Daniel Levine, Buttercup, 2003-2004

May 15, 2010 – June 26, 2010

Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce an exhibition of monochrome paintings by Daniel Levine. Since 1990, Levine has created groups of closed-system paintings that embrace the following elements: off-square painting supports of modest scale and varying depths, small borders to amplify the paintings’ complex surfaces, a variety of media (oil, gouache, flashe), and a palette of primary colors. The works in this show, while continuing Levine’s long-standing interest in surface, light, and painterly materials, expand upon this working process in the exploration of open-system paintings.

Using subtle gradations, Levine slowly builds up layers of white and yellow paint, creating complex painterly surfaces. These works reveal themselves over time and from various vantage points, offering the subtle beauty of paint imbedded in an archeology of brushstrokes. Light – especially natural light – is a completing factor in seeing and understanding the paintings. Also, since these works are created over a number of years and the process is documented on the verso of each piece, they are a kind of discrete, personal history of a painting.

Daniel Levine has exhibited in Europe and the United States since 1984 and was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. His work is represented in the Panza Collection, Italy, The Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and private collections in Europe and the United States. He lives and works in New York City.

January 23 – February 27, 2010

Dirk Rathke creates objects with painterly materials – wooden frames, canvas and paint – that go beyond the scope of the genre. This Berlin-based artist is part of a young generation that has developed fresh approaches to painting and has distinctive solutions in the geometric-abstract tradition. The relationship between line, area, space and movement is the main emphasis in Dirk Rathke’s artistic exploration.

With his room drawings, Rathke explores the dialectical conflict between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional space. The same tension exists in his paintings. Exploiting the spatial potential in the surface of the canvas, Rathke zestfully bends, shifts and twists them out of axis.

Dieter Balzer, Konjunktion, lin., 2009
Mdf, foil, approx. 150 x 50 x 4 cm

November 7, 2009 – January 2, 2010

September 12 – October 31, 2009

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

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

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

Installation view

May 16 – July 4, 2009

Gallery Sonja Roesch presents an exhibition featuring work by Dutch artist Jan van der Ploeg. The exhibition will open May 16 and close on July 4, 2009.

Jan van der Ploeg is interested in the relationship between art and the public sphere. He constructs site-specific wall painting installations, both indoors and outdoors, that react with the surrounding architecture and atmosphere. The paintings represent a series of abstract forms that are repeated throughout his work, like the “Grip” and the “Wave”. The “grip” is a horizontal, long rectangle with rounded corners, derived from the hand-holes in the cardboard boxes used for removals. Attracted to repetition, his work relates painting, sculpture, system, and seriality.

The scale of these wall-size, and even building-size, installations consider not only the architectural surroundings but also the viewer’s participation. The designs are painted with an un-textured surface using black, white and other contrasting color shades. Depth of field is created through size and placement. His attention to scale is very important, especially in relationship to his paintings on canvas. Though physically smaller, they have a large presence due to the sense that their design could extend beyond the edges of the canvas.

Jan van der Ploeg, born 1959 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has exhibited his work extensively throughout Europe as well as the United States. He is also the co-founder of PS Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Amsterdam.

Installation views

January 17 – February 28, 2009

Gallery Sonja Roesch presents Accrochage, a group exhibition with nine artists explorin different approaches to reductive art. The exhibitions features work by Soledad Arias, Matthew Deleget, Daniel Levine, Rossana Martinez, Ruth Pastine, Mario Reis, David Simpson, Hills Snyder, and Tilman

Through using different materials and procedures, these nine artists demonstrate a variety of approaches towards reductive and concept based art. The pieces are either painted, constructed, or using found materials and even though they are reduced to the essentials, the results vary drastically. 

Ruth Pastine uses tiny brush strokes with oil paint to build up the layers of the painting in an almost meditative, obsessive way to achieve a glowing luminosity. Hills Snyder’s conceptual site-specific placed pieces are constructed with colored plexiglass that simply use the outline or shape to communicate a reference to the viewer. Mario Reis submerges the canvas into the river, which then collects the natural pigments and sediments and the movement from the river. Matthew Deleget’s piece ‘I love you’ is made up of found colored plastic bags, which represent the color names citation in a Beatles song.

November 8 – December 27, 2008

September 13 — November 1, 2008

Right on the heels of Hurricane Ike, Gallery Sonja Roesch presents an exhibition featuring work by New York City-based artist John Clement. Starting with a coil of spiraling bent steel pipes, Clement diligently, but playfully, cuts, bends, joins, and welds the pipes into different interweaving and interconnecting arrangements. At once an ordinary industrial material is transformed into a whimsical and monumental line drawing in space. The curved form is classical and, though made out of a man-made material, organic. Gravity defying in appearance, these sculptures are grounded both physically and traditionally. Referencing time and space, John Clement’s sculptures are painted in vibrant, primary colors creating a child-like playfulness in a world filled with imagination, hope and potential. Despite the large scale and solidity of his medium, Clement’s work celebrates the joy of movement and the rediscovery of space while altering our view of the surrounding landscape.

Drawings by Susanne Ackermann & Rossana Martinez (left to right)

July 12 — August 30, 2008

Gallery Sonja Roesch presents the exhibition Sequence, featuring work by Susanne Ackermann (Karlsruhe, Germany) and Rossana Martinez (Brooklyn, NY). The line, a basic mark-making gesture, transforms itself when repeated. It is through the layering and repetition, or sequence, of a line that shape, form, and depth are achieved. Both Susanne Ackermann and Rossana Martinez explore the line in a non-representational, expressive, and almost meditative manner.

