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

January 14 – February 26, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda Francis, Interference, 2010
Mixed media on wood
24 x 24 inches

November 12 – 26, 2011

Artists: Clary Stolte, Don Voisine, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog, José Heerkens, Kasarian Dane, Linda Francis, Mel Prest, Paul Pagk, Richard Schur.

A Romance of Many Dimensions is comprised of nine artists/painters who share at least two things: their work expands the idea of dimensionality past the exactitude of two and three- dimensional space, and, they have had all been interviewed by Brent Hallard. You can find the interviews posted online at Visual Discrepancies.

The title of the show comes from Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland — A Romance of Many Dimensions, who dedicates the book…

To The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL And H. C. IN PARTICULAR This Work is Dedicated
By a Humble Native of Flatland
In the Hope that
Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries
Of THREE Dimensions
Having been previously conversant
With ONLY TWO
So the Citizens of that Celestial Region
May aspire yet higher and higher
To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions
Thereby contributing
To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION
And the possible Development
Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY
Among the Superior Races
Of SOLID HUMANITY

What better sentiments come to mind than this to suggest the tenets of a reductive visual practice… the enlargement of the imagination, the development of that rare and excellent gift of modesty?

Like the novella, the paintings in “A Romance…” do not provide an axiom for the existence of higher dimensions into other worlds. That’s something a mathematician or physicist might be able to do better. Rather, the works in this exhibition attend to the flat — surfaces, shapes and color — as if in defiance of the existence of the dimensional world that they inhabit.

The experience of a painting, noting that the term painting here can be applied rather loosely, is primarily phenomenological. Yet just as a line or shape can suggest an aspect of the recognizable as a response to the world around us, shapes also go on to form recognizable things, and, as such link the three-dimensional experience of supports and canvases as they protrude from the wall.

While early abstraction had its interest in non-Euclidian geometry, the fourth dimension and the idea of time and motion as a perceived illusion, artists such Mondrian and Malevich clearly worked with the phenomenal world that they were in. Their mature paintings generally had a top and a bottom, not of sky and sea, but in correspondence to the way the body responds to the environment. And if some of this early experimentation appears to be gravity free, on closer inspection it becomes clear that a bodily response to gravity is there expressed through a modesty of means.

The artists in the show all work with visual dialects, understanding that line is connected to form, that object is connected to color and line, that our participation informs and blends all this, and the relationships formed hereafter are very much about our connectivity, be-coming aware of another sensual realm that may have no physical location. It is here that the artist romances, bringing together relationships, for the viewer to experience and wonder about.

A Romance of Many Dimensions is curated by Brent Hallard.

ABOUT BROOKLYN ARTISTS GYM
BAG is gallery and artists’ studio facility in the Park Slope/Gowanus area of Brooklyn, NY. BAG’s mission is to help make it possible for artists to further their work and careers at a reasonable cost. Started five years ago, BAG also offers classes, critiques, figure drawing, library, wifi, kitchenette and all studio facilities.

November 3-27, 2011

American Abstract Artists presents ABSTRACTION (Abstraction to the Power of Infinity), curated by Janet Kurnatowski. ABSTRACTION celebrates the perseverance of non-figurative and non-objective art, including the practitioners, pioneers and those currently working in the traditions of abstraction. This exhibition shows the recent work of 76 members of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), along with four guest exhibitors. The works exhibited span a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and digital computer art; vividly communicating with color, line, form and texture.

As one of the few artists’ organizations born of the Great Depression, the AAA was a pivotal force in the development and acceptance of abstract art in the US. The group’s continued vitality after 75 years is a testament to the power and reach of these non-objective art forms and points to an infinite future for abstraction…This exhibition is also a tribute to Will Barnet, an esteemed member of the AAA since 1954
and also the AAA’s first centenarian.

