Work by Gilbert Hsiao

November 12 – December 31, 2011

Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work on paper by Gilbert Hsiao. The exhibition will open November 12, 2011 at an opening reception from 5-7pm, and close on December 31, 2011. Hsiao has been exploring the mechanics of visual perception since the 1980s. In his current works, light has become the subject, and these objects are meant to be experienced in changing light. There is not single optimal lighting situation; rather, the viewer’s experience of them depends on changing light and vantage points. The material or subject of the pieces are not as important as how they change reflected light.

This show will feature collages of perforated and layered materials. These are physical and visual filters that sift the light and color of the underlying layers. The pin-holed paper collages recall sparkling constellations, with small glimpses of the glittering paper underneath, by creating an effect of viewing light and color traveling from a great distance. Other works consist of meticulously layered stripes in tightly woven structures that create vibrating visual movement. The thicker, sponge-like constructions absorb direct light, intensifying and electrifying them. There is a visual “aha” moment when one views them from a distance, giving the sense of planets floating in deep space. 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.

Myke Venable, Dark Violet/Reflex Rose/Silver

June 4 – July 30, 2011

John Henry, Blue Rhapsody, 1998
Painted aluminum
96 x 84 x 48 inches

January 21 – March 26, 2011

Spanning a 50-year career as an artist and sculptor, John Henry has amassed an internationally collected body of work. Henry’s focus in the 60s and 70s was founded on the Constructivist movement melding technology and industrial materials with abstract forms. Today, the evolution of his work remains constant with his primary influence of the changing landscape of the urban environment.

Henry’s sculpture can be described as colorful, primarily large-scale, welded steel structures. He arranges sharp linear and rectilinear elements that appear to defy gravity and float. Many suggest a moment of paused motion where flying or tumbling elements are frozen in time. There is a simple elegance and an unexpected sense of poetry and weightlessness in his work. The scale ranges from tabletop pieces to monumental structures. Ruder Finn Press is set to release a 517-page book detailing John Henry’s extensive career as an artist and sculptor in early 2011. Gallery Sonja Roesch will hold a book signing with John Henry in March 2011.

Work by Ruth Pastine

November 6 – December 31, 2010

Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce the exhibition Present Fugitive, featuring new work by California-based artist Ruth Pastine. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Ruth Pastine’s nearly monochrome color field 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 into wet, layer upon layer, with a 2-inch brush- an essential part of the rigorous process and seamless resolve of the meticulous surfaces. Inspired by distinct and contrasting light conditions Pastine creates 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 arresting surface, vibrantly present and ephemeral, that appears to expand outwards as the edges contract inwards.

Donald Kuspit writes, “The light suddenly changed and the field changed with it, losing its uniformity and blossoming, as it were, into a variety of spontaneously color events. Undifferentiated shallow surface had become differentiated expressive depth, one narrow color note had expanded into a chamber music of colors, each distinct yet merging, playing off of each other yet oddly harmonious.” “Pastine creates an infinitely nuanced range of colors experiences, each with it’s own “spiritual sound” or resonance, to use Kandinsky’s term. While Pastine is obsessed with “the convergence and reconciliation of opposition,” the changing light brings out the opposing colors, conveying the tension between them.”

Installation view

September 18 – October 30, 2010

Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce MORE THAN THIS, an exhibition of new work by Mexico City based artist, Aldo Chaparro.

Aldo Chaparro is best known for expanding the boundaries between art and other disciplines such as music, industrial design, editing and writing. His work takes inspiration from song lyrics and the pop culture that surrounds contemporary music and art rock. Through the use of different materials, Chaparro remixes and edits references from the media world pushing aside the notions of past and future to offer a present where simultaneousness co-exists. MORE THAN THIS is an exhibition of works in varied media that depart from the music, titles, and lyrics of songs that linger in our collective memory, such as the 1982 hit “More Than This” by English art rock group, Roxy Music. Fragments of lyrics and rhythms that we have all heard at one moment or another are brought back from our unconscious memory and re-presented to us as art. The experience between the work and the viewer is therefore questioned – is it a new experience from reading the text in a new context, or is it simply the memory of a feeling created by a particular song heard before? It is precisely this dialogue between the disciplines and the effect that such dialogue has over the viewer’s experience with his art that interests Chaparro the most. The exhibition consists of wall-mounted steel sculptures, light art, and a collaborative performance on opening night by Mexican musician Bibi Zambrano titled Here We Are Now, Entertain Us.

Aldo Chaparro was born in 1965 in Lima, Peru and has lived and worked in Mexico for many years, both in the cities of Monterrey and Mexico D.F., where he currently resides. His work is a direct reflection of the hip, contemporary art culture found in Mexico City today. He has exhibited in Argentina, Colombia, Dubai, Europe, Mexico, Peru and the United States. This is his first show in Houston. His work is represented in numerous private art collections both in the U.S. and internationally. Chaparro is also the publisher of Celeste Magazine and editorial director of Celeste Editorial Group, one of the most influential contemporary culture publishers in Latin America.

Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM, 2010
Installation view with painting & wall painting

September 18 – October 16, 2010

MINUS SPACE is very excited to announce the solo exhibition Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM.  This is the Amsterdam-based artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a site-specific painting installation.

For his exhibition, Jan will present two new acrylic on linen paintings featuring intricate black and white patterns.  The patterns are informed by a number of diverse sources, including Maori weavings, Islamic ceramic tiles, Portuguese azulejos, and Italian architectural marble designs, among others.  The paintings will be installed directly on top of an ambitious floor-to-ceiling wall painting covering all four walls of the gallery.  The wall painting will consist of narrow vertical red, green, and blue stripes that repeat at regular intervals throughout the space.  We will also have available a new limited-edition print by the artist (Untitled, 2010, silkscreen on paper, 50 x 40 cm, edition of 25) as part of his exhibition.

About Jan’s work, artist, curator and writer Michelle Grabner states, “…his paintings expand the best of contemporary non-objective work in their shear boldness and fearless scope, the entirety of the painting’s dynamics are always greater than the architecture that supports them…The impact of van der Ploeg’s paintings is located at the intersection of sensation and thought, between the work’s graphic visual impact and its conceptual underpinnings. His paintings are welcomingly antagonistic to narrative. Signifying instead a powerful commitment to the commingling of the familiar, new and strange potentials of color and form.”

Over the past two decades, Jan van der Ploeg (b. 1959) has exhibited his work extensively in both solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, including at venues such as The Suburban (Chicago), Smart Museum (Chicago), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Gemeentemuseum (The Hague), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Galerie Asim Chugthai (Berlin), Konsortium (Dusseldorf), Centre d’Art Neuchatel (France), Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (Brussels), Sarah Cottier Gallery (Sydney), Goddard de Fiddes Gallery (Perth), and Hamish McKay Gallery (Wellington).

Jan’s first solo exhibition at MINUS SPACE in 2006 was the gallery’s inaugural exhibition.  His work was also included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008-2009.

In addition to his artistic work, Jan founded and directs PS, a highly-regarded exhibition space and program based in Amsterdam.  Committed to new abstract and conceptual art, PS aims to provide a platform for the work of upcoming international artists in an environment that exists between the conventions of an artist-run space and a commercial gallery.

SUPPORT
Jan van der Ploeg: BIG CALM is generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

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.

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)