George Ortman’s painted constructions of the 1950s and early 1960s are pioneering works. Their reductive geometry and modular color were widely seen as being at the forefront of young artists move away from abstract expressionism.
Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY
A key figure of the Paris avant-garde in the 1950s and ’60s, Jesús Soto (1923–2005) is widely recognized for his groundbreaking innovations in color theory, serial composition, and movement in art. Less well-known is the wide range of styles and mediums that he explored early on. Drawing inspiration from optics and serial music, Soto employed repeating geometric forms and superimposed surfaces to convey a sense of physical displacement.
Ellsworth Kelly: Black and White, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany
Ellsworth Kelly is among the most important protagonists of colour field painting. His paintings, in large format for the most part and consisting usually of several panels, are an impressive interplay of form, colour and space.
Karlos Cárcamo: Till the Break of Dawn, Dean Project, New York, NY
Karlos Cárcamo, Hard Edge Painting (Stan 153), 2011 Latex and enamel paint on canvas over panel 48 x 48 inches April 7 – May 14, 2011 “Combining my interest in urban culture and art history I navigate toward making work that is in constant dialog with each other. Through the use of high and low cultural iconography and art historical references I create a working space between both cultural identities in which samples could be [...]
Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection, Temporary Stedelijk 2, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Installation view. Opens March 3, 2011 Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection explores how a museum collection constructs and embodies histories to be reconsidered over time, offering various views into the museum’s own history and its collections right up to the present day, through monographic installations of individual works or bodies of work by key artists and designers, thematic surveys, archival research projects, special projects and recent acquisitions. The exhibition showcases the breadth of [...]
Malevich and the American Legacy, Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY
Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915 Oil on canvas 26 x 17 inches March 2 – April 30, 2011 I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic Art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature. –Kazimir [...]
John Zinsser: New and Earlier Painting and New Auction Catalogue Drawings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
John Zinsser, Geometry and Ego, 2007 Enamel and oil on canvas 30 x 28 inches December 18, 2010 – February 12, 2011 Get Me to the Church on Time It was a simple enough assignment, drive the painter Marcia Hafif to her opening at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. What I couldn’t have predicted was that a massive wreck on I-95 would shut down the highway completely. The trip became a seven-and-a-half hour odyssey, [...]
Shape Language, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY
Installation view June 22 – July 31, 2010 Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery presents Shape Language, a group exhibition organized by Natalie Campbell.The works on view rethink the basics of color and form while treading the line between what is inside and outside a formal vocabulary. The starting point for the exhibition is Blinky Palermo’s Graue Scheibe from 1970, in which form attains a precarious autonomy: an irregular lozenge of shaped noncolor, floating (almost) freely on the [...]
Formal 2010: Jose Heerkens & Cecilia Vissers, Waterland Museum, Purmerend, The Netherlands
(left) Cecilia Vissers, Blacksod Bay, 2010 Steel, 2 x 95 x 93 x 0.8 cm (photo Peter Cox) (right) Jose Heerkens, Written Colours II, 2010 Oil paint on linen, 150 x 200 cm (photo Willem Kuijpers) May 20 – July 25, 2010 As in previous years, the Waterland Museum is organising an exhibition on current forms of concrete art. This time we present works by two female artists, both of whom have a strong affinity [...]
Gardar Eide Einarsson: Power Has a Fragrance, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway
Installation view May 6 – August 15, 2010 We are proud to present the first major museum exhibition of the young Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson (b. 1976). For several years Einarsson’s art has been subject to a major international attention, and with his characteristic works Einarsson has developed into one of today’s most notable, young artists from the Nordic countries. The dual theme of authority and rebellion is a point of departure for Einarsson’s [...]
Panel Discussion: Abstract Art, A Living Legacy, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
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 [...]
Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
February 17 – May 23, 2010 The first exhibition to bring together South American and US geometric abstraction, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s features more than 90 works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. Constructive Spirit examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, [...]
Jan van der Ploeg: Good & Plenty, Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jan van der Ploeg, Wall Painting No.273 Grip, 2009 Acrylic on wall, 560 x 1400 cm November 7 – December 19, 2009 JAN VAN DER PLOEG “And yet Giotto succeeded. He could make the local and particular stand for universal ideas.” – Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920) “The purpose of good design is to ornament existence, not to substitute it.” – George Nelson, Good Design: What is it for? Problems of Design (1957) “Q: [...]
