Works from the 25 – 25 IS (2010) on the floor at SNO
(l to r, t to b) Tilman, Tallman, Heerkens, Hallard, Hsiao,
Arts, Voskuil, Winkler, Andrews, Roux, Dahlhausen,
Van Der Graaf, Deleget, Van Der Aa

August 7-29, 2010

Solo Installations
Guido Winkler & Iemke van Dijk

25 -25 IS Box
The 25 – 25 IS box contains work of 25 artists at 25 x25 cm. The edition consists of 75 boxes. Available at 395 EUR / 575 AUD. Participating artists include: Justin Andrews, Linda Arts, Chris Ashley, Sanne Bruggink, Christoph Dahlhausen, Matthew Deleget, Rene Eicke, Billy Gruner, Brent Hallard, Jose Heerkens, Gilbert Hsiao, Arjan Janssen, Sarah Keighery, Alexandra Roozen, Leopoldine Roux, Giles Ryder, Clary Stolte, John Tallman, Tilman, Richard Van Der Aa, Iemke Van Dijk, Jasper Van Der Graaf, Henriette Van ‘t Hoog, Jan Maarten Voskuil and Guido Winkler.

IS Group Show
Participating artists include: Jose Heerkens, Henriette van ‘t Hoog, Arjan Janssen, Jasper van der Graaf and Jan Maartin Voskuil

Clary Stolte, CS_008 MODEL 003 overview, 2006
Galerie van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands

Brent: At some level an artwork needs to quench the desire – the need to know what something is. But also, it shouldn’t stop there. In your case what is ‘known’ is a shape. You generally use the square and it is often imbued with the hues around white. Robert Ryman used a square because it took away the need to make what he thought were arbitrary decisions. In your case I’m not exactly sure why you chose this shape, but it works. I consider the shape as a container, or a surface, a plate that you serve things on. Left bare it goes back the other way: is a plate, a surface, and an empty container. But always there is something there.

In this ‘presence’ I am also aware of something that is very portable, an ornament almost. You can arrange this in any number of ways. It can be put away and brought back out, and ‘re-presented’. Then as shape, surface, container, and ornament all this starts to perform something like a gift. And how this gift is presented seems very much important. Now we move through into ritual.

Clary: When looking at my work I am often told that the observer is searching for some kind of support, looking for a ‘known’, looking for a way to ‘enter’. The eye tries to focus on something though may not know where to start.

“VOLUMESURFACE #2” (2004), is a square; a semi-transparent work made out of folded paper. There is not much there to lead you in; even the edges are hard to focus on.

To really understand why I use the square as a shape and white as a color, I have to take you back a bit in time to the moment I came to the decision to start working with these elements. The square and the color ‘white’ was used by artists from the early 60’s and 70’s, such as the American artist Robert Ryman, and the Dutch painter Jan Schoonhoven. My work is most placed in this tradition, and that of minimal art. But maybe when I explain a little further about my way of using these elements it will become clearer that my work also has other contexts in art history…

Brent: While artist-in-residence in the most western point of Ireland, Achill Island, you tapped in a description of the landscape: Dramatic, With Cliffs, An Ocean, And Totally Isolated.

This is your work: my first impression.

There is Nature in your pieces. And it took a tough wind and a heavy sea to set this all in motion.

I see firm – more than firm, hard. Hard material that has cuts, often just a few. The cuts themselves appear powerful. They can cut into a shape. Another piece they cut to form the shape. And if anyone were to ask me about the lightness of your work, I would reply ‘Weight!’

Cecilia: I am glad you brought up the residency in Ireland. The Achill Heinrich Boll Foundation operates the residency and it is a great opportunity to explore this particularly isolated peninsula.

As noted, Achill represents the most western point of Ireland. It signifies the ‘extreme edge’ of the land. You cannot physically go further.

I would walk over the high cliffs and see the ocean there below, and could do so without distractions: There were only the sea and the waves, the wind and the lines.

In 2008 I visited Canna, a similar island. Canna is part of The Hebrides, located off of the western coast of Scotland. Only 15 people live there. And it is filled with nothing: There are no roads – traffic, shops, or computer. The only payphone you could find was in the little white cottage from which you could view the sea from every window. These are the places that impress me most. They allow a focus on the rhythm of the landscape. And this gives me time to find the repetition. The tougher the wind, the higher the wave, the more I like it.

