The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois

January 22 – February 26, 2012

We are delighted to announce the group exhibition MINUS SPACE at The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. The exhibition features artists Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz and Gilbert Hsiao, and is conceived around the ideas of confounding pattern, spectral color, shaped supports, and divergent painting methods.

THE SUBURBAN
Founded in 1999, The Suburban is an independently run artist exhibition space. We give complete control to the artists in regards to what they choose to produce and exhibit. Thus it’s a pro artist and anti curator site. The Suburban is not driven by commercial interests. It is funded within the economy of our household. Its success is not grounded in sales, press or the conventional measures set forth by the international art apparatus, but by the individual criteria set forth by the artists and their exhibitions. In this, The Suburban is more closely aligned with the idea of studio practice than that of the site of distribution.

–Michelle Grabner & Brad Killam

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
Mechanical Garden: Carrie Pollack’s Error Makes Art, by Jim Long, CityArts, February 7, 2012
Carrie Pollack at MINUS SPACE (image reproduction), WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide, February 2012
Carrie Pollack @ Minus Space, KCLOG, January 28, 2012

Awkward x 2, Exit Velocity Faster than the Speed of Light, 2011
Oil on linen
64 x 64 inches

October 30, 2011 – January 15, 2012

Awkward x 2 is a collaboration between two painters: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Rebecca Norton. They began working together in the summer of 2010 and their show at the Suburban, opening on Sunday, October 30th, will be Awkward’s first solo exhibition. Awkward’s chief interest is painting, but they also explore new ways in which to talk about art and further collaborations into areas outside of art. “We’re interested in beauty, the involuntary, pleasure and complexity and in what results from two people working on the same thing in a field where works have traditionally been associated with individual subjectivities.” Rebecca Norton received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2010, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe received his from Florida State University in 1970.  She is from Kentucky, he is from Kent. Awkward x 2 is made possible with support from Puffin Foundation Ltd.

Work by Douglas Melini

July 17 – August 10, 2011

Simon Ingram’s Radio Paintings “results from a sequence of material conversations of unseen and unheard information.” Ingram’s Abstract paintings are produced via a machine that scans the electromagnetic spectrum. Douglas Melini’s tightly pattern symmetrical abstractions will be juxtaposed with an audio component for his project at The Suburban.

Simon Ingram is an artist and Senior Lecturer at the ELAM School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has exhibited internationally for over ten years including at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and CCNOA Center for Contemporary Non-objective Art in Brussels.

This summer New York-based artist Melini is included in “Self Referral Non Object,” curated by Hudson at Feature Inc, NYC. He has exhibited at Minus Space, Brooklyn; Ursule Werz, Tubingen Germany; Rocket, London and Richard Heller, Santa Monica. He received his MFA from CalArts and has taught at RISD and VCU.

Anne Tyng, Dodecahedron with Nested Cube, 2010
Luan plywood model
96 x 102 inches

April 15 – June 18, 2011

Inhabiting Geometry is the first major exhibition of the work of the visionary architect and theorist Anne Tyng. Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and independently pioneered habitable space-frame architecture, Tyng has applied natural and numeric systems to built forms on all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces. This exhibition features room size models of the five platonic solids (the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron). Identified in ancient times, the platonic solids are the only regular equilateral and equiangular polyhedra. These forms can be found in nature, such as in the structure of crystals. The installation, together with archival material, illustrates the synthesis of Tyng’s life-long research on advanced geometry and how she derives her own built forms through the symmetries, orders, and dynamic progressions by which one form in geometry becomes another.

Demonstrating this vision at work is a selection of drawings, models, and other documentation of past projects, including: City Tower (with Kahn, 1952­–1957); Urban Hierarchy (1970); and the Four-Poster House (1971–1974). There are also examples of Tyng’s publications and research, which investigate Jungian cycles, city squares, and the cosmos. Throughout, geometry is both rational and expressive, as much a means of contemplation as of calculation and construction.

In 1965, Anne Tyng was one of the first women to receive a fellowship from the Graham Foundation for her project Anatomy of Form: The Divine Proportion in the Platonic Solids. In her research she developed a theory of hierarchies of symmetry—symmetries within symmetries—and a search for architectural insight and revelation in the consistency and beauty of all underlying form. A portion of this research was published in the article Geometric Extensions of Consciousness in the Italian architectural journal Zodiak #19 in1969.