Susanne Ackermann’s drawings examine the line quality within the self-imposed rigid process-based work ethic. She carefully investigates not only placement and arrangement of lines, but also the color dynamics between the lines. Through repetition and arrangement, the individual colored pencil lines become part of shapes that in turn take on form. Rossana Martinez, working conceptually project based, is interested in the Body-Space relationship – a body moving through space in relation to nature and in case of this work, the ocean. A single line made out of blue thread stays constant as the drawn colored pencil lines change from rigid to dynamic.

May 10 — July 5, 2008

The Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce the exhibition Ever Present, featuring work by California-based artist Ruth Pastine. Ruth Pastine’s nearly monochrome paintings invest in the perceptual experience of color, light, and temperature. Suspending preconceived notions about visual experience, she investigates the mercurial shift of warm and cool color identities. The complementary oil colors are worked together on the canvas inch-by-inch, wet in wet , layer upon layer, an essential part of the rigor and seamless resolve of the surface of the work with a tiny 2-inch brush, creating an inner luminosity, which expands beyond the canvas. The work is clearly focused on the process of painting – taking the material aspect and transforming it through a disciplined work ethic into something spiritual – “optically immaterial”. The result is a visually vibrating surface as the center expands outwards and the edges contract inwards.

March 8 – May 3, 2008

An exhibition examining pattern painting in the information age, featuring four NYC-based artists Henry Brown, Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsiao & Douglas Melini.

The title of the exhibition, Machine Learning, is inspired by a part of artificial intelligence concerned with the development of algorithms that allow computers to “learn”.   Machine learning recognizes patterns within massive sets of information and has a wide range of real-world applications, the most ubiquitous of which is the Internet search engine.

The exhibition Machine Learning examines the relationship between abstraction and the information age, and presents four artists making new forms of pattern-based painting. The exhibition raises multiple questions.  How has abstraction responded to the irresistible siren call of the Internet?  How has abstraction digested the appearance, logic, and behavior of the Internet?  And finally, with every conceivable kind of information now available at the click of a mouse, what are contemporary abstract artists’ core concerns?

The exhibition originated at The Boyden Gallery, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD in September 2007, and then traveled to The Painting Center, New York, NY in December 2007. A color catalog accompanies the exhibition.

SUPPORT
Machine Learning is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.  The exhibition, tour, and catalog are made possible by grants from the Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Foundation, The Golden Rule Foundation, and Louise & Anne Abrons Foundation.

PRESS
Machine Learning: Reductive artists get to the point, by Olivia Flores Alvarez, Houston Press, March 9, 2007
The Front Row: Machine Leaning at Gallery Sonja Roesch, Interview with Henry Brown, Matthew Deleget & Gilbert Hsiao, Houston Public Radio (KUHF.FM), April 24, 2008

January 12 — March 1, 2008

Jac Leirner creates installations, sculptures, and mixed media pieces using everyday objects like business cards, plastic bags, cigarette packs and banknotes, which are meant to live in transit; they circulate within our society with their final purpose to be destroyed and taken out of circulation. She dislocates these items from their known context and injects them with new value simply by stopping this throwaway product cycle and collecting these items, which then become rejoined and eternalized within her work. Jac Leirner lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has been the recipient of awards such as the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship as well as residencies at the Walker Art Center, USA, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. She is in the collection of many institutions such as The Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Installation view with works by
Josef Adam Moser & Mick Johnson (l to r)

November 3 — December 15, 2007

Gallery Sonja Roesch presents Painting or Object? featuring artists Garland Fielder, Mick Johnson, Josef Adam Moser, and Dirk Rathke.  The exhibition investigates the borderlines between what constitutes a painting or an object. This question, though mainly used for classification and description of work, has been the subject of many discussions. The critical split occurs due to color being more important to painting, whereas form is more important to an object. But what happens when color and form join together holding an equally important position?

Tilman, 12 Colors for Texas, 2007
Adhesive foil to be mounted directly onto the wall or framed
13 5/8 x 10 5/8 inches, Edition of 10 with 2 Artist Proofs
Published by CCNOA (Brussels) & Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston)

Alma Tischler (left) & Tilman (right)

September 8 — October 27, 2007

Alma Tischler and Tilman were both master students from Guenther Fruhtrunk at the MA Academy in Munich. He is known for his radiating colorful geometrically structured paintings. While rejecting the figure reference, the structure of parallel lines in different thicknesses becomes a pattern where color becomes form as well as figure. Even though both Tischler and Tilman went their own way to develop their artistic identity, Fruhtrunk’s influence can be seen in their work.

Installation view

July 7 — August 25, 2007

Madeleine Dietz, Perla Krauze, and Mario Reis, all born in the 1950s, grew up during the prominence of Earthwork or Land Art and are continuing to further the concepts the movement concerned itself with. For these three artists the main focus is not the concept of erosion, but rather the concept of preservation. They are freezing time and the erosion process through preserving natural materials that readily fluctuate.

David Simpson, Form to Light, 2006
Iridescent interference pigment with acrylic paint
69.5 x 23.5 inches

May 5 — June 16, 2007

Installation view

March 3 — April 28, 2007