, the nation, ethnicity, tradition and social custom. The formalist theory of modern art may have lost its currency by the early 1970s, but it has been a persistent reference point in contemporary art ever since. Similarly, although vanguard architects have long rejected the formalism of late modern architecture, its pragmatic version of truth to form and function continues to drive building design across the world.

Today, modernist aesthetics are part of daily experience, not an unfamiliar and intimidating expression of the new. In spreading throughout Australian society, the modern has become stylistically varied and impure, forging countless open associations rather than resulting in the restrictive situation its rigorous aesthetic principles initially suggested. In addressing the circulation of modernist aesthetics through art and architecture, Trevor Richards’s latest works explore the formal and representational logic behind what is now ordinary; his practice of improvisation within limits uncovering the many small, aesthetic transactions that make the modern a part of lived experience in the here and now.

Endnotes
1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 20.
2 Robin Murray, Geoff Mulgan and Julie Caulier-Grice, ‘How to Innovate: The tools for social innovation’, The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (UK) and The Young Foundation, undated, p. 3. Available at http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/research/news/generating-social-innovation-how-innovate-tools-social-innovation, accessed 16 March 2009.
3 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.
4 Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 5 2005, pp. 548-567.
5 Brian Massumi, ‘The autonomy of affect’, in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: a Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp. 217-239.
6 See Lefebvre.
7 Ben Highmore, ‘Homework: Routine, social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life’, Cultural Studies, Vol.18, No. 2, 2004, p. 312.

Biographical note
Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she is involved in a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public contexts. She is an assistant editor of the International Journal of Design, book reviews editor for Artifact and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Craftsman House published her monograph on the Hong Kong-Australian artist John Young in 2005.

Work by Gilbert Hsiao

August 1-30, 2009

July 31 – August 29, 2009
New Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm
There is no opening event for this exhibition.

MINUS SPACE project space
98 4th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm
Directions | Downtown Brooklyn Galleries Map

We are pleased to announce our summer group exhibition Open House for Butterflies featuring work by seven international reductive artists.

Participating artists include:

Justin Andrews (Melbourne, Australia)
Hartmut Böhm (Berlin, Germany)
Michelle Grabner (Chicago)
Daniel Göttin (Basel, Switzerland)
Gilbert Hsiao (Berlin, Germany / NYC)
Victoria Munro (NYC / Auckland, New Zealand)
Karen Schifano (NYC)

We are also delighted to announce our new flatfiles and bookstore. Our flatfiles feature works by select reductive artists working around the globe, including drawings, prints, photographs, works on paper, editions, and multiples. Some paintings, sculpture, and design objects are also available. Our bookstore features dozens of publications on reductive art and ideas on the international level, including artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, journals, ephemera, and select vintage books.

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!

Jurek Wybraniec, Surrogate (Pillow-like template
for despair, Blue + Pink combo 1), 2009
Enamel on vinyl, 40 x 40 x 9 cm

SNO 50 Fundraiser – Silent Auction
Over 50 Australian & Internationals

All bids finalized at 5pm, Sunday, July 26, 2009.
All bids enter at $100, with no reserve.

Viewing throughout July.
Opening reception: Saturday, July 4, 3-6pm

Bids can also be placed via an online form at www.sno.org.au
or in person at SNO centre at:

Level 1, 175 Marrickville Road
Marrickville
Sydney, NSA 2204
Australia
info@sno.org.au

Open 12-5 pm, Friday to Sunday or by appointment

Kevin Finklea
A List Of Things We Said We’d Do Tomorrow #18, 2009
Acrylic on Baltic plywood
28cm x 10cm x 12cm

June 20 – August 5, 2009

Participating Artists:
Christoph Dahlhausen, Kevin Finklea, Daniel Gottin, Rosa M. Hessling, Sherna Teperson, Mark Titmarsh, Heiner Thiel, Bill Thompson, Peter Weber

Installation view through storefront window

May 29 – June 12, 2009

Participating Artists:
Brian Scales, Inverted Topologies (Justin Andrews, Kyle Jenkins, Danny Lacy, Masato Takasaka), Suzie Attiwill, and Warren Taylor

June 15 – July 15, 2009

Presented by White Street Project, prototypes for temporary outdoor sculptures on display at the AMC Frankston 12 Cinema Complex on Wells Street and the Frankston City Library on Playne Street.