“Tyng’s ideas, supported by the Graham Foundation over 45 years ago, resonate deeply with contemporary architects who are working with complex geometry as a source for new forms in building,” notes Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation. “She was at the forefront of experimentation in the field, and this exhibition introduces her work to new generations who are also working to push the spatial potential of architecture.”

Anne Tyng (b. 1920 Jiangxi, China; lives in San Francisco) was among the first women ever to receive a Masters of Architecture from Harvard University. Beginning in 1947, she worked with Louis I. Kahn and was instrumental in the design of the Trenton Bath House and Yale University Art Gallery. After 1968, she focused her attention on research, earning her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she subsequently taught for almost thirty years.

Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA) and curated by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner; consulting curator Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Assistant Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University; and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, Director of the Graham Foundation, Sarah Herda and Program Coordinator, Ellen Hartwell Alderman contributed to the Chicago exhibition.

Uta Barth, …and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.3), 2011

May 14 – August 14, 2011

Since the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Uta Barth has examined photographic and visual perception—how the human eye sees differently from the camera lens and how the incidental and atmospheric can become subject matter in and of themselves. That is to say, she is perhaps less interested in where the camera is pointing than the act of looking through the lens in the first place.

The works that brought her to international attention, the series Ground and Field, presented photographic blurs caused by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground; these lushly colored images tested connections between the descriptive clarity of photography and the haze of memory. The 2002 series, white blind (bright red), which was rooted in the process of staring at a tree outside her window, explored optical after-images as literal and metaphorical modes of perception. And in 2007, Barth produced Sundial, a series of photographs in her home at dusk. Made at the moment when light begins to transition and fade, these images operate between positive and negative, visibility and invisibility, and shadow and light.

Barth’s latest series, … and to draw a bright white line with light, debuts with this Art Institute exhibition. As with much of her earlier work, the domestic setting continues to be fertile ground for nuanced explorations of changes in atmosphere, although for the first time the artist has intervened in the scene she previously had only observed. In this new series, Barth transforms a simple observation—the dance of a ribbon of light across curtains—into a complex photographic experience describing perception and the passage of time. The word “photograph” translates as drawing or writing with light; Barth’s new images, then, are quite literally photographs. This newest work is contextualized in the exhibition with select examples from white blind (bright red) and Sundial that have furthered her investigations into perception and light.

John Storrs, Abstract Forms No. 1, 1917-1919
Granite and marble
Collection of the Newark Museum of Art, NJ

April 12 – July 9, 2011

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist is the first major museum exhibition of work by this important American sculptor in 25 years. Opening at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery on April 12, the show features most of the known works—some 40 items including sculptures, paintings, and drawings―from Storrs’s most innovative period, from 1917 through the early 1930s. Focusing on Storrs’s elegant abstractions of skyscrapers, Machine-Age Modernist remains on view at the Grey Art Gallery through July 9, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that situates the artist within an international avant-garde milieu.

John Storrs (1885–1956), one of America’s foremost modernists, reinvigorated what had become primarily an academic medium, with a dynamism previously unknown in the United States. Situated at the forefront of both European and American avant-garde movements, Storrs participated in a vibrant, early 20th-century culture enthralled with invention. Although he lived and worked in France for most of his career, Storrs was born in Chicago and maintained partial residency there throughout his life due to a stipulation in his father’s will. “This transatlantic life allowed Storrs to straddle multiple artistic communities, audiences, and debates, a situation that resulted in his radical renewal of sculpture in both France and the United States,” observes guest curator Debra Bricker Balken, who organized the show with the Boston Athenaeum. Storrs drew inspiration from American life and culture, whatever the lure of France and its staggering, seductive heritage.” While Parisian artistic developments influenced his aesthetic, Storrs continued to be drawn to a particularly American subject: the iconic skyscraper.

The sculptures—29 examples are featured—range in size from intimate to impressive, with some over six feet tall. Included in the Grey Art Gallery’s presentation are major works from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. Storrs’s interest in soaring verticality was influenced by the burgeoning field of American architecture, which saw the construction of the earliest steel-framed buildings capable of reaching heights never before possible. Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery, notes, “We are pleased to present the sculptures of John Storrs at NYU. Our location amidst the cityscape of downtown Manhattan provides an evocative environment for his distinctive architectural forms.”

