View of Carrie Pollack’s studio, Brooklyn, NY

January 13 – February 25, 2012

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Carrie Pollack: Witness. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of new paintings consisting of digital prints on linen.

Carrie Pollack describes her work as “a catalog of her memories”. In it she examines what we as individuals consciously or unconsciously choose to remember, and how our memories of people, places, and events degrade and change over time. Begun after the death of her father in 2009, Pollack’s new paintings are both poetic and existential, and they investigate the notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as uncertainty and contradiction. She deliberately intends her paintings to function “more as conversations than as statements”. Her imagery can often appear both familiar and unknown at the same time spanning both abstraction and representation.

The source materials of Pollack’s new paintings can be found in long meditative walks she takes daily with her dog around her Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. She carries her camera with her religiously, which she uses as a research tool to record the fleeting nature of her immediate environment. Each day Pollack takes dozens of photographs, which as of late have focused on deteriorating advertising posters, faded graffiti tags, vacant lots, worn textiles, and the fleeting quality of the sky, as well as other elements in transition and flux.

Pollack in turn organizes her photographs – now numbering in the thousands – into several distinct categories: posters, skies, newspapers, and textiles, among others. She spends weeks pouring over her images, intuitively arranging and rearranging them, looking for shared relationships between them. Once she identifies an image of essential interest, Pollack reduces it down to gray-scale in Photoshop, occasionally adjusting its contrast if needed to bring the image into a neutral state. She then prints upwards of one hundred test images with her large-format printer onto a wide array of supports, including newsprint, paper, canvas, and linen. The printing process is intentionally laden with glitches and hiccups, which she readily embraces. She remarks that the technology “adds its own interpretation of the image”, which reflects the way one’s mind continually tries to understand, interpret, and find meaning in the past, present, and future.

In the concluding steps of her process, Pollack prints a final image onto linen in a size that is unequal – sometimes larger, sometimes smaller – to the dimensions of the painting stretcher that will support it. As a result, the printed image often appears misaligned at first glance. Sometimes an image will wrap around the sides of the stretcher bars and onto the back the painting. Other times an image will be completely isolated within a much larger field of raw linen on the surface of the painting. These choices starkly contrast the digital quality of the image with the physical materiality of the painting itself, which directly parallels and exemplifies the complexity of memory.

Carrie Pollack (b. 1973) has exhibited her work throughout the United States, as well as in Germany and Belgium. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Between This Light and That and Space curated by artist Douglas Melini at the gallery this past summer. Pollack has also recently exhibited at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Monya Rowe Gallery, and David Krut Projects, all in New York. She has also produced editions with Daily Operation in New York and Sonnenzimmer in Chicago, IL.

Pollack has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been discussed in publications, such as Time Out New York, Metropulse, and The Daily Beacon. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and a BFA from Alfred University, Alfred, NY.

PRESS
Carrie Pollack at MINUS SPACE (image reproduction), WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide, February 2012
Carrie Pollack @ Minus Space, KCLOG, January 28, 2012

Installation view.

November 4 – December 23, 2011

Walter Storms Galerie in Munich presents a solo exhibition of the work of Peter Krauskopf.

Installation view. Work by Martin Boyce.

October 7, 2011 – March 18, 2012

The Daimler Art Collection is pleased to announce the exhibition ‘Conceptual Tendencies’ at Daimler Contemporary, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The exhibition showcases works representing varying conceptual trends from the 1960s up to the 1990s alongside pictorial and media statements by more recent exponents. The intellectual and factual proximity of the works in the exhibition allows the visitor to follow the fundamental moments of Conceptual Art mentioned at the outset: the emphasis of system and series, dematerialization and processuality, rationality/irrationality of the idea of the work, parameters of the artwork, involving the observer, art as language – language as art, the fringes of Concept and Minimal Art, media and techniques of conceptually reduced art. The conditions under which art comes into being are examined, along with temporal and spatial structures, the congruency of theory and practice, the possibility of involving the viewer intellectually and physically, and also the general conditions for presenting and responding to art in institutional contexts. ‘Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to today’ combines current new acquisitions for the Daimler Art Collection with works from this context already in our collection. Artistic positions from the 1960s to the 1990s for example from Albert Mertz, Joseph Kosuth, Andre Cadere, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Arakawa or Dan Graham are juxtaposed with artistic statements from younger representatives such as Martin Boyce, Santiago Sierra or Jonathan Monk. Some 80 works from 20 German and international artists are on exhibit.