In front of a work you are likely to focus on color, line and form. Maybe there is a sense of weight. I want to transfer this sense to the viewer. It’s kind of an abstract value until you actually lift the work.

The sculptures are flat and executed in thick (8-15mm) plates of metal. While they appear light (like graphic signs or forms), they are actually very heavy. The challenging features of the material are the power and strength of the metal. This is what I like to work with.

I use the saw-cuts to interfere/delineate the square form or circle. The placing/location of the cut is crucial and is a very clear and radical decision: once performed in steel it is irreversible. If it is 1 or 2mm to the left or right the whole work can change, shift. The balance and composition has to be just right. I admire the work of Ad Dekkers (NL) and Gordon Matta Clark (US), construction and de-construction are important features of both their work, however they interpret it…

Richard Bottwin, Facade #5, 2009
Wood, Acrylic Paint, Textured Acrylic Sheet
15 x 15 x 4.5 inches

“Brent: As a sculptor you work fairly pure, neither adorning pieces with mounts nor placing your presentations on pedestals. If a “work” sits on the floor and only grows to somewhere around or below the knees, well, that is where it sits.

You suspend. In this case the body becomes very aware of its own mechanisms; how it values weight, position; how this operates within the sense of the temporal.

Smaller scale: The eye moves in and latches onto visual sensations that convince, though also deceive. And while no guesswork is needed to place the vocation in the realm of the sculptural there is a question to whether the form adds more, or if there is more to what there is?

Richard: My very early freestanding sculptures, although stable, looked like they were always about to fall over. Now I strive to make it very difficult to get a vertical fix on what you’re looking at. Walk around them and any expectations you had during your first scan will be subverted. Some recent pieces create a slight sense of anxiety in my gut when I look at them. Not a panic response exactly, more fun than that. Confronting a human-scaled construction that is standing on the floor, does engage the body of the viewer as you suggest. In contrast to this, I have found that the import of gravity is not such a big deal in small, pedestal size pieces. Maybe that’s why I moved them to the wall and used them to explore other issues long ago.

I’ve always been suspect of the conventional “modern art” solutions to gravity; Sculpture on a pad, sculpture on a stick, sculpture on a hidden pad (underground) and sculpture hanging on a wire doesn’t interest me. I like things to stand alone, solidly on the ground without artifice. Recently, I’ve been very conscious of wanting the things to stand in a thoroughly inevitable way, like junk casually left on a construction site. This allows the environment to intrude upon the sculpture and the sculpture to engage the environment.

The environment may be the “More” in your question. I’d like to have several sculptures in an installation working together, or, a single built environment one can enter that remove the viewer from this reality. I’ve always been moving toward architecture and have brushed up against it a few times. I feel like I’m collecting information to eventually build a pavilion or a “house” of some sort again as I did a few times in the past.

One vice I have is a passion for the decorative. For a brief period, around 20 years ago, I threw 22k gold leaf on my sculptures and sometimes glazed it with color. I learned a lot about pigments and transparency that way and then got over it. Now, I employ that love of decorative surface to create allusions to functionality. Veneers make the sculptures look like furniture and that confuses expectations. Figuration in a veneer also initiates visual activity that I can play with in the form of the sculpture…”

“Brent: In “Treble II” you have an envelope-proportioned structure that has a fold but not like an envelope. There is a corner missing from one side: And a corner protruding from the other. The whole thing is one sheet of color, and of two forms… how did that come about?

Connie: In the “Treble” pieces I’m working with parts of a whole, hence the single color. As to whether these parts become a single entity or are in the process of individuation, well… it can go either way. That’s the point – the uncertainty.

Transformation, the presence, and a stimulus are all part of the move. There is always a “present”: And there is in every piece a “movement” just as there is a pull to and away from gravity. I work a disturbed equilibrium. And it’s there where I find the accord.

I’ve worked off the square/rectangle shape for years. This four-cornered parallelogram is static, constant, perfectly composed. But I take that parallelogram and cut into it, knock it off balance. I have it strive toward another less stable shape and then strive back for perfect containment. The shape wants to stay intact, but countervailing forces are always eroding and pulling at its perfect equanimity. The differing depths of the components in the piece are intended to enhance the notion that this is a changeable, morphing form…”

Don Voisine, Chemical Moment, 2009
Oil on wood, 16×17 inches

“Brent: Upon entering the gallery, your first show on the West Coast, San Francisco, Gregory Lind, immediately you become aware of all that is color. Oddly it is not the black that pushes its presence first. But like a good friend, faithful, the blacks unfold at a different speed, which require the intimate. If dark be the turbine then color is the outwardly expressive, and is the meter. In the exhibition space this is what travels across to us in calibrated splendor.