In addition to studying architecture on his own, Storrs received a peripatetic formal education, spending brief periods at various art academies including the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also trained abroad, with artists Arthur Bock in Hamburg in 1905 and Auguste Rodin in Paris in 1913. Perhaps even more formative were his childhood years in Chicago, where he was impressed by the modernist structures at the World’s Columbian Exposition and works by local architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Storrs much preferred the simplified, functional approach of Sullivan and Wright to the Beaux-Arts architectural aesthetic then in vogue in the United States, which he viewed as too traditional and conformist. In contrast, in his stylized, architectonic sculptures, Storrs absorbed and referenced the austere style of Chicago modernism.

Explorations of planar forms are at the core of the works featured in Machine-Age Modernist. Examples carved from stone in the late 1910s and early ’20s reflect Storrs’s interest in Native American art, which he discovered while travelling through the American West in 1914 with his wife Marguerite, a French writer. In the later 1920s, Storrs’s interest in geometry was realized in lustrous metal structures. These pieces reflect Storrs’s attraction to the skyline of New York City―which he visited on several occasions―and to the Machine Age’s streamlined aesthetic.

Embracing sleek industrial design and characterized by an obsession with mass-produced objects such as the automobile and the steel-framed skyscraper, the Machine Age provided an ideal context for Storrs. During the 1920s, he successfully melded his interest in Americana with his earlier explorations of pure geometric abstraction. While many of the sculptures produced during this period retain surface decoration that recalls Art Deco, others are quite spare and anticipate Minimalism’s reductivist aesthetic of the 1960s. Storrs’s approach appealed to a Machine Age society eager to celebrate modernism and technological advances. Several large sculptural commissions resulted. One, a 31-foot-high aluminum figure of Ceres, would serve as the Chicago Board of Trade building’s renowned finial and is represented in the show by two studies. A stylized, svelte, metallic Art Deco goddess, Ceres resembles a classical column. Adorned with sheaves of wheat, she symbolizes American agricultural fecundity.

With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, commissions became scarce and sculptural materials too costly. In response, Storrs increasingly turned toward painting, a less expensive medium. The paintings included in Machine-Age Modernist convey Storrs’s sculptural concerns translated into two dimensions. They also introduce Surrealism’s influence, demonstrated by Storrs’s addition of biomorphic forms to his vocabulary of angular geometries. Storrs also created many works on paper. Some were studies for projects that were later executed in three dimensions; others are pure exercises in imagination.

The sculptures, paintings, and drawings in Machine-Age Modernist represent a high point in a long and influential international career. Storrs’s Franco-American lifestyle allowed him to foster friendships with prominent artists on both sides of the Atlantic. In Paris, he became familiar with the Cubist sculptural experiments of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Jacques Lipchitz, which profoundly informed Storrs’s own manipulations of geometric shapes. He later met the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, with whom he shared an interest in representing essential forms in three dimensions. Back in the United States, Storrs knew members of Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York, a circle of artists that included Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, and Morton Schamberg. Other artistic acquaintances of Storrs during the 1920s included Francis Picabia, Marsden Hartley, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, and Fernand Léger. This international, avant-garde context is reflected in the many dynamic works on view in John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist. Poised at the forefront of European and American artistic movements, Storrs created an art that convincingly attests to the multi-faceted concerns of a society enraptured with the sleek aesthetic embodied by early skyscrapers.

Elizabeth Murray, Möbius Band, 1974
Oil on canvas, 14 x 28 inches (35.6 cm x 71.1 cm)
Collection of Ellen Phelan and Joel Shapiro

March 31 – April 30, 2011

The Pace Gallery is pleased to present its eighth exhibition devoted to the work of Elizabeth Murray and the gallery’s first exhibition since Murray’s death in 2007. Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ‘70s will feature thirty oil on canvas paintings created between 1970 and 1980, including important loans from the Detroit Institute of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as three later paintings. The exhibition will be on view at The Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, from March 31 through April 30, 2011. The gallery will remain open from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 7.

Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ‘70s is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Robert Storr, Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Storr organized an important retrospective of nearly forty years of Murray’s work in October 2005 to inaugurate the Museum of Modern Art’s building. The occasion of this retrospective marked the first time a living artist was the subject of a one-person exhibition in the museum’s new space and, perhaps as importantly, it was the first full-scale exhibition devoted to a female artist at the Museum since Helen Frankenthaler’s retrospective in 1989. The exhibition later travelled to the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Spain (2006). Storr also included Murray’s work in his exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense at the Italian Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale (June-November 2007). Murray’s painting Do the Dance (2005), which MoMA acquired from Pace’s 2006 exhibition Elizabeth Murray: Paintings 2003–2006, is currently on view in the museum.

Surveying the decade of works on view in Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ‘70s, it is evident that the early 1970s was a period of intense growth and experimentation for Murray, who had moved to New York City three years earlier. The cartoon-influenced narratives that characterized her work in the mid to late ‘60s evolved in the early ‘70s into a more non-figurative approach to painting. Murray, who had once again embraced oil paint, concerned herself with the most elemental components of a composition: line, shape, color, and surface. Her reductive, linear paintings from this period were created in dialogue with Brice Marden’s monochrome grounds and Jasper John’s painterly surfaces. Works such as Untitled (After Golden Delicious) and Giant Maiden, dating from 1972, have mottled, impastoed surfaces punctuated by swathes of golden yellow, deep green, rusty red and cobalt blue. Her forms are irregular circles and asymmetrical arches that hug the top or bottom of the painting and triangles whose corners meet the sides of the canvas, all of which push against the constraints of the rectangle.

By 1973, Murray had refined her voice and was creating paintings that utilized a geometric language to build an abstract form of narrative. Three bodies of work emerged around this time: the Step paintings, stacked rectangles and squares and irregular ladder-like structures; the horizontal Mobius Band compositions anchored by tiny squares of solid color; and the small-scale Heart Beat paintings, straight lines radiating from a half moon shape and pulsating with energy. These paintings were Murray’s response to the male-dominated painting styles of the decade.

As the decade progressed, Murray became increasingly ambitious as a painter. Around 1975–6, her paintings grew from the more intimately-scaled works of the early ‘70s to large-scale shaped canvases composed of curvilinear, geometric images and bold color combinations. The pictorial tension of these complex paintings, such as Parting and Together, 1978, and Twist of Fate, 1979, both of which will be on view in the exhibition, pushed the boundaries of the two-dimensional picture plane, foreshadowing the three-dimensional paintings that would characterize Murray’s work in the 1980s.

By the end of the ‘70s, Murray no longer felt constrained by the traditional limitations of painting. Figuration and abstraction converged with a re-emergence of cartoon-like imagery and developing a personal narrative took on a larger role in her works. The exhibition presents one of Murray’s early, iconic paintings from 1971―Beer Glass at Noon, a skewed still life of a beer glass painted in a stylized manner that paid homage to Cézanne, Gris, and Picasso. Nine years later, the reintroduction of scenes from her everyday life enlivened Murray’s practice once again. The stemmed glass as a subject reappears in Breaking, 1980, an asymmetrical two-part painting divided by a zigzag running down the center of a frenetic composition that plays out across both halves. Upon closer inspection, the viewer realizes that the painting is an image of a glass shattering into pieces, with its blue liquid spilling out. In 1986, Murray revisits Beer Glass at Noon, created 15 years earlier, with two Beer Glass compositions painted in a style reminiscent of this early ‘70s work. Both paintings will be on view in the exhibition.

Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ‘70s also includes the last painting Murray created in her lifetime, Everybody Knows (2007), which is being exhibited for the first time. Seen alongside her first mature works from the 1970s, Everybody Knows underscores the radical, pioneering nature of Elizabeth Murray’s journey as a painter.