On the landscape of the focuses of the Daimler Art Collection – abstract avant-garde works from Classical Modernism via Concrete and Constructive Art, Zero and Minimal, Neo Geo to the present – examples of historic Conceptual Art represent a quasi-blind spot, for many reasons, with some notable exceptions (Arakawa, Barry, Burn, Cadere, Darboven, Mosset, Roehr, Walther). Only some of those are included in the exhibition but all are present in the accompanying catalog. A corporate collection cannot and needs not strive for museum-like completeness.

The tour through the exhibition ends with three Danish artists: Paul Gernes has recently been rediscovered as a wanderer on the boundaries of Concept/Minimal/Pop of the 1960s and ‘70s who combined these styles with a social revolutionary impetus. A comparable revisiting of the conceptual multimedia work of Albert Mertz that began to emerge in the late 1950s is still pending. Both artists were important role models for young Danish concept artist Lasse Schmidt Hansen, as is evident in his sculptural deconstructions of the norms, systems and regulations of art and day-to-day life.

Ellsworth Kelly, Black Curve in Relief, 2009

October 7, 2011 – January 20, 2012

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923 in Newburgh, New York) 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. Kelly’s works are notable for their very lean imagery: the forms are geometric or organic, the contours are drawn sharply, the colours are intense. Form, derived from real observation, is at the source of Kelly’s creative process. the window of a museum, the floor of a Paris café, the diagonal shadow of a garage entranceway – fragments of everyday reality that the artist translates into the simplest, most memorable forms, hence turning the quotidian into two-dimensional signs. Kelly does not find refuge in invented lines or shapes and is therefore liberated from the need to compose an image: “the things that interested me were always there”.

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.

Josef Albers, Variant / Adobe: “Gray Facade,” 1947-54
Oil on masonite
22 x 26 inches

November 2 – December 6, 2011

Waddington Custot Galleries, in collaboration with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, are pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Josef Albers, dating from 1931 to 1958. The exhibition includes early monochrome paintings from his Biconjugates and Kinetics series, as well as Variants, dating from the late 40s to 50s. Within these differing compositions, Albers experimented with form, line and colour to explore visual perception.

Steps (1931–1956), the earliest work in the exhibition, made after one of Albers’s glass pieces, has two stair-like constructions in black, white and grey; a larger one in the right foreground and a smaller version in the upper left, which “float” on a black background. Following the “steps”, up and down, in this ambiguous space, the folded forms appear to flip forwards and backwards, sometimes creating the illusion of motion. In Vice Versa (C) (1943), a biconjugate, Albers introduced a landscape format; geometric, interlocking, angular shapes appear to mirror each other on a horizontal plane.

Albers began his Variants series in 1947, the year he spent a sabbatical in Mexico. Also known as Adobes, the Variants derive their basic geometric composition, of multiple, interlocking and apparently overlapping rectangles, from the simple facades of the traditional Adobe houses, with their two windows set either side of the doorway. As well as monochrome paintings in this new format, in the Variant series, Albers used vibrant colour shapes which allowed him to closely examine colour relationships.

Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Germany, Josef Albers trained as a teacher, later moving into art education before studying art at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Essen, where he worked in stained glass and print-making. In 1920, Albers enrolled in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus, which had opened the previous year in Weimar. Within two years he was running the glass workshop and, in 1923, he set up the preliminary course in material and design, later taking charge of this course and rising to the position of assistant director to Mies van der Rohe in 1930. When the Bauhaus was closed down by the Gestapo in 1933, Albers, then aged forty-five, left Germany for the United States to initially take up a teaching post at the newly-formed Black Mountain College in North Carolina, moving to Yale University in 1950. Albers retired as Chairman of Yale University Art School in 1958 but retained his post as Visiting Professor until 1960. In 1959, he was awarded the Ford Foundation fellowship. Interaction of Color, his seminal account of over thirty years of his colour theory teaching, was published by Yale University Press in 1963. In 1971, Albers was the first living artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Josef Albers died on 25 March 1976 in Orange, Connecticut.