Don: Your response sounds similar to the reaction people have when coming to my studio for the first time. Having seen a painting or two in various group shows they would expect the studio to be a dark and perhaps foreboding place. Often the first words uttered are, “Wow, look at all this color!” I think this explains why salon style installations of my work have been done in a few exhibitions. It replicates the experience of seeing the work in the studio…”

Work by Brent Hallard

November 12 – December 19, 2009

An international, visual conversation between abstract painters; a traveling, transformable series of shows.

Exhibiting artists – Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier

Meridian Gallery is pleased to present TRANS: form | color the San Francisco manifestation of a series of international traveling shows by nine artists from Japan, Germany and the United States who are engaged in a dialogue about Painting and Abstraction.

Begun as an in-person and online conversation between Richard Schur in Munich, Mel Prest in San Francisco and Brent Hallard in Tokyo, TRANS has grown into an exhibition with nine artists. Three of the artists hail from Germany, four artists live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, one in upstate New York and one lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a visual dialogue between themselves and as a means to join today’s contemporary painting dialogue.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference, as well as, the ways that the works align both formally and conceptually, with a range of abstraction spanning hard-edge, optical, minimal, expressive and conceptual. An aspect of the artists’ continuing dialogue is the installation of TRANS: form | color, which is done onsite by the artists together. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic and timely exhibition.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century, with its awareness of history as well as conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

“…These painters, calling themselves TRANS, meeting in person or on the Internet, found that they share a common interest in the painting process, pure, and often not so simple. Unlike previous groups, they share no common ideology and they certainly are not likely to publish a manifesto. And they all agree that it is the viewer’s response, which completes the work…”
—Peter Selz

TRANS:Abstraktion opened in November 2007 at Weltraum, a non-profit gallery space in Munich, Germany. In March 2009 TRANS:formal traveled to Pharmaka, a non-profit space in Los Angeles. Each show includes new work by each artist –thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. TRANS: form | color at Meridian Gallery will be the first time all artists will be present at the exhibition.

Catalogue available, with notes on TRANS: form | color by Peter Selz.

Installation view at Non Objectif Sud, France, 2009

Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was that because you felt the image had reached a stage whereby via the residue the movement just kept going on all by itself? I sense the building of form and then the letting go, engaging in a perfect slip, of folding in and out, in pairs, a synchronizing of different stages.

In Dark Nebula in Saggitarius, 1979, the marks have a similar feel in touch, and there appears to be some pairing, folding, and twisting. Though any geometric sub-structural hint is well hidden under what lay on top. I have an image of this as the remnants of a bout.

Linda: That was a smaller try of a group of large (approx 4×7′ or larger depending upon the space) drawings I made on the wall. The grid was ruled in with pencil and made a rectangular pattern. Each part of the symmetrical grid was drawn upon with chalk using simple rules: only quarter arcs, straight lines, changing the movement at a crossing, etc. They were freehand and each section done with each hand. That is to say, the right grid drawn on with the right hand and the left with left. I just started in the middle and drew out and then came back. I not quite erased what went before to push it into the background and then did it again, responding to the first drawing. I thought of it as re-seeing in time that could have gone on forever. I guess I stopped when I thought the movement was over. Kind of with a long exhale very much as you describe.

I went from the analytical gesture to some years of drawings in which I used the chalk and eraser to literally remake various spiral galaxies. I was looking at small photos in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies. The epiphany was that these galaxies were the analog of the gestures in the earlier work, and of course by extension the body and brain alike were similarly organized natural phenomena. Drawing for me was a kind of research. Looking at those small pictures united my hand and mind as I tried to find the structure that was simultaneously building and destroying the form. This info was not commonly available as it is now and the few books that existed like Mandelbrot’s first and Pirogene’s were the only references I had to try to find out more of what I intuited to be true. In 1982 I did an exhibition of big drawings in Copenhagen. The show was titled The Order of Chaos and here is a picture of one of them done from the galaxy M101…

Brent: Finding. You come out of a bit of a painting history; gesture; hints of constructive; a kind of record keeping; painting that pays attention to relationship more than heroics, though the mark and scale suggests that’s where you were initially coming from?