> Daniel Argyle’s web site

May 8-29, 2009

RMIT University School of Art and Sydney Non Objective present contemporary non-objective practice from MINUS SPACE New York. A survey of reductive strategies by artists living in and around New York City. Presenting a single work from each artist, as well as an open letter to the artist community affiliated with RMIT Non Objective.  The exhibition originated at Sydney Non Objective in 2007, and later travelled to Curtin University in Perth in 2008.

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 

MINUS SPACE is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Funding for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Golden Rule Foundation.

MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artists David Thomas and Billy Gruner for bringing the show to Melbourne!  Additional thanks to Daniel Argyle for his assistance.

Liz Shreeve, 81 Light Boxes, 2009
Gesso, acrylic and wax on wood, 180 x 180 x 5 cm
(no web site) 

April 9-18, 2009

Liz Shreeve’s paradoxically subtle and astonishing works make the viewer consciously aware of ambient light and the beauty of sight. In Boxing Light, wall mounted and free standing structures transform the available light into soft clouds of glowing colour.

Christoph Dahlhausen & Michael Graeve
Dialog I, 2006, Raum 2810, Bonn, Germany
Photo: Christoph Dahlhausen

March 18 – April 18, 2009
(closed Easter Saturday)

Sound performance and artists’ talk on Saturday, March 21, 3pm

Christopher Dean, Middle Age Hard Edge
Abstractionist from St Marys Seeking Same, 2007
Oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm 
Photo: Adam Hollingworth & Blacktown Arts Centre

March 26 – April 4, 2009

Factory 49
49 Shepherd St, Marrickville, Sydney, 2204

Three Pink Monochromes (a work in progress)
The first pink monochromes were made in 1993 and since this time Dean has continued to explore and experiment with this concept. The combination of the tradition of monochrome painting with the use of the colour pink holds a great fascination for him.

While Dean is currently writing his thesis, titled “The Pink Monochrome Project”, art historian, Barbara Rose curated a major international exhibition on the history of monochrome painting. Whereas the exhibition as well as the substantial catalogue that documented the event divided the wide selection of monochromes spanning the past one hundred years into sections according to different colours including Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Brown and Gold as well as Black and White, remarkably a section dedicated to the colour Pink was not included!

For Dean, pink is the quintessential colour for a monochrome because it develops a critique of the metaphysical and masculine logic of the monochrome as an emblem of Modernism while holding the potential to simultaneously represent the variables and contingencies of the artist’s subjectivity and locality. Dean suggests his slogan should be: “Pink monochrome painters of the world unite”!

Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water 2000
Light bulbs, water, mirror room, 300 x 450 x 450 cm
Collection: FNAC, France
Image courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery,
London, and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo

Until June 8, 2009

Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years explores the extraordinary work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture, Japan). The exhibition reveals the coherence of her practice over many decades and highlights the freshness and innovation she brings to themes investigated consistently throughout her life—repetition, pattern and aggregation.

Kusama describes herself as an ‘obsessive artist’— her work is intensely sensual, infused with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content. The exhibition presents seminal works from her years in New York in the 1960s, such as Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (1965), Narcissus Garden (1966) and Walking Piece (c.1966) juxtaposed with the artist’s more recent films, wall and floor pieces, and environments including Fireflies on the Water (2000) and the site specific, labyrinthine Invisible Life (2000/2009). A new environment Clouds (1999/2009) features large-scale monochromatic inflated forms which create a sombre other-worldliness in dark space, reflecting Kusama’s on-going concerns of obliteration through physical scale, volume and positive and negative space.

The exhibition includes a selection of Kusama’s renowned Infinity Net and Infinity Dot paintings which are at the core of her practice. Additionally, 50 new silkscreen works on canvas Love Forever (2004-7) appear as a stream of consciousness, fluidly drawn in black on white. The artist has covered every surface in myriad lines, sweeps, figurative and organic forms.

This exhibition also includes a special selection of very early works from the artist’s own collection. In these, we recognise nets and accumulations of dots, combined with the sensual line she brings to Love Forever more than 50 years later.

Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years has been curated by Jaap Guldemond (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim (Le Consortium, Dijon, France). The exhibition is organised by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and proceeds to City Gallery Wellington in September 2009.