Installation view. Paintings by Jason Hoelscher. Temporary Gallery Berlin, photo by Andrea Amelung.

September 22 – October 20, 2011

Temporary Gallery Berlin is pleased to exhibit Jason Hoelscher: Recent Paintings, a series of works that Hoelscher calls “short attention span paintings for short attention span culture”. Combining the quick-glance semiotics of corporate iconography with the gestalt read of 1960s minimalism, Hoelscher’s latest series of paintings incorporate areas of raw, unprimed canvas that play off of the highly-finished painted areas, exploring the range of contrasts between constructed flatness and literal flatness.

John Aslanidis, Sonic Network No.9, 2011
oil on canvas, 244 cm x 304 cm

October 7 – November 6, 2011

dr. julius | ap is pleased to announce a cooperation of Australian painter John Aslanidis and Berlin-based British musician Brian May. This will be the first vision + sound installation ever in the gallery of the New Concrete. The exhibition will comprise of a large painting, Sonic Network No.9, constructed of four panels measuring 244 cm in height by 304 cm in length, and a generative sound piece, which will be a response to the painting.

In the sonic network paintings John Aslanidis uses a set of mathematical intervals, which are relative to a grid on each of the four canvases. The drawing he derives these intervals from is akin to a “musical score”. This is a drawing of compositional intervals, which Aslanidis has used in composing the sonic network series.

It is from these compositional points that Brian May has written an algorithm which determines the characteristics and timing of the tones in relation to the points as conceived in the sound piece. The sine wave tones created are audio representations of circular forms.

Brian May’s sound piece will be using the programming language for sound synthesis SuperCollider to compose, produce and play the piece, which will be played in conjunction with the painting from a computer through a sound system for the duration of the exhibition.

The sound piece is generative and infinite, with no fixed start or end point in the composition. This correlates with the idea of infinity, a basic element of the sonic network series.

Consequently, the interaction between the sound piece, the painting and the observer will always be different, as the painting perpetually shifts upon being viewed and the sound piece emanating from SuperCollider mirrors this.

The intention of the sound piece is to create an equivalent of the reverberating patterns and geometric shapes, resembling the patterns in the painting. In addition to this the composer will be taking into consideration the structure and composition of the painting and respond to the moiré patterns – which will be represented via audio interference of the sine waves, known as beat frequencies in the sound piece.

Using SuperCollider, Brian May will be able to create sounds which correspond to colours emanating from the painting.

Order and chaos is present in both the sound piece and the painting, the resulting effect being one of synergy between analogue and digital mediums.

Brian May [born 1966 in Manchester, GB] has been producing and performing music across Australia, Japan, Europe and North America since 1990. Currently he is working as music producer and sound artist in Berlin, performing on a regular basis internationally.
The first collaboration between John Aslanidis and Brian May was in an exhibition at Austral Avenue Melbourne in 2006. In this exhibition Brian May composed a sound piece in response to Sonic Network No. 2.

John Aslanidis [* 1961 in Sydney, AUS] has a history working in the area of music and sound, having been part of Clan Analogue – a collective of sound and visual artists based in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1990s – and later being a visual artist on Zonar recordings, an electronic music label based in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2011, for the exhibition “Sounds Good”, curated by Claudia Calirman at Location One in New York, John Aslanidis, Katy Dove, Phoebe Hui, Sophie Hunter, Miler Lagos, John O’Connell, Gonzalo Puch, and Zane Saunders all collaborated to create a visual responses to a collaborative sound piece.

In addition to this Aslanidis participated in the exhibition “Sound and Vision” at Mc Kenzie Fine Art In New York, with Gilbert Hsiao, Daniel Hill and Laura Watt.

Aslanidis has been participating in “mehrfach -_ multiple” in December 2010, a group exhibition featuring all dr. julius | ap artists.

Ted Stamm at his studio
101 Wooster Street, January 1980
Photo courtesy of Abby Robinson

September 24 – October 29, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Ted Stamm: Paintings, an overview of paintings, works on paper, street interventions, and other materials by the late NYC-based abstract painter. Prior to his unexpected death from heart failure in 1984, Stamm created a substantial, mature body of work that was at once responsive to the past, indicative of his time, and prescient of the future.