Richard: Yes, I do feel that what I do comes out of, and actually continues within, a history of painting. I trained as a painter initially during the early 80s in Christchurch, NZ and my teachers were predominantly abstract expressionists who were extolling the virtues of the New York school and the theories of Clement Greenberg (20 years after the fact.) Being young and impressionable, I came out loving that stuff and have been working my way out of there ever since. Even now, I feel that what ever I do is inflected by a way of thinking about painting which I took on board way back then. In brief it is about: The painting as evidence of process and most importantly for me, the painting as an object. When you say record keeping you are bang on. Perhaps it is more obvious in my earlier work, but I would say even now – I think of the artwork as a kind of physical residue of a physical activity that has taken place. I don’t try to hide the evidence of an artist at work – touch is important to me.

You do well to speak of it being about scale/relationship more than heroics. I had dreams of being the next Franz Kline or Motherwell or de Kooning – a big gestural guy – but soon found that I had a tendency to want to structure things more and tidy them up, to some extent. So I veered towards the Rothko and Newman side of the NY school, and with a touch of Mondrian thrown in, my work became much more about simplicity, solidity, scale and proportion than the grand gesture. I think that to this day relationship is key to everything I do. In fact that word could well summarise it all…

Brent: You have a penchant for travel, often for the more exotic places on this globe. You return home, go to the studio, and take out your notes… what are these notes?

Mel: I like to be completely immersed while I’m traveling—so this means not putting a frame/ lens/ color on paper between the experience and myself. Sometimes I take little snapshots with my phone, or quickly record video of small moments with my cheap camera. On this trip to Senegal I have three little videos I am happy with: one is walking on the road in a village by the welder’s stand. The welder likes to listen to Islamic music and blasts it on an old speaker (music and tools powered by a generator). So we are approaching this stand, walking behind our grandmother and a taxi is approaching from behind, sounding a sort of funny custom horn. It’s these strange moments, when layers of unrelated things that occur spontaneously, that characterize travel for me. I have no idea what will happen with these captured moments once I return…

“Brent: Pop, peek-a-boo, poking around, of color that is not of this world, though worldly set in architectural places that can eat up the logic of their interior. Indeed you have for lunch many of the preconceptions of the formal. Your sense of order of space and how you color it physical is full of humor often playing up to our own inquisitiveness, how we are likely to navigate – how we and our body often lurch into understanding looking for an easy registration, and what happens when this is not possible.

Henriette: Well, I have been poking around for a while hoping to make people aware of color and shape, and of non-existing space. In Joint I transformed a little area into something new and unexpected, joking around with color and shape while not knowing where it would lead – just having fun, and working through ways that would perhaps mislead the audience. I always trust myself to find the next step in the direction I am going, but this is also scary, I can tell you. But usually the work I’ve just completed hints to what is going to happen next, even if I’m not totally aware of it.

I like the idea of making something that nobody has seen before. Although I am aware that everything has been done already, it doesn’t matter. I am also aware that I’m working in a tradition, but that doesn’t matter either. Actually I think it’s a strength knowing that I am working in a tradition. There is a chance to break all the unspoken rules. And then you find out that what you have to do is invent new ones, your own rules, otherwise the work doesn’t work. And this is odd, and interesting, and matters…”

VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our third viewlist exhibition is conceived by New York painter Karen Schifano.

Bulletin Board: Inspiration Information*
Thoughts on Inspiration
Conceived by Karen Schifano

The word “inspire” (originally meaning “to infuse with breath”) is a verb, but can also transform itself into a noun or adjective. It’s very active, and yet also implies being receptive, even demands openness, a readiness to receive, and a sharpening of perception and awareness. From one thing, there is a direct connection to another thing, a kind of touch that is nurturing, rich and full of promise. Potential becomes realization; we wake up rejuvenated, re-energized, and ready for action.

This group of inspirational flotsam and jetsam from our homes and studios is incredibly varied, running the gamut from a poetic quote to the restoration of a house, from the image of a computer desktop to strips of colored tape on a wall. In some instances, there’s a surprising leap from the image seen here to the finished work, in others there is a clear and recognizable relationship. I hope that as you are intrigued by an image, you will click on it to reveal the caption or thoughts of the artist, and then go to the individual websites linked to each name. Through a dialogue about how the mysterious process of getting from A to B or even Z unfolds for each of us, new avenues of search can open up, and we can be re-inspired by this “Inspiration Information”.