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago – d. 2007, New York) received a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago (1962) and an M.F.A. from Mills College, Oakland, California (1964). She was awarded honorary degrees from her alma mater, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1992), as well as the Rhode Island School of Design (1993) and the New School University (2001). Murray’s work has been the subject of more than 85 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since her New York City debut in the 1972 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum, where she participated in six Whitney Biennial exhibitions from 1973 to 1991. Murray first exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1974 and joined Pace in 1996. In 1987–88, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, jointly organized a major retrospective exhibition of Murray’s paintings and drawings that later traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Des Moines Art Center, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum. Not long after, Murray was invited to participate in the 1988–9 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art invited Murray to curate an Artist’s Choice exhibition: Elizabeth Murray: Modern Women at the Museum of Modern Art, following her inclusion in Kirk Varnedoe’s exhibition High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990–91). (In that installation, Varnedoe juxtaposed Murray’s work with that of Jeff Koons.) Additional one-person museum shows have been presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (1991–92), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998), and the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover (2002). In 2009, the Arts Club of Chicago presented an exhibition of eleven of Murray’s paintings dating from 1981 to 2007. A catalogue with an essay by writer, curator, and educator Sarah Lewis accompanied the exhibition.

Murray was the recipient of the Walter M. Campana Award from the Art Institute of Chicago (1982), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1984), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1986), the Larry Aldrich Prize in Contemporary Art (1993), and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (1999). In 1992, Murray became a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, New York. She was also honored by Artists Space, New York, in 2001. In introducing Murray that evening, Varnedoe referred to her work “as dramas of form and color that accept, indeed demand, to play on the more austere terrain of high abstract art, in decisions about push and pull, bright and dark, fragmented and whole, planes and volumes, sculptural and painterly, that move us before we know what they are about.” In June 2002, Murray and her husband, poet Bob Holman, were bestowed with the National Artist Award by Anderson Ranch Art Center, Aspen. Four years later, Murray was presented with the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement at their 94th Annual Conference.

In addition to the four paintings on loan from museums, Murray’s work is part of public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Spain; Israel Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Saint Louis Art Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among many others. Both the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of America Art own multiple examples of her work.

Installation view.

January 14 – February 19, 2011

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition by Chicago based artist Judy Ledgerwood. Activating the space between the painting and the viewer, Ledgerwood’s patterns are composed of shapes proportioned to the body of the viewer, and various color interactions within those shapes. This relationship between the pictorial and the physical space is often linked to Color Field painting, a style of abstract painting in which large fields of solid color create a flat picture plane, emphasizing process and consistency of form.

Chromatic Patterns for Chicago are new wall paintings, with a repeating pattern in rich manganese blue, metallic copper, and florescent pink on one wall, and ultramarine blue, fluorescent red, and burnt umber paint on the other. With their drooping, irregular edges, the wall paintings appear to hang on a fictional support against the wall while simultaneously mimicking the wall itself. Ledgerwood’s bright hues are selected to contrast the frigid Chicago climate and respond to the physical space in the front gallery, which she views as a theatrical box with a screen-like window facing the street.

The Blob Paintings displayed in the middle gallery space are new works for Ledgerwood as well. Composed of two-part urethane foam, color is added to a mixture and then to an activator which hardens the work. Once the activator is added, Ledgerwood has no more than 60 seconds to make the painting. These works, which are performative in their making, differ from Ledgerwood’s more controlled practices of the past. Just as the two-dimensional works engage the space with color interaction, the blob paintings physically reach toward the viewer, and are more akin to sculpture. More literal and more immediate, these paintings use alternate means to articulate the very same ideas as Ledgerwood’s two-dimensional wall paintings.

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2011
Graphite and gesso on panel
15 x 17 inches

January 22 – February 26, 2011

Shane Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce Like a Rare Morel, an exhibition of graphite and metalpoint works on birch panel by Michelle Grabner.

This exhibition marks Grabner’s return to domesticated geometric pattern. Gingham, a plain-woven fabric where the warp and weft are aligned to form a simple perpendicular crossing pattern is the basis of Grabner’s recent metalpoint panel works. Gold, silver, copper, and graphite are employed to imitate the basic grid structure generated by gingham weave. The small scale of these works, their minimal gestures, and their ever-changing metal patina up-stage their common reference soliciting theoretical notions of times and geometric abstraction. These simple works re-postulate the restlessness set forth by the long-standing theoretical debates between the polemical conditions of representation and non-representation, relative and non-relative, material and immaterial, the measurable and the immeasurable.