Ted Stamm was born in Brooklyn in 1944. At age eleven, his family moved to Freeport, Long Island, where he spent the remainder of his youth. He enrolled in Hofstra University in the mid-1960s, where he began by studying graphic design. He quickly moved into painting studying with artists Perle Fine and John Hopkins. He also studied printmaking with artist Richard Pugliese, who later introduced him to the Soho art world. Stamm moved to Soho permanently upon graduating from Hofstra University in 1968.

Between 1968-1972, Stamm produced lyrical abstract paintings consisting of poured red, blue, and pink paint on canvas. In the summer of 1972, he began to cover up these earlier works with grids-like patterns of black marks; he referred to these as his “cancel paintings”. Inspired by the late work of Ad Reinhardt, Stamm consistently used the color black in his paintings from this moment forward. He associated black with rebellion, rigor, and reduction.

In 1973, Stamm began making conceptually-driven work based on chance systems – rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel – that would determine the format and number of painting layers for a specific work. In 1974, he started working with shaped stretchers and introduced the element of line into his paintings. A year later, Stamm produced his “Wooster” series inspired by a form he had seen on Wooster Street where he lived. At this time, he also began making on his “Dodger” paintings named after the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. The curved forms and right angles used in these paintings were likely derived from the shape of a baseball field diamond. Examples of both Stamm’s “Wooster” and “Dodger” paintings will be included in the exhibition.

Increasingly engrossed by the concept of speed, the aerodynamic design of cars, trains, and airplanes, and the Modernist charge to reinvent painting for future generations, Stamm began developing his “C-Dodger” paintings in the last 1970s. The “C” in the title referred to the supersonic airplane The Concorde, which Stamm would often travel to see arrive and depart at Kennedy Airport in NYC. Similarly, his “Zephyr” paintings begun in 1979 were informed by the futuristic, stainless steel train that set a speed record for travel between Denver and Chicago in 1934. His later paintings “ZCTs” and “CDDs” from early 1980s hybridized various elements from his earlier “Wooster” and “Dodger” works and were hung low on the wall just inches off the ground. One of Stamm’s “Zephyr” paintings, ZYR-4 (1979, oil on canvas, 33 x 114 inches), will be on view in the exhibition.

During his career, Stamm was also engaged in making highly experimental works produced in collaboration with other artists and individuals. His “Tag” pieces enlisted the participation of visitors to his studio who were asked to make a mark of their choosing onto a found garment tag that was glued down onto a page in a sketchbook. Stamm would respond to this mark in a second sketchbook of the same design. Both pages were then stamped with the date and other collateral information to create a record of their exchange.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Stamm also made proto-graffiti street interventions, which he termed “Designators”. Using a small stencil of his “Dodger” shape, he painted the shape in black on buildings and other locations in NYC that had personal significance to him. When he returned to a specific site and saw that his original mark had been altered, he would paint the shape again in silver. On his third visit, he would stencil a black “T” on the silver shape. On his fourth and final visit, he would add a second “T”, this time in silver. Images of Stamm’s street interventions will be included in his show, as well as documentation by photographer Abby Robinson of his participation in the Pool Project organized by artist Russell Maltz at the C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY, in the late 1970s.

In one of his few written statements about his work, Stamm asserts “my work deals with an idealism which announces and supports the advancement of the art language, specifically painting”. More than 25 years after his death, it is clear that Stamm’s persona and character, his optimism about painting’s enduring possibilities and future advancement, and his expanded practice both in and out of the studio were of great significance to his artist contemporaries. His work also anticipated the conceptual strategies and material inquiries of subsequent generations of artists who came of age in NYC during the past three decades.

Ted Stamm (b. 1944 Brooklyn, NY; d. 1984 New York, NY) exhibited his work internationally during his lifetime, including in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues, such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Clocktower, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Condeso/Lawler Gallery (all New York City), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH), Museum of Art (Fort Lauderdale, FL), Oklahoma Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, OK), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, CA), Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL), Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), Atkins Museum of Fine Art (Kansas City, MO), Akademie Der Kunste (Berlin, Germany), and Louisiana Museum (Humlebaek, Denmark).