* by Shuggie Otis

Participating Artists (left to right, row by row):

Stephen Maine | Richard Bottwin | Paul Corio

Joanne Mattera | Kevin Finklea | Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery

Linda Arts | Erik Saxon | Henry Brown

Rory MacArthur | Melanie Crader | Matthew Deleget

Daniel Argyle | Li-Trincere | Chris Ashley

Linda Francis | Sylan Lionni | Shinsuke Aso

Douglas Melini | Brent Hallard | Lynne Harlow

Guido Winkler | Michael Zahn | Karen Schifano

Lynne Eastaway | Daniel Göttin | Simon Ingram

Daniel Feingold

Installation view

thru July 25, 2009

Brent Hallard: Out of location, a thing found – wonders in ways that form a new thing, in a different location – this is generally how I sense your various projects working.

Patricia Zarate: It is my experience of a location or an object in a place that is important to me. I think that I’ve been concerned with taking an experience – a place in time, perception – a feeling or idea and translating or transforming that into a physical object. The installation I made at The Queens Museum in New York is an early example of how I translate my experiences into object. I was still working exclusively in black and white and the imagery was representational. At the time, I had been making 3 x 3 inch grid-drawings on paper, each cell had a drawing. It was very graphic and I wanted to somehow translate it into a larger space. I worked in my studio trying to figure out how and what I wanted. For the exhibition I used two adjoining walls, drawing a one row grid measuring 1 x 312 inches, each alternating one-inch cell had a drawing. The placement of the work was vital, from a distance it looked like a solid line, as the viewer came closer the imagery unfolded…

Works by Brent Hallard, Richard Roth, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog

Opens June 27, 2009

During July, ParisCONCRET presents work by three contemporary artists who push, gently, against the notion that painting is a strictly 2 dimensional proposition: Brent Hallard (au/jp), Richard Roth (us), Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog (nl).

Brent: Color scales, gray scales, drums, unwrapped columns, the feel of folds, all different measures of light that sometimes manifest as light ‘actually’, though all together register as interest in how things unfold, expose, and fold back – that draw attention to form while somewhat masquerading with it – Linda, what is the common thread that runs through your work?

Linda: Interesting that you refer to my work as folds, literal, or as a manner of speech—each way is interesting. For me everything I do leads back to light and space. What I am after is capturing a sense of space and how light naturally opens, informs, and suggests. When you concentrate on the one aspect [light] the other [space] becomes an irrevocable subject that needs attention. Each aspect involves the other, not altogether different from how we experience ‘real things’, or how nature informs. Actually the canvas itself stands in for a sort of space also. It’s a complex relation where you try to tie the two by engaging a process, sometimes ignoring one for the other. Looking for a reconciliation, accepting what is done, and further working through the given…in a manner. Eventually there exists a tension. The work, also, is as much about darkness as it is light.

At this point it’s probably quite important to mention that though my work may appear distant and concrete, or minimal, more or less the result of a mechanical process (especially when it’s photographed or digitally reproduced) -, this is not the case in reality! When it is reproduced the little irregularities in my work caused by hand and the under ground aren’t noticeable. And that’s a pity because it is a deliberate choice that they are seen. Human touch is allowed in my work, if not necessary. As I said: my work is about finding and combining opposites. This means that the tension between mechanical and handmade must also have its place, must be shown, to be felt and to have its indescribable effect…

Brent Hallard, Spa-t_kiss, 2009
Japanese acrylic resin on plastic paper,
mounted on layers (white-grey-white) of corrugated plastic

June 6 – July 5, 2009

IS projects is pleased to announce a new project entitled Kosmos, featuring a selection of work by artists working with light and space: Brent Hallard, Jose Heerkens, Gilbert Hsiao, Caroline de Lannoy, and Giles Ryder.

Lynne Harlow, Four Kicks, 2005
Pair of plexiglas boxes, 4 x 24 x 24 inches
 

Brent: What are you currently working on?

Lynne: I’m working the way I most like to, doing several different things at once. I have just completed a site-specific piece for a group show, I’m playing around with painted balsa wood strips that I’m gluing into shapes and, most significantly, I’m preparing for a collaborative project coming up this summer in Houston, TX. A terrific artist in Houston, Ariane Roesch, has organized the project and she has paired me with Brett Davidson, a writer currently living in Zurich. I’ve never collaborated with a writer before and it’s very good new territory for me. The current pieces continue to explore the question that’s central to how, and why, I work: how little is enough?…

Devin Powers, Untitled, 2008
Installati0n, enamel and latex on wall 

Brent: The structure of space, theoretical models such as n-space and the hyper-cube usually lose most of us even in adult life. However you had an interest in this as a child. How did this fascination arrive?