The artists included in the exhibition are:
Alice Adams, Steven Alexander*, Eve Aschheim, Martin Ball, Will Barnet, Dennis Beach*, Siri Berg, Emily Berger, Power Boothe, Susan Bonfils, Sharon Brant, Henry Brown, Marvin Brown, Kenneth Bushnell, James O. Clark, Mark Dagley, Matthew Deleget, Tom Doyle, Tom Evans, Gabriele Evertz, Kevin Finklea*, Heidi Glück, Vito Giacalone, John Goodyear, Gail Gregg, James Gross, Lynne Harlow, Mara Held, Daniel G. Hill, Charles Hinman, Gilbert Hsiao, Phillis Ideal, Julian Jackson, Roger Jorgensen, James Juszczyk, Cecily Kahn, Steve Karlik, Marthe Keller, Victor Kord, Irene Lawrence, Mon Levinson, James Little, Jane Logemann, Vincent Longo, Katinka Mann, Nancy Manter, Stephen Maine, Rossana Martinez, David MacKenzie, Creighton Michael, Manfred Mohr, Judith Murray, Sharyn O’Mara*, John Phillips, Corey Postiglione, Joan Webster Price, Raquel Rabinovich, Leo Rabkin, Ce Roser, Irene Rousseau, David Row, James Seawright, Edward Shalala, Babe Shapiro, Louis Silverstein, Robert Storr, Peter Stroud, Robert Swain, Richard Timperio, Clover Vail, Vera Vasek, Don Voisine, Merrill Wagner, Joan Waltemath, Stephen Westfall, Mark Williams, Jeanne Wilkinson, Thornton Willis, Kes Zapkus, Nola Zirin

Exhibition curator Janet Kurnatowsk is the owner and director of Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Since opening its doors in 2004, the gallery has maintained a strong focus on showing abstract art from emerging talent as well as mid-career and established artists. Special thanks to The Golden Rule Foundation for making this exhibition possible.

Work by Tilman, from the “Animation” series

September 18 – October 3o, 2011

IS Projects presents the exhibition “Schnittstellen,” featuring the work of Tilman, Edgar Diehl, Andrew Leslie, and Don Voisine.

Don Christensen, Tip, Top, 2009
Oil on canvas
55 x 77 inches

June 23 – August 19, 2011

Curated by Stephen Westfall: Rachel Beach, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Nicholas Krushenick, John McLaughlin, Jackie Meier, Tom Raggio, Jennifer Riley, Don Voisine, and Stephen Westfall.

Gilbert Hsiao, Dual, 2007
Acrylic on panel
32 x 32 inches

May 21 – July 15, 2011

Participating Artists:
Alice Adams, Babe Shapiro, Ce Roser, Cecily Kahn, Charles Hinman, Clover Vail, Corey Postiglione, Creighton Michael, Daniel G. Hill, David Mackenzie, David Reed, David Row, Don Voisine, Dorothea Rockburne, Edward Shalala, Emily Berger, Gabriele Evertz, Gail Gregg, Gilbert Hsiao, Heidi Gluck, Henry Brown, Irene Lawrence, Irene Rousseau, James Gross, James Juszczyk, James O. Clark, James Seawright, Jane Logemann, Jeanne Wilkinson, Joan Waltemath, Joan Webster Price, John Goodyear, John Obuck, John Pai, John T. Phillips, Judith Murray, Julian Jackson, Katinka Mann, Kenneth Bushnell, Kes Zapkus, Leo Rabkin, Louis Silverstein, Lucio Pozzi, Lynne Harlow, Manfred Mohr, Mara Held, Mark Dagley, Mark Williams, Marthe Keller, Martin Ball, Mary Obering, Merrill Wagner, Mon Levinson, Nancy Manter, Nola Zirin, Peter Stroud, Phillis Ideal, Raquel Rabinovich, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Richard Pugliese, Richard Stone, Richard Timperio, Robert Swain, Sharon Brant, Siri Berg, Stephen Maine, Stephen Westfall, Steve Karlik, Susan Bonfils, Thornton Willis, Tom Doyle, Tom Evans, Vera Vasek, Victor Kord, Vincent Longo, Vito Giacalone, Will Barnet

Don Voisine, Cross Purpose, 2011
Oil on wood
30 x 22 inches

May 5 – June 11, 2011

McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Don Voisine, his second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens Thursday, May 5th with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs through Saturday, June 11, 2011.

Voisine paints in oil on wood in a reductive, hard-edged manner within a consistent format: solid bands of rich, bright color of varying width are set either top and bottom or left and right and enclose overlapping fields of black against a white or near-white field. The black fields are rectilinear in form and are articulated one from another by the use of matte versus gloss finish, as well as by directional brushwork. The black planes are sometimes set in a grid, but more often are set at angles to one another, for example, as overlapping X shapes, or a square set against a parallelogram. In Voisine’s new
work, the angles have become more complicated, and the artist intentionally disrupts the logic of the lines and planes as the eye travels from one side of the painting to the other. Subtle internal rhythms emerge: at times the black fields have a free-floating quality and give an impression of movement within deep space; in other works the matte versus glossy fields engage in a subtle pulsation, while in others the space is shallow and planar, punctuated by small diamond shapes or triangular cuts that pierce the intensity of the black void. Offsetting the weight of the black planes are narrow strips of additional color that counterbalance both the dark areas and the borders, and provide movement and punctuation within the composition. In these new paintings the outer color bands are more saturated, with deeper tonalities than previously, and the paintings are executed with a taut precision and clarity throughout. Regardless of scale, Voisine’s paintings feel monumental and self-contained, straightforward but never austere, subtly nuanced and sophisticated. The artist achieves a remarkable diversity within a restricted format which nevertheless has seemingly endless possibilities for variation and exploration.