In 1977, Stamm was included by curator Manfred Schneckenburger in Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany. His work was exhibited alongside artists, such as Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra, among others. In addition, Stamm exhibited his work at the legendary Downtown artist-founded venues 112 Greene Street (1975), Artists Space (1975, 1980), and Franklin Furnace (1977, 1980).

Stamm received awards in Painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowments for the Arts (1981-1982). His work has been reviewed in publications, such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun, among others.

Stamm’s work is included in the public collections of Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA); Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), and Western Australia Art Gallery (Perth, Australia).

CATALOG
Ted Stamm: Painting Advance 1990, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, NY, 1986 (PDF)

PRESS
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Pac Pobric, On-Verge, November 27, 2011
Ted Stamm: Paintings at MINUS SPACE, by Brett Baker, Painters’ Table, October 8, 2011
Ted Stamm @ MINUS SPACE, by Mark Dagley, Abaton Book Company, October 6, 2011
Best Exhibition Award, DUMBO Arts Festival, September 23-25, 2011
The Reductive Expands: MINUS SPACE will move from 175 feet in Gowanus to a Dumbo loft, by Stephen Maine, Artcritical, September 12, 2011
Gowanus Gallery MINUS SPACE Moving to Dumbo, by Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, September 1, 2011

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE would like to thank Russell Maltz, Per Haubro Jensen, Abby Robinson, Linda Levit, Serra Pradhan, and Marianne Boesky Gallery for their expert assistance with this 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!

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm and by appointment

Ivo Ringe, Skull, 2010
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 20 inches

September 23 – October 22, 2011

Schaltwerk Kunst presents an exhibition of recent painting by Ivo Ringe.

Tomma Abts, Ert, 2003
Acrylic and oil on canvas
19 x 15 inches

July 16 – October 9, 2011

Born in 1967, Ger­man ar­tist Tom­ma Abts ranks among the out­stan­ding fe­ma­le pain­ters of her ge­ne­ra­ti­on. She was awar­ded the Tur­ner Pri­ze in 2006, and her work has fea­tured in so­lo ex­hi­bi­ti­ons at such re­now­ned in­sti­tu­ti­ons as Kunst­hal­le Ba­sel, the Ham­mer Mu­se­um in Los An­ge­les and the New Mu­se­um of Con­tem­pora­ry Art in New York. The show at the Kunst­hal­le Düs­sel­dorf will be the Lon­don-ba­sed ar­tist’s first so­lo ex­hi­bi­ti­on at an in­sti­tu­ti­on in the Rhi­ne­land, whe­re she has be­en teaching sin­ce sum­mer 2010, ha­ving ta­ken up a pro­fes­sorship at the Kunst­aka­de­mie Düs­sel­dorf.

A slow and ri­go­rous pro­duc­tion pro­cess is a dis­tin­gu­is­hing fea­ture of Tom­ma Abts’ work. Alt­hough she fol­lows a pre­de­ter­mined me­thod in her pain­ting, ap­p­ly­ing pu­re­ly geo­me­tri­cal shapes to a clas­sic 48 x 38 cm por­trait for­mat in lay­er af­ter lay­er of oil and acryl­ic paint, her pain­ting is far re­mo­ved from se­ri­al pro­duc­tion. The in­di­vi­dua­li­ty of each of her pie­ces can, in­s­tead, be at­tri­bu­ted to a pro­duc­tion pro­cess whe­re each image is shaped by con­ti­nual ques­tio­ning, and by con­stant con­struc­tion and de­con­struc­tion. The rich, of­ten mu­ted co­lour to­nes lend each work its own mood, which draws the be­hol­der in­to a world of in­ti­ma­te ima­ge­ry. On­ly on clo­ser in­spec­tion do the un­der­ly­ing lay­ers peek through the sur­face he­re and the­re, re­vea­ling faint pat­terns and iso­la­ted li­nes, and cas­ting Abts’ work as a re­flec­tion on the pain­ting pro­cess its­elf.