Devin: Well, I was no child prodigy. In fact, I was born dyslexic. I did not learn how to read until around the forth grade and it was a few more years till I could honestly say I was a fluent reader and several more before I became confident in writing. In an odd way, this deficit propelled me toward asking and thinking about big questions early on. My parents are well educated and impressed upon me the value of education not just as a method of upward mobility but for its own inherent value. I believed them. Books became these mysterious venerate objects to me that contained great secrets that everyone else had access to except me. I deeply wanted to read in order to gain access to this knowledge. I believed that there was some deep mystery I did not have the pass code to and I wanted to know it, I wanted to know everything. I remember fantasizing as a boy that if I had a superpower it would be the ability to instantly absorb and comprehend any book I had contact with. I pictured myself visiting the Harvard libraries and being immediately inundated by the immense tidal force of knowledge housed within its walls. I could not imagine any better power. Understanding was everything…

Read the complete interview

Brent Hallard: You have been working on areas of color; vertical or horizontal bands of either matte paint or gloss paint with sometimes both present in the one painting at the same time. The structure between two areas of color, you couldn’t really call it a line, though, well, in the material – a space where something stops and then something starts.

You have used aluminum supports for some time now. They sit well, both functioning as unadorned surface where paint can just glide over, and as a sheer and clean plane on which to see the color, the paint.

What brought you to use these supports? Do you do all the preparation yourself? If so could you tell what that entails to get something to sit on the wall, for paint to sit upon the support?

Kasarian Dane: I’ve been using aluminum since about 1996 or so. I discovered it as a painting support in graduate school at The Art Institute of Chicago. I was making these fairly reductive paintings on canvas and was really struggling with what to do with the sides of the canvas: do I paint the edges of the canvas? Do I tape the sides so they stay clean? Are the sides of the canvas with the paint build up an important index of the process or a distraction from what’s happening on the surface plane? How thick or thin should I make the stretcher? I tried a lot of different ideas with this, thick stretchers, thin stretchers, etc. and it was not satisfying. The sides of the canvas were always another plane to deal with in relationship to the surface plane, and I was just not interested in making paintings on the sides of my paintings…

April 28 – May 23, 2009

Since the late 1990s, Douglas Witmer’s paintings demonstrate an increasingly distilled sensibility related to surface and color. Intuitively combining simple geometric imagery, emphatic color, and subtle manipulation of the surface, his paintings are inquiries into the materiality of seeing, perception, feeling, and memory.

In a recently published interview with the Tokyo-based artist Brent Hallard, Witmer said, “I want the present moment of seeing to be charged with the possibility of some kind of change in the next present moment of seeing. I hope for that to activate the sense that you feel yourself seeing. I like to think of these moments as clear, pure, innocent, and solitary. And if you can get to them, then you have, in a way, started an experiential engine for yourself, and your thoughts can begin to move in uniquely personal directions.”

The exhibition title “Field + Stream” is taken from the popular hunting and fishing magazine, which the artist often saw as a young boy. This title acknowledges the influence of nature in Witmer’s paintings, and refers to the binary elements in his work: rectangles of dominant color set upon a cascading gray ground.

Brent: Of course the first impression I get with your collage work (we may as well start there) is that it rings Japanese: The color, the quirkiness, and freshness – the level and sense of reserve and adornment. Though that’s too simple. Quirkiness and perhaps freshness has been picked up, more fetishized, by western media, so we’ll leave that for a moment. And as you are not in Japan, and have settled in a different environment, I’m going to leave the Japanese thing aside as well – for the moment. Sensibilities, or where the work comes from probably will flow naturally without the need to make some grand cultural point.

That said, if I didn’t live here, I don’t know if I would have got the collage work that you do, as well as I think I do. Simply said I enjoy and feel it. It’s very much part of this culture’s fabric. Said from someone who is still coming to terms with what that fabric is. In the process, so to speak – never expecting to get there, of course, but open to the process.

I wouldn’t mind starting with ways of looking. And perhaps how you see something that interests you. How you pick that up, give it some attention, notice its qualities, what memory that triggers, its instance, and some of the more intriguing background operatives, how you are thinking when you move that into that position.