Voisine has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally for over three decades. Recent showings include group exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational in New York, the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Maine, and numerous solo and group gallery exhibitions from San Francisco to Berlin. He is president of the American Abstract Artists, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.

Studio view

March 26 – April 30, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don Voisine, Tricoteuse, 2010
Oil on wood
17 x 18 inches

January 6 – February 12, 2011

This is the fourth January group exhibition in a series focusing on aspects of abstraction. In this instance, it is an examination of the use of planarity in painting, sculpture, and photography. Work in the exhibition ranges from deceptively simple, geometric work that consciously embraces the flatness of the picture plane, to those using complex interactions of planar forms to construct the illusion of depth, volume, and movement.

Kim MacConnel’s exuberantly colored enamel paintings use simple diamond, ovoid, and rectangular forms to create a joyful internal cadence. Joanne Mattera creates reductive yet richly colored and textured near-monochromes built up of layers of encaustic, and Steven Alexander layers colors into textured fields activated with centralized, multi-colored rectangular shapes, echoing the planar field of the painting. Don Voisine, Karen Schifano, and Brent Hallard all employ a reductive palette and strong rectilinear forms in taut and precise compositions that reference architecture but also set up internal rhythms of alternating geometries and shifting spatial depth.

The industrially inspired, complex painting of Dannielle Tegeder, with planar forms set at oblique angles, uses the interaction of planar elements to impart a sensation of deep space. Reed Danziger’s work employs prismatic volumes intersecting with both linear and biomorphic forms to suggest movement within an abstract landscape. Sara Eichner’s planar grids of intersecting hexagonal fields simultaneously impart a sense of movement and the suggestion of infinite space. Ion Zupcu uses multiple exposures in his black-and-white photographs of simply painted cubes to build up dimensional illusion, generating planar layers that seem to pulsate.

The exploration of depth is continued into the spatial realm. Don Christensen’s wall-mounted sculpture of found furniture painted with geometric shapes playfully pushes the flatness of painting into three-dimensions. Heather Hutchison creates simple forms from bent acrylic sheets articulated with crisp bands of color to achieve a similar end through more reductive means, while exploiting the translucency of the material to elegant effect. Tilman’s large floor sculpture, constructed from layered, tilting stacks of monochromatically painted board, gives the impression of a painting that has been taken apart or perhaps in the process of being assembled.

Installation view

thru October 23, 2010

“I’ve chosen artists’ work that I feel share something of a fetish with/in the production/object, particularly based on an aesthetic predisposition that can run formally, culturally, adding the social/personal. How I personally interpret this is with a Tokyo sensibility, how Japanese respond to objects and their placement, their positioned sense of worth, a cuteness, an austere vs. touch. The exhibition consists of individual pieces, multiples, or artists books, which may sit on the wall, or on shelves within the grid, mixing up the idea of ‘art object’, ‘art multiple’, and/or simply as a ‘monogram’ [a copy record of the art/practice] to bring together a whole presentation, inviting communication and contact. And that, in a nutshell, is touch.” –Brent Hallard, Oct. 2010

These things that may sit on the wall, on a table, draw attention not only unto themselves but also in proximity, of ideas, of soothers and disquietude: two grids on tangential walls, another formed by a mass of white, tabletops bunched together, anticipate a social meeting of sorts, like-minded, or in location disparity, objects intertwine ideas, engage an audience that may lead them, us, to a precipice of the inexorable… a spree, a want, desire, an enchanted moment with what is there, a champagne bubble, a twist of color, an abstract motif turned clock tower, some things something suggested… other times not… shiny surfaces, bars of color, dingle dangles that pull on the psychological purse, strings… these but a few of my favorite things… Touch is a meeting place, not always bound by the physical, though often unleashed via the temporal… a get-together, a conversation, where we can touch.