The in­ten­si­ty of this ar­tis­tic pro­cess is re­flec­ted in Abts’ ex­hi­bi­ti­ons, which pre­sent each of her works as an in­di­vi­du­al, co­he­rent image. Kunst­hal­le Düs­sel­dorf has cho­sen a selec­tion of twel­ve can­va­ses to pre­sent in its main hall. For the first ti­me ever, Abts’ pain­tings will be ac­com­pa­nied by a se­ries of small, pre­vious­ly ba­re­ly known drawings that she has crea­ted over ma­ny ye­ars along­side her pain­tings in or­der to work out the li­nes, shapes and spa­ti­al re­la­ti­ons­hips wi­t­hin her de­li­ca­te com­po­si­ti­ons.

Works by Manfred Mohr (left) and Jan van Munster.

June 17 – September 11, 2011

Galerie Linde Hollinger in Ladenburg, Germany, presents Manfred Mohr: Works from 1977-2011 and Jan van Munster: Neon.

Installation view.

May 10 – September 25 2011

The first special exhibition of the Daimler Art Collection to be held in the Mercedes-Benz Museum (built by UN Studio), which first opened its doors in 2006, showcases key exhibits from the collection as well as new work commissioned by renowned international artists in various thematic stages – integrated into the company’s history on a floor area of 16,500 m².

The exhibition will also include numerous works created as studies of the models and design of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, thereby entering into an artistic dialog with the history of Mercedes-Benz automobiles. These include the legendary CARS series by Andy Warhol, originally designed by the pop art icon 25 years ago for the 100th anniversary of the automobile.

In addition to further works with automotive ties including pieces by Bertrand Lavier, Robert Longo and Vincent Szarek, as well as new commissioned works by Sylvie Fleury, Nic Hess, Philippe Parreno and Michael Sailstorfer will be on display for the first time at the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

A separate exhibition area of 600 m² will present the key thematic areas of the collection: The exhibition ranges from classics of Constructive and Concrete art from the Southern Germany to videos and photography by international contemporaries. Around 250 pieces by about 120 international artists will be on exhibit.

This exhibition, hitherto the most comprehensive presentation of the Daimler Art Colllection, will be accompanied by a comprehensive supporting and educational program. Special publications such as an essay on the “Stages of Modern Art in Stuttgart 1986 – 2011″ and the “ABC of the Daimler Art Collection for Students” are being designed for the exhibition. In addition to this work book for high school and college students, there will also be an accompanying book with training programs for teachers.

Martin Creed, Work No. 1209, 2011
Emulsion on wall
dimensions variable

April 29 – June 25, 2011

On occasion of Gallery Weekend, Johnen Galerie proudly presents the exhibition Paintings by Martin Creed. The works on view, as all other works by the artist who is well-versed in media as diverse as photography, sculpture, film, and music, range between plain and generally understandable structures, and happenstance. The ‘genius’ creator steps back by – at least theoretically – enabling everyone to make the work following his instructions which makes this work deeply democratic and leaves room for play, practice and selection. Some of the small canvases are densely packed with horizontal, intertwining brushstrokes, others show stair-like stacks of different strokes or zig zags of all shades of colors. His palette reaches from primary or non-colors such as red or black on white ground to color compositions of a wide spectrum. It seems as if each stroke was applied to the canvas with a different beat and timbre. The pictures attest often to a joyful lightness but are always objective reflections about art and thus lead the viewer far beyond the field of abstract painting. Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, UK. From the age of three he lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In 2001 he was awarded the Turner Prize. Martin Creed currently lives and works in London and Alicudi, Italy.

Julian Jackson, Aura Study 2
Oil on prepared paper
26 x 22 inches

May 12 – June 30, 2011

“Aura is often defined in near mystical terms as the halo or penumbra of colored light surrounding an individual in a field of radiant energy. The colors of the aura are imagined to correspond to the individuals’ personal Chi, or life force. The works in this exhibition are from an ongoing series of paintings and works on paper in which I am exploring phenomena of light, color, and atmosphere in order to map the mood of a day or season, as well as the inner architecture of my own creative drive.

On a color wheel the visible spectrum is rendered as 7 key colors; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. But we all know that between these cardinal points there lie infinite gradations of hue and shade. As much as music, color is a language of moods. These Aura Studies are like pages from my diary helping me to find form, experiment with subtleties of color, and to further my understanding of the pulse and temperature of passing time.”

-Julian Jackson, April 2011

Installation view.