Michelle Grabner’s work is currently on view in A Shot in the Dark at The Walker Art Center and Collaborating with Michelle Grabner isn’t as fun as you think it is” at Gallery 16 in San Francisco.  She is a professor and department chair of the Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and along with her husband Brad Killam runs the artist-run exhibition spaces: The Suburban, Oak Park, IL and The Poor Farm, Waupaca County WI. Grabner’s work is included in the public collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Opens November 13, 2010

October 21 – November 27, 2010

Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Sound on Sound, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Christopher Wool.

This is the first solo show for Wool in Chicago since 1986. He lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, but was raised here, in Hyde Park. An internationally renowned painter, Wool first rose to prominence with a series of bold text-based paintings, some of which were shown in an important three-person exhibit at The Renaissance Society (with Albert Oehlen and Georg Herold) in 1989. Over the last thirty years, Wool has explored many different methods for creating abstract images, often utilizing printmaking techniques in combination with painting. His palette is generally reduced to black, white, and grey, with occasional passages of color taking on a highly dramatic role. In his more recent works, including those in this show, he uses enamel on linen, spray painting looping black lines, then erasing or blurring them with rags, engaging in a complex play of presence and absence, gesture and cancellation.

Sound on Sound will feature three major paintings and four large scale (6-foot tall) works on paper, the latter pitting dripped or rolled paint against silk-screened backgrounds

Part of the exhibition’s inspiration comes from the music of Joe McPhee, an important underground jazz musician from Poughkeepsie, New York. McPhee is a favorite of both Wool and Corbett vs. Dempsey, and the title of the show comes from a 1968 recording of his that has never been issued. McPhee will perform solo at the gallery on November 20, in celebration of the first release of this incredible music. Wool designed the CD covers and used ephemeral McPhee materials in his designs for the exhibition invitation and advertisements.

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The Suburban, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam’s Oak Park based art space celebrates it’s 10th anniversary with an encyclopedic compendium of it’s long history. Introductory essays by Forrest Nash and Michael Newman & design by Jason Pickleman.

Artists: Kevin Appel, Vasco Araujo, David Hullfish Bailey, Mike Banicki, BANK, Stephen Berens, Cindy Bernard, Walead Beshty, Dike Blair, Gregg Bordowitz, Keil Borrman, Andrea Bowers, Yvette Brackman, Troy Brauntuch, Ralf Brög, Alex Brown, Elizabeth Bryant, Elijah Burgher, Michael Byron, Lisa Caccioppoli, Gary Cannone, Todd Chilton, Peter Coffin, Cip Contreras, David Coyle, Julian Dashper, Paul Druecke, Meg Duguid, Jeanne Dunning, Sam Durant, Tim Ebner, Mari Eastman, Sharon Engelstein, Karl Erickson, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Jan Estep, Peter Fagundo, Andrew Falkowski, Ken Fandell, Rochelle Feinstein, Tony Feher, Joel Feldman, Andreas Fischer, Bernard Frize, Ceal Floyer, Howard Fonda, Gabe Fowler, Nicholas Frank, Alicia Frankovich, Gaylen Gerber, Matthew Girson, Amy Granat, Terri Griffith & Serena Worthington, Joseph Grigely, Katharina Grosse, Wade Guyton, Karl Haendel, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Terence Hannum, Paula Hayes, Julia Hechtman, Drew Heitzler, Adriane Herman, Alex Herzog, Matthew Higgs, Richard Holland, Steven Husby, Jessica Hutchins, Sergej Jensen, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Mitchell Kane, Clinton King, Jakob Kolding, Konsortium, Michael Krebber, Olga Koumoundouros, Thomas Lawson, Shana Lutker, Duncan MacKenzie, Cameron Martin, Corey McCorkle, Rodney McMillan, Sam Messer & Jonathan Safran Foer, Olivier Mosset, Dave Muller, N55, John Neff, Peter Newman, John Nixon, Helen Maria Nugent, Jamisen Ogg, Olof Olsson, Aaron Parazette, Amy Park, Martin Parr, Claire Pentecost, Joe Pflieger, Jan van der Ploeg, Elizabeth Pulsinelli, Autumn Ramsey, David Reed, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Matthew Rich, David Robbins, Kay Rosen, Susie Rosmarin, Sherman Sam, Loul Samater, Maya Schindler, Shane Aslan Selzer, Marie Shannon, Stan Shellabarger & Dutes Miller, Joe Smith, Michael Smith, Chris Sperandio, David G. A. Stephenson, Kirsten Stoltmann, Shannon Stratton, Ricky Swallow, Neil Taylor, Mungo Thomson, Padraig Timoney, Nevin Tomlinson, Brad Tucker, Gavin Turk, Luc Tuymans, Lesley Vance, Philip Vanderhyden, Pedro Velez, Michael Velliquette, Amy Vogel, Dan Walsh, Jeff M. Ward, James Welling, Curtis Whaley, Griff Williams, Kelly Williams, Kevin Wolff, Lars Wolter, B. Wurtz, Andrea Zittel and The Smockshop