Participating Artists:
Shinsuke Aso, Kasarian Dane, Brent Hallard, Lynne Harlow, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog, IS projects, Linn Meyers, Mel Prest, Karen Schifano, Jessica Snow, Clary Stolte, Hadi Tabatabai, Cecilia Vissers, Don Voisine, Nancy White, Patricia Zarate

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

August 1-22, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Henry Ramirez, BLACKOUT (installation view), 2010
Mural, paintings, relief, furniture & lighting
A Centennial Commission, Newark Museum, NJ
Photograph by Raymond Adams

Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Reception 6-7pm, Program 7-8pm

Free, pre-registration required.
Call 973.596.6550 or e-mail: rsvp@newarkmuseum.org

Newark Museum
Billy Johnson Auditorium
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.newarkmuseum.org
directions

Matthew Deleget will moderate a discussion with an international group of contemporary artists including Lenora de Barros, Paul Henry Ramirez and Don Voisine. The artists will talk about the legacy of constructivist abstract art as it relates to their work and explore why abstraction continues to be a vital mode of expression.

This panel discussion is presented in honor of Elizabeth Brady Richards.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract artist, curator and writer. He is the director of MINUS SPACE, a gallery and web site project devoted to reductive art in Brooklyn, New York.

Lenora de Barros is a poet and visual artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, whose work includes video, poetic performance, photography and sound installation. Having exhibited throughout Brazil and abroad, she is interested in exploring the abstract visual, aural and material signs of language.

Paul Henry Ramirez is a US artist noted for his signature style of fleshy and pop-inspired abstraction. BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation in which he has transformed the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court with abstract, biomorphic forms and playful, bold color.

Don Voisine is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn, New York. President of the New York-based American Abstract Artists group that was founded in 1936, he works with a visual vocabulary of pared-down geometric form to explore the possibilities of visual space within abstraction.

RELATED EXHIBITIONS
On view through 05.23.2010

Constructive Spirit
Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s – 50s
Constructive Spirit investigates the formative geometric abstract art movements of Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. This exhibition is the first to explore the conceptual connections and exchanges that existed between abstract artists from South and North America. Featured are more than 90 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films drawn from the collection of the Newark Museum, along with loans from public and private collections and galleries across both continents. Artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Alejandro Otero, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

BLACKOUT
A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation that allows viewers to experience painting as an environment that one can enter. Using the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court as his canvas, Ramirez employs his signature curvaceous biomorphic forms amidst a profusion of pop-inspired colors in dialogue with the Court’s distinctive Beaux-Arts architecture. BLACKOUT is the fourth and final commissioned project initiated to celebrate the Museum’s Centennial year.

For more information, please visit www.newarkmuseum.org.

Work by Lawrence Keny

March 17 – April 10, 2010

Gallery 128 is presents the exhibition, “Geometric Themes & Variations”, curated by the painter Gloria Klein. Klein’s idea and intention was to invite artists who work within a geometric format using different materials. Geometric Abstraction remains fresh, visually pleasing and conceptually challenging.

The artists were invited from Ms Klein’s past and present contacts and longtime friendships, so the exhibition is as much personal as it is thematic. Exhibitors Clark Richert, Richard Kallweit, Charles DiJulio and Fred Worden are the originators of Criss-Cross, a Colorado-based artists cooperative which was formed in the 1970’s. Klein and George Woodman, friends of Criss-Cross, showed quite often with this group.

Richard Kalina, represented by Lennon, Weinberg, and Betty Woodman, represented by Max Protech, participated in Pattern & Decoration exhibitions in the early seventies.

Kazuko, the director of Gallery 128, introduced Lawrence Kenny, Michael Ottersen and April Vollmer to Gloria Klein.

Joanne Mattera recommended Steven Alexander. Both Mattera and Alexander are part of Geoform, an international online curatorial project dedicated to geometric structure in contemporary geometric art, edited by Julie Karabenick. Michael Knutson, Scott Malbaurn, Bruce Pollock, Richard Bottwin and Gloria Klein are also represented here. Edward Shalala and Don Voisine are members of American Abstract Artists.

Together these 20 artists represent a cross section and continuum of the expression of geometric form in two and three dimensions, from mathematically conceived and rigorously rendered compositions to a looser, more intuitive approach to line, angle and curve.