Shinsuke: I am interested in encountering activities and accidents that convert or flip over concepts, stereotypes and prejudices. As an artist, I am trying to create artwork that suggests to the audience several different points of view toward things and phenomena around them…

Richard Roth, Full Cleveland, 2007
Flashe on Birch plywood
11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches

Brent Hallard: It seems to me that no matter where you position yourself to take these paintings in there are always two states forthcoming, though perhaps not always on view at the same time. Separately these different moods evoke, for example in ‘Full Cleveland’ or ‘Happy Hour’, the carnival and serene. When the two states mesh, it’s generally considered that a third state arrives. Though in your paintings, Richard, the third state is already there, as a three-dimensional completed painting, something that we need to move around to see. In ‘Plywood Violin’ the mood swings are less obvious, perhaps operating more as object/surface/spatial disorientation—naughty austere.

Richard Roth: Mentioning “states” and “moods” is an interesting way to begin our discussion of paintings that are extremely abstract and highly reductive – and it pleases me. First of all, I do not consciously try to insert meaning into the paintings; though I am delighted that the paintings are seen as carriers of moods and that they contain such readings or multiple readings. I am interested in and draw ideas from a wide range of artifacts and disciplines such as product and package design, visual perception, nature, architecture, popular culture, custom cars, and fashion. As these influences interact with specific formal concerns, as well as my riffing on the three-dimensional structure of the support, it is hoped that a certain power/depth is achieved in the fusion. “Full Cleveland” for example, when viewed frontally, is a straightforward horizontal stripe configuration, but when informed by its side-view, the stripes become components of a dynamic red and white object that appears to be formed by extrusion. In the end, I expect the paintings to be open to anything, conceptually informal rather than formal – so, your observation of “Plywood Violin” – “naughty austere,” sits well with me. I much like this quotation by Vitaly Komar (on the work of Komar and Melamid) in relationship to my work and to painting in general: “Generally, art wavers between being closer to a book or closer to a rug – more conceptual or more decorative. Our work is somewhere in between. We try to make conceptual rugs.”…

Works by Leo Hurzlmeir, Richard Schur & Brent Hallard (l to r)

March 12 – May 2, 2009

Exhibiting artists: Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leo Hurzlmeir, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier 


Pharmaka is pleased to present “TRANS:formal” the Los Angeles manifestation in a series of traveling shows by nine artists from Germany, Japan and the United States who are all engaged in a dialogue about Abstraction in painting.

Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a dialogue between themselves and as a means to engage the viewer in this conversation.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference as well as the ways that the works align formally and conceptually. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic, timely exhibition.

Begun as a conversation between an artist living in Munich and another in San Francisco, this dialogue has evolved into a show of nine artists. Three of the artists live in Munich, Germany, one lives in Tokyo, Japan, four live in the San Francisco bay area, one in upstate New York.

The show first opened in Munich, Germany as TRANS: Abstraktion at Weltraum gallery in November 2007, and in November 2009 it will travel to San Francisco to the Meridian Gallery. Each show will have new work by each of the artists thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. The show provides a location for the artists to come together and converse. Many of the artists will be engaging in the artists talk at Pharmaka on March 14.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century with its awareness of history as well as the conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

Kasarian Dane uses highly colorful hard-edge painting to push a perception of the reductive. His vertical strips of color jerk and cajole the edges of the eye. In an elegantly calibrated and vibrant space, it appears nothing else is there: nothing else is needed. Born 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota; lives in upstate New York.

Stephan Fritsch is equally at home on and off the canvas. Referencing aspects of gestural painting, graffiti and architecture, he builds complex canvases and installations. His color instances, discovered in daily encounters, mingle with brushstrokes and create images that evoke unexpected and fresh associations. Born 1962 in Stuttgart, Germany; lives in Munich.

Brent Hallard’s work is full of contradictions: quirky and conventional, jarring and elegant, humorous and refined. Using plastics, vinyl, aluminum, painted tape and templates, he often imbues a singular minimalist shape with multi-possibilities, pushing a perceptual vision into a realm of irreconcilable illusion. Born in 1962 in Sydney, Australia; lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Leo Hurzlmeir’s paintings move between motifs of abstraction to figuration and narrative and are engaged in the materiality of paint itself. Within this realm of play, his work undergoes a highly personal process of abstraction that is always left open to associative readings. Born 1983 in Starnberg, Germany; lives in Munich

Robin McDonnell uses an abstract ‘process’ driven language to create a complex field of activity in her paintings. The intention is to create an opticality that is both engaging and immersive to the viewer without providing resolutions or answers, thus creating an open ended visual experience. Born 1955 in New York, NY; lives in Berkeley, California.