6.25 x 6.25 inches
Published by Poor Farm Press

Film still with Julian Dashper

Starting August 26, 2010, on YouTube, you can view the film My Space, by Simone Horrocks & Richard Flynn with Julian Dashper.

Early in 2008, Dashper approached film makers Simone Horrocks and Richard Flynn, with the idea of collaborating on a film project. It was important to Dashper that we remain open to where the filming might take us, but together we agreed that the film in some way would be : ‘A meditation on the meaning of success and failure in an artist’s life’.

We filmed with Dashper between June and October 2008, as he travelled between Auckland, Sydney and Chicago. It was Dashper’s wish that my space would premiere on YouTube.

Work by Richard Roth

June 27 – September 10, 2010

Installation view

July 31 – August 21, 2010
By appointment

Sara Schnadt is a Chicago-based performance/installation artist. Raised on an international commune in Scotland, an ‘alternative’ context which considered itself as a social experiment outside of conventional culture, she spent formative years understanding herself as an outsider, an observer. Since moving to the United States in 1986, Sara has become fascinated with the unifying rituals and values that are common threads in contemporary western culture, and has made work that frames and resonates with those common threads.

Formally, Sara makes performance and installations that use task, found objects, interactivity, projection, and movement derived from common gestures. Her work creates environments that shift the audience regularly from spectator to participant as the performer constantly moves between pedestrian and more stylized or evocative activity and the viewer negotiates spacial immersion in the work.

Works often take shape as installations and live activities that translate data visualizations of large quantities of socially-resonant information into material, gestural and poetic form.

Network, Domestic Intervention

Since November 2009, site-specific versions of Network have been created in Chicago for an unused store front downtown and a gallery space at Hyde Park Art Center. For What it is, a version of Network will be created to inhabit the entire house that is the project space and artists’ live-work space and extend out into the garden.

Visualizing the idea that we simultaneously live in a real and virtual world, and that the virtual is infinitely expansive, Network uses large quantities of electric yellow twine (tied in patterns based on both social network structures and Internet network infrastructure) to suggest a virtual network landscape cutting through an otherwise ordinary space.

Artists/curators/residents Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes will also live with the work in their home for a month, negotiating their routines around it. A series of photographs will document their activity for the project catalog.

Sara Schnadt is a Chicago-based artist working in new media, installation and performance art. She has shown her in work in Chicago at Hyde Park Art Center, Pop-Up Art Loop temporary gallery series, 12×12: New Artists New Work at the MCA Chicago, Looptopia, the Site Unseen Performance Festival, Balloon Contemporary, and at Antena Gallery. National and international shows include Exchange Rate public projection series in LA and New York, Upgrade! – Chain Reaction in Skopje, Macedonia, CINEA Paris, FreeManifesta in Frankfurt, and the Busan Biennale in Busan, South Korea.

View more installation photos here.

Installation view

May 14 – June 19, 2010

Rocket presents new paintings from the ‘Black Circle’ series by the Chicago-based artist, writer and curator Michelle Grabner. This is Grabner’s fifth exhibition at Rocket.

April 23 – May 22, 2010

Participating Artists:
Michelle Grabner, Katharina Grosse, Brad Killam, Philip Vanderhyden & Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

The exhibition, “I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with Michelle Grabner is dull” brings together the work of four antithetical painters who Michelle Grabner, the Chicago-based artist, heralds as profoundly enabling to her own unvaried and unimaginative abstract investigations. The exhibition is diverting and self-critical, juxtaposing Grabner’s work with the work of Katharina Grosse (Berlin), Molly Zuckerman-Hartung (Chicago) Philip Vanderhyden (New York), and her husband, Brad Killam (Chicago). Grabner’s enthusiasm for dull Eucleadean rules and reductive visual vocabulary are absolved when measured against the gestural, chromatic, and material explorations by four artists she greatly esteems.