Don Voisine, Untitled (XX), 2010
Oil on Paper, 4 x 6 inches
Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art, NYC

Curated by James Carroll of the New Arts Program, this three venue survey will feature Don Voisine’s work from 1988 to the present. Northampton Community College will showcase work from 1988 to 2006, in particular paintings on canvas and wood. Reading Area Community College will feature paintings on styrofoam and prints, as well as one diamond shaped painting. The New Arts Program will feature recent work.

Northampton Community College
Bethlehem, PA
March 1-31, 2010

Reading Area Community College
Reading, PA
March 1-31, 2010

New Arts Program
Kutztown, PA
March 19 – May 1, 2010

Kenneth Noland staining ‘Horizontal Stripe’
paper piece at the paper mill
Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, NY, 1978
Photographer: Lindsay Green

“I’ve followed other artists gratefully and I hope I’ve also followed my own path….sometimes along side other artists. I’ve also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist. I love art and I love the life of art and I only wish that the real life of art could affect social change in a good way and that the invasion of commercialism in art and the invasion of entertainment into all areas of our lives hadn’t brought some of the worst features of our culture into the realm of art.

—Kenneth Noland
“The Bennington Years” symposium, University of Hartford, March, 1988

I heard of Kenneth Noland’s death through a text message from my friend and fellow painter Don Voisine: Kenneth Noland RIP. This isn’t the sort of thing artists kid about, not Don’s idea of a practical joke; still, I clung to a small shred of doubt. Moments later, I googled Don’s exact words and found that Noland had indeed passed away. Well, I figured, at least he made it to his 85th year. Not a bad run, not a bad run at all. But it’s difficult to fathom: one of the last great colorists of the 20th century is no more…”

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…”

Don Voisine, Seven-Zip, 2009
Oil on wood, 30 x 22 inches

November 4 – December 23, 2009

Gregory Lind Gallery presents a series of oil paintings on wood by New York artist Don Voisine, whose work is defined by its exceptional nuance, sophistication, and reductive visual aesthetic. Distinctively architectural in style, Voisine’s pieces consist of central expanses of overlapping rectangles or squares painted in black and set against white fields. These hard-edged forms are bordered top and bottom or left and right by vibrant bands of contrasting colors of varying width. While the surfaces of his pieces are smooth, they are also not entirely uniform, as the interplay between transparency and opacity manufactured by the variance of paint density is always at work with his visual planes.

Voisine’s pictorial planes connote a meditative self-containment that renders Voisine’s images almost sculptural and object-like. His aesthetic lexicon is one that is both formal and rigorous with its adherence to strict geometries, but it is also deeply refined and meditative in its evocation of empty or deep space, as well as movement. Voisine’s works are unvarnished and rectangular or square in shape, while the shapes within the paintings are also rectangular, square or rhombi. The works are composed on flat surfaces that offer no traditional perspective, thereby creating the illusion of endless depth. Despite Voisine’s restricted palette and compositional consistency, his work evinces an enormous amount of freedom within constraints, in facets such as weight, tone (in working with varying grades of color, such as matte charcoal black, deeper carbon black, and shinier black surfaces), direction, and spatial illusion.

Don Voisine attended the Portland School of Art and Concept Center for Visual Studies in Portland, ME. He received an honorary BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2000. His recent exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art, New York; Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, ME; and Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY. His recent group exhibitions include “New From Hamburg, New York, Berlin,” pp projects, Hamburg, Germany; “Planes of Abstraction,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; “Escape from New York,” Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; and “Minus Space,” P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY. His work has been written about in The New York Times, Village Voice, and Chicago Tribune. Collections include Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museum, VA. He lives and works in New York.

November 6, 2009 – January 29, 2010

Participating Artists: Rolf Rose, Don Voisine and Susanne Jung.

Don Voisine, Buzz, 2009
Oil on wood
17 × 17 inches

“A week after the opening of his exhibit of a new group of paintings, which will be on view at McKenzie Fine Art Inc, located at 511 West 25th Street, till June 6, 2009, the painter Don Voisine visited the Rail’s Headquarters to talk with Assistant Art Editor Ben La Rocco, and contributing writer Craig Olson about his life and work.

Ben La Rocco: Lets talk about your early life in Maine.

Don Voisine: I was born in Fort Kent, Maine in 1952. Fort Kent is a northern border town on the western-most edge of New Brunswick just 10 miles from the Quebec border. The majority of townspeople are of Acadian descent and speak French, the principal industry is potato farming and lumbering. My father died when I was three and my mother never remarried. She worked two jobs to support and raise three kids. From the time we were ten we also worked part time and after school…”