Mel Prest’s conceptual color drawings transform language into color and shape. With a systematic but open process, words derived from pop culture, the urban, and the everyday produce a precarious architectural space. In her paintings a dissonant palette of hand-painted lines evoke the optical effect of collapsing space creating perceptual puzzles. Born in 1969 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; lives in San Francisco, California.

Richard Schur combines rigorous visual enquiry with a knowing playfulness where amalgamations of marks break the dominance of the geometric. With a systematic and sensuous use of color, space in Schur’s paintings is both elusive and palpable.. Born 1971 in Munich, Germany; lives in Munich 
 


Nancy White orders geometric shapes with precision to intensify the instabilities of visual acuity. On hand pigmented grounds after-images emerge; forms can appear simultaneously flat and three-dimensional. Her frame paintings create an amplification of light and color. Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1947; lives in Redwood City, California.

John Zurier is highly attuned to and carefully considers the intrinsic characteristics of all his materials. His brushwork can be simultaneously expansive and restricted, formal and informal, lush and austere and always compels a closer, slower and longer look. In all his work an ethereal quality is evoked revealing the experience of seeing as something difficult and real. Born in Santa Monica, California in 1956; lives in Berkeley, California.

 
Brent: Kate, your pencil line drawings, either vertical lines or horizontal, always not the two together [?]: The framing device, the format and its edge seem to create the plus minus balance. How do you work on them? I noticed on your homepage that you had an image of quite a large one sitting flat on a bench top.

Kate: Shape is very intriguing to me and sets the scale for each piece, which is specific to each individual surface. All of the line work is in response to shape. When I first started making these, Brent, I spent a lot of tedious time drawing boxes – four connected lines – trying to perfect the exact size and shape within the surface before working the line. I was always at odds with my material because, you know, beautiful paper has an aspect of life in it; it’s not perfect. Trying to force a perfect line went against the nature of the material. This created a false tension on the drawing surface because the white space – the space not marked within the surface – is a critical component to the works, it’s not simply left out; empty. To get closer to my work, I have had to let go of creating these pre-shapes which has allowed a more natural relationship to transpire between the paper, and my hand. I think the resulting shape and scale is both more sensitive, and dynamic…

Installation view

January 17 – February 7, 2009

ParisCONCRET’s inaugural exhibition “Pour faire simple”.

Participating Artists:
Pam Aitken, Daniel Argyle, Roger Bensasson, Joel Besse, Sanne Bruggink, Carola Bark, Christoph Dahlhausen, Julian Dashper, Rene Eicke, Billy Gruner, Brent Hallard, Hiroshi Harada, Tony Harding, Jose Heerkens, Sarah Keighery, Irene Kivinen, Vaclav Krucek, Arjan Janssen, Kate Mackay, Aldo Mengolini, Simon Morris, Antoine Nelen, Roland Orepuk, Charles Payan, Jacek Przybyszewski, Paul Raguenes, Alexandra Roozen, Marlene Sarroff, Clary Stolte, Bogumila Strojna, John Tallman, Richard van der Aa, Iemke van Dijk, Jacques Weyer & Guido Winkler

View of Kevin Finklea’s studio, Philadelphia, PA

“Brent: Kevin, you sent a studio shot of your new pieces. I can see how they fit with the flatter paintings, and what this new wood and paint work is doing. You mentioned that these pieces come about much quicker. Have you been going through a process of redefining time in your work? Do you think that changes a lot of things? Or is it that you have just redefined time?

Kevin: The new works you see in the studio shot are essentially plywood and wood reliefs. I make them very quickly in an attempt to free myself from the often-laborious process of getting a painting surface prepped. I paint them rather quickly to maintain this spirit of freeing myself up in the studio. Here I’ll note I don’t see this as some fantasy of freedom on my part. I’d say being free is a completely romantic notion and there is no such thing: But I digress. Let me stay on point…”

December 12, 2008 – January 9, 2009

Also, be sure to catch a recent interview with Richard Schur:

Midnight Run: Interview with Richard Schur, by Brent Hallard, Visual Discrepancies blog

Douglas Witmer, How Soon Is Now?, 2008

Karen Schifano, Coming Soon, 2008
Oil on canvas, 37 x 48 inches