April 30 – June 8, 2011

ParallelResonance is the 4th cycle of artwork, which Manfred Mohr produced as a software artwork, beside a series of pictures. In the series Mohr is exploring in his characteristically straight forward forms and colours the tension fields between the shifting black and white lines and plaines. The changing colours of the background range in pastel-coloured shades. Beside the software pieces the exhibition also features large-scale and small prints from the series.

Manfred Mohr’s artworks are based on custom-authored algorithms. Mohr belongs internationally to the most successful artists in the field of software art. Since 1973 he is exploring the logical and mathematical structure of cubes or hypercubes as well as their lines, planes and their relationships. Mohr co-founded the “Art et Informatique” seminar in 1969 at Vincenne University in Paris, and his first major solo museum exhibition ‘Une esthétique programmée’ took place in 1971 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. That exhibition has become known historically as the first solo show in a museum of works entirely calculated and drawn by a computer.

Manfred Mohr’s artworks are based on computer programs written by himself. Mohr belongs internationally to the most successful artists in the field of software art. Since 1973 he is exploring the logical and mathematical structure of cubes or hypercubes as well as their lines, planes and their relationships. Mohr co-founded the “Art et Informatique” seminar in 1969 at Vincenne University in Paris, and his first major solo museum exhibition ‘Une esthétique programmée’ took place in 1971 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. That exhibition has become known historically as the first solo show in a museum of works entirely calculated and drawn by a computer.

Frank Badur, #11-10, 2011
Oil and alkyd on canvas
16 x 20 inches

May 12 – June 25, 2011

Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Mostly Red + works on paper, an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Frank Badur.

Badur’s gracefully intuitive minimalist compositions draw his viewers into their subtlety with a delicate interplay of surface and color. Veils of reds are laid down in bands of varying widths and opacity across the canvas, creating a vibrating, almost tectonic sensation on the painting’s surface; one becomes aware of the subtlety of shade, tone and texture of each band in a newly heightened way. Far from clinical, or mechanically produced, Badur’s paintings carry with them deep emotional weight, as each level of surface reveals the human hand that created it.

The artist’s clear aesthetic language—one that is aware but independent of the gesture’s long history, tracing from fauvism and constructivism through the color field paintings of the Abstract Expressionist movement—relies on formal restraints combined with control of materials and intuition to develop a clear awareness of itself that is unspoken, yet distinct. Badur’s work seeks to find the pure meaning of painting, and neither mimetically nor metaphorically represents or references any reality outside of the canvas. This lack of signifiers, this primeval sense of painting, allows the viewer to dive into the piece and experience it without the clouding of subject or metaphor.

This exhibition also features a selection of works on paper that Badur refers to as “scrolls.” Long vertical sheets are divided by subdued and delicate graphite and gouache lines, bands and grids, which build the same visual harmony achieved in the paintings. These quieter works carry with them a stillness that is gentle, but impacting.

Frank Badur’s work has been exhibited and collected widely in both Europe and the Americas. His work is in the collections of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt/Main, the Ahrenberg Collection, Los Angeles, Malmo Konstmuseum, Sweden, the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Progressive Collection, the Yale University Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

Installation view

May 6 – June 25, 2011

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Donald Judd drawn from the artist’s seminal 1989 exhibition held at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany. Brought together from international public and private collections, this will be the first time these particular works have been exhibited together in a group of this size since Judd’s 1989 installation.

The exhibition, which will span both of the gallery’s spaces at 525 and 533 West 19th Street, will reflect the artist’s intended clarity and rigor in its installation. These works comprise one of Judd’s few explorations of color on a large scale using anodized aluminum and thus provide a focused investigation of the key concerns within Judd’s practice.

This will be the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work since having announced its exclusive representation of Judd Foundation.

One of the most significant American artists of the post-war period, Donald Judd’s oeuvre has come to define what has been referred to as Minimalist art—a label the artist strongly objected to. The unaffected, straightforward quality of Judd’s work demonstrates his strong interest in color, form, material, and space. With the intention of creating work that could assume a direct material and physical ‘presence’ without recourse to grand philosophical statements, Judd eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation.