Tilman: House of Colors, L’Atelier Soardi, Nice, France
Installation view June 27 – September 26, 2009 Freestyle or The art of surfing the abstract wave Tilman’s latest monochromes, whether one-off or in series, have an askew look to them; they would appear to have broken with geometric abstraction, with the purism of primary colours and with self-reference. While there is a hint of the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, in fact the syncopated silhouettes and acid tones of these Freeforms spontaneously evoke the [...]
Tony Delap: Modern Times, Royale Projects, Indian Wells, CA
Tony Delap, Modern Times III, 1966 Wood, fiberglas and lacquer, 32 x 84 x 38 inches March 7 – April 4, 2009 Pushing the edges, often literally, of his primary disciplines, artist Tony DeLap has dedicated close to half a century to exploring the seam between sculpture and painting, merging the boarders of architecture, design and art, reducing to the most basic expression of form, shape, scale and color, while remaining devoted to the [...]
Ellsworth Kelly exhibitions, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY
Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Blue Relief, 2008 Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 80 x 80 inches Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1957 Ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches February 5 – April 11, 2009 Matthew Marks announces two exhibitions by Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal. Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal The exhibition features eight two-panel paintings from 2007 and 2008, on view in the 22nd Street gallery. Each consists of a black or white rectangle with a contrasting [...]
Thomas Kalthoff, MOT International, London, United Kingdom
January 10 – February 15, 2009 MOT International founder Chris Hammond interviews artist Thomas Kalthoff. “One cold April afternoon in Cologne I spent a few hours at the studio of an artist I had recently been introduced to. We drank coffee and ate large slabs of gateau whilst discussing painting, Palermo and the Cologne scene in the 1980’s and 90’s. All the while I was flicking through a large pile of photographs of the [...]
Plastic Fantastic Formalism: Mark Dagley, by Nora Griffin
Here we are far from the living-room and close to science-fiction Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication” Your aluminum finish slightly diminished is the best I ever have seen Jefferson Airplane, “Plastic Fantastic Lover” In 1987, the year Mark Dagley’s paintings currently on view at Minus Space were first exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, abstract painting was exploring its newfound relationship to the digital age. The hard-edge lines and shapes that had been a mainstay [...]
Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950-Today, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Purchase on Amazon.com March 2 — May 12, 2008 Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol’s [...]
The Complexity of the Simple, L&M Arts, New York, NY
Installation view December 1, 2007 — January 31, 2008 L&M Arts presents The Complexity of the Simple, an exhibition of more than twenty important works by twenty artists of international renown. The show demonstrates the broad range open to a systematic abstraction viewed over nearly five decades. Artists represented include such mid-century masters as Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, and also critical figures of more recent date such as Felix [...]
Fall Exhibition Highlights, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Lines, Grids, Stains, Words thru October 22, 2007 Lines, Grids, Stains, Words presents drawings from the 1960s to the present that conflate the simple and seemingly impersonal formal and compositional vocabularies of Minimal art with references to the physical and the bodily. Concerned with issues of scale and perception rather than content, Minimal art often utilizes industrial fabrication techniques and materials, and its hallmark compositional strategies include straight lines and geometric forms organized [...]
Small Differences Make All the Difference, by Lynne Harlow
In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions. Why abstract art? What is abstract art good for? These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar. It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work. They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we [...]
Interview with Steve Karlik, by Chris Ashley
introduction Steve Karlik’s paintings are formally refined yet generous in spirit, grounded in materials yet spatial and open. His work is that of a serious painter, at first seeming almost severe, yet with time revealing itself as sensual, emotional, and beautiful. A thoughtful viewer will find that his reductive forms can resonate with one’s memory, references, and experiences; the associations one makes with his work are varied and surprising. The paintings involve our eyes, minds, [...]
Interview with Harmut Böhm, by Matthew Deleget
Hartmut Böhm, Quadratrelief 32, 1968 Plexiglas, 127 x 127 x 5.5 cm Peter C. Ruppert Collection Museum im Kultur-speicher, Würzburg, Germany The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004 in conjunction with Hartmut Böhm’s spotlight exhibition. Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview – your first published in English – with a brief discussion of the art climate in Germany directly following World War II. You were born in Kassel, [...]