Clint Doyle, Yellow Painting,  2008
Oil on canvas 62 x 85 cm
(no web site) 

February 26 – March 7, 2009

Clint Doyle’s paintings are composed of numerous colours of yellows, layered on canvas, rendered closely together allowing for duration of perception for the colours to appear giving way to a feeling of intoxication.

September 9-28, 2008

In 2007 Sydney Ball revisited the direct pictorial architecture of his Canto paintings to develop Structures 2, a series of radiant abstract colour works. The modernist architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe and Zaha Hadid – and their open-ended, problem-solving approach to refined ‘architectonic form’ – provided a framework that resonated with Ball’s artistic practice. 

As a young man, Ball worked as an architectural draughtsman before moving to New York in 1963, where he studied painting under Theodore Stamos at the Art Students League. He was able to experience firsthand seminal paintings by Henri Matisse, Hans Hofmann and Kenneth Noland and to meet New York School artists Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. In this environment, Ball quickly evolved a spare pictorial language, first realised in the vertical coloured stripes of the Band paintings, shown at Westerly Gallery in his first solo exhibition, in 1964. The Canto series followed (1964–66), with geometric forms used as vehicles for more dramatic, optical, acrylic colour. Their directness and simplicity impressed Stamos, who wrote of their capacity, to ‘enforce a contemplation more exacting than the simplicity of the forms seems to require’. Ball’s subsequent Persian series (1966–68) contained passages of rhythmic colour inspired by Islamic architecture and Persian miniatures, followed by the minimal shaped canvases of his Modular series (1967–69). 

In Australia, the Canto paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Design in Melbourne in 1965 and, in 1969, he was represented in ‘The Field’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, among the first of many important group exhibitions. In 1973 Ball’s abstract expressionist Stain paintings achieved popular and critical success in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. A year later, Patrick McCaughey proclaimed him ‘one of the best and most mature painters to emerge in Australia over the last ten years’. From 1983 to around 2000, Ball travelled widely and explored figurative painting, during which time he continued to be represented in significant museum exhibitions of colour painting. His return to abstraction with the Structures series consolidated his place within Australian contemporary art.

September 10-27, 2008

“Traces of minimalism-conceptualism’s redefinition of the work of art as analytical proposition converge in Andrew Leslie’s recent works, which are best described as hybrid painting-objects. Each is comprised of a bundle of narrow, factory-made lengths of aluminium. Only when installed as a rectangle of closely spaced, vertical units on the (gallery) wall do they become a ‘painting’, highlighting the interconnected role of architecture and conventions of media as agents of artistic definition. The back of each set of lengths is painted with a single, yellow word on a blue ground. The slightly v-shaped, front face of each length is left plain. An observant viewer, however, will notice that some painting has taken place since Leslie isn’t concerned to mask the thin edges of the aluminium units to keep them free of paint. The ragged marks left by the painting process signal that each work is a pictorial object not a readymade, much as Daniel Buren—an artist of significance for Leslie—consistently painted the outer bands of the striped fabric he used in his extended cycle of works exploring how the readymade had affected the possibilities for painting.” — Carolyn Barnes, Melbourne 2008

Michael Graeve, Untitled, 2008
Digital print on aluminium, 28 x 36cm

August 27 — September 20, 2008

…”Sometime during the same period I was to read the following passage written about Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel:

“Palermo is a craftsman, moving on from one commission to the next and assembling individual pieces with the utmost care; by contrast Imi Knoebel pays his objects just so much attention as they need in order to exist – the attention that a farmer devotes to the separate departments of work on his land. Imi Knoebel treats his work like a farm, on which many different activities are kept going with great skill. Dairy cattle, therefore butter and cheese; perhaps some bulls for breeding; young stock; perhaps a few oxen and pigs; grass for pasture and winter feed; cereal crops of various kinds; woodland for winter felling; any number of fruit trees, and therefore fruit juice and liquor; any amount of chickens and geese; a dog and a couple of cats; perhaps a fine horse; pigeons on the roof; a mill on the stream; and a quarry by the roadside“…

Installation view with work by Billy Gruner

July 26 — August 16, 2008

Partcipating artists include Daniel Argyle, Billy Gruner, Kyle Jenkins & Tilman.