Judd began his practice as a painter in the late 1940s; however, he soon introduced three-dimensional elements into the surface of his work. His first sculptural objects took the form of shallow reliefs, and by 1963 he had begun to create freestanding works that were presented directly on the floor and the wall. Throughout his practice, Judd used materials such as plywood, steel, concrete, Plexiglas, and aluminum and employed commercial fabricators in order to get the surfaces and angles he desired. He created declaratively simple, fundamental sculptural forms, many of which took the shape of simple ‘boxes’ or ‘stacks,’ which he would often arrange according to repeated or sequential progressions.

Consisting of twelve identically scaled anodized aluminum works, the historic exhibition at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden was significant in that it marked the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format. Although he had previously examined the qualities of an open box form, the works created for Baden-Baden display a distinct systematic approach in determining the interior space of each box, which Judd divided vertically in different spatial configurations, sometimes introducing color through the use of anodized elements or sheets of Plexiglas in blue, black, or amber. The combinations of materials, dividers, and colors—which differ from box to box—thus determine the singular nature of each work within a finite number of variable possibilities; each of the boxes being an individual work that represents one possibility out of the given parameters.

These works demonstrate the artist’s visionary approach to using industrial material as well as his considered attitude toward proportion and installation. They were designed not for the actual space at Baden-Baden, but in relation to each other and within the given framework of their

design. Installed together, these artworks present a particularly unified experience of composition and space. For Judd, the placement of a color, panel, or, ultimately, a work, was always part of a larger context. The presentation of the boxes as a group allows for their unique spatial arrangements and colors to be apprehended by the viewer as a whole, while also emphasizing their relationship to the surrounding architectural environment. As such, the exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to experience a large-scale presentation of a single body of work by the artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, to be published in collaboration with Steidl, Göttingen. The publication will include new scholarship on Judd by noted art historian Richard Shiff, in addition to archival material and re-printed interviews with the artist.

The work of Donald Judd (b. 1928 Excelsior Springs, Missouri; d. 1994 New York) has been exhibited internationally since the 1960s and is included in numerous museum collections. A survey exhibition of the artist’s work was organized by the Tate Modern, London, in 2004 and traveled to the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Kunstmuseum Basel. Other important exhibitions of the artist’s work include Donald Judd: Early Work 1955-1968, which traveled from the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany to the Menil Collection, Houston in 2002-2003 and Donald Judd: Colorist, held at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice in 2000-2001. Permanent installations of the artist’s work can be found at Judd Foundation spaces in New York City and Marfa, Texas, along with the neighboring Chinati Foundation; his work is also on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, New York.

Gerhard Mantz, Amarige, 2010
Pigmented ink on canvas
140 x 190 cm, 55 x 87 inches

April 2 – May 27, 2011

Installation view

March 23 – April 21, 2011

ParallelResonance is the latest series of Manfred Mohr and the software pieces are exhibited for the first time internationally at Gallery [DAM] Cologne. parallelResonance is the 4th cycle of artwork, which Manfred Mohr produced as a software artwork, beside a series of pictures. In the series Mohr is exploring in his characteristically straight forward forms and colours the tension fields between the shifting black and white lines and plaines. The changing colours of the background range in pastel-coloured shades. Beside the software pieces the exhibition also features large-scale and small prints from the series.

Manfred Mohr’s artworks are based on custom-authored algorithms. Mohr belongs internationally to the most successful artists in the field of software art. Since 1973 he is exploring the logical and mathematical structure of cubes or hypercubes as well as their lines, planes and their relationships. Mohr co-founded the “Art et Informatique” seminar in 1969 at Vincenne University in Paris, and his first major solo museum exhibition ‘Une esthétique programmée’ took place in 1971 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. That exhibition has become known historically as the first solo show in a museum of works entirely calculated and drawn by a computer.

‘The main elements of the algorithm are two randomly selected and superimposed 11-dimensional diagonal-paths (see: emohr.com, workphases “Dimensions” 1978, “Laserglyphs” 1991 and “Klangfarben” 2007). Both diagonal-paths have a very thick line width (line expansion) with their edges running parallel on both sides of the original diagonal-path. The top line expansion is always WHITE describing a white form. The bottom line expansion is BLACK and describes a black form. Both forms are projected on a colored background. In calculated intervals, the black form interchanges with the colored background so that the background becomes black and the previously black form assumes a color. These exchanges create continuously new visual relations in form and tension fields. The clearly visible thin black/white lines in the image show the original diagonal-paths.’