Grabner’s attraction to the transcending virtues of quantity and form via the act of counting points and lines is the result of theoretical and cultural imprinting. After all, Grabner is a middle age, middle class, mid-career, Mid-western mother of three who is deeply unsettled by her own subjectivity. The ‘other’ paintings in the exhibition expose the unrelieved and idealistic conceit that Grabner desperately clings to when she is in the studio.

Michelle Grabner’s exhibition at MINUS SPACE continues through May 1, 2010.

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2010
Black gesso & silverpoint on 300lb Arches hot press paper
30 x 22 inches

March 27 – May 1, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new exhibition of drawings by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Grabner works primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking, and her practice is commonly organized around straightforward mathematical systems.

For her exhibition, Grabner will present a new series of drawings made from black gesso and silverpoint on heavyweight paper. In contrast to her other work, Grabner thinks of her drawing practice as “purely playing — it’s curiosity.” She continues saying, “The drawing just has to be executed, I have to play through it. I’m working on a lot of silverpoints right now; they’re not painting, but in their presence, I see them as an extension of painting.”

Michelle Grabner has exhibited her work extensively, including in North America, Europe, and Australia. Her work has been presented at museums, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Kunsthalle (Bern, Switzerland), Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Smart Museum (Chicago, IL), Mary and Leigh Block Museum (Evanston, IL), Naples Museum of Art (Naples, FL), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, MN).

Her work has been reviewed widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Musée d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Daimler Art Collection (Berlin, Germany), and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC).

Michelle Grabner is also a professor and chairperson of the Department of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in Chicago, and an MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

In addition to her artistic work, Grabner and her husband, artist Brad Killam, founded and direct The Suburban, a very well regarded, experimental exhibition space in Oak Park, Illinois. Grabner has also written extensively for publications, such as ArtForum, Modern Painters, Frieze, and X-tra.

In collaboration with MINUS SPACE, Grabner recently organized the online VIEWLIST project There are many things in the air and all of them are for free, published in May 2009. Her work was also included in the group exhibition Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in August 2009.

A comprehensive interview with Michelle Grabner by Saul Ostrow appears in the March 2010 issue of Art in America magazine.

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

Installation view

The Lesley Heller Workspace is pleased to present The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now, an exhibition organized by guest curator Jason Andrew, featuring the work of artists associated with The Wells Street Gallery, one of Chicago’s vanguard galleries of the late 1950s.

On exhibition will be works from the Wells Street Gallery period (1957-1959) as well as examples of recent work by a majority of the original artists associated with the gallery including: painters Richard Bogart, Ernest Dieringer, Judith Dolnick, Robert Naktin, Ronald Slowinski, Naomi Tatum, Gerald van de Wiele, Donald Vlack, sculptor John Chamberlain, and photographer Aaron Siskind.

The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now is the first exhibition of it’s kind, uniting the tough gang of young Chicago abstract artists who together ran the Wells Street Gallery from 1957-1959. They were “a band of young, fire-eating vanguard artists,” wrote the prominent art critic Franz Schultze in Art News, and the gallery was tagged “an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town,” by the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

The Wells Street Gallery played a major role in granting young artists like sculptor John Chamberlain and painter Robert Natkin their first one-person exhibitions at a time when too few galleries in Chicago, or elsewhere for that matter, where interested in the work of abstract artists. This exhibition pays tribute to this artist-run gallery and the brief yet historic contribution it made in advancing abstract art in Chicago.

“The Wells Street Group,” as they were called, were “sewn together by a plucky and often exciting lot of young painters,” wrote Franz Schultze. The group’s colorful, vigorous, nonobjective and non-representational expressive paintings were distinguishable from the “Monster Roster” of Chicago expressionists, lead by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, and the Bauhaus-influenced formalists, leading critics to consider them the counterpart to the New York School of abstract expressionist calling them the new “Chicago School.”

Jason Andrew is an independent curator and archivist. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, Andrew is the founding director of Norte Maar, which encourages, promotes and supports collaborations in the arts. Guarding against any special interest in any particular style or genre, his curatorial projects bridge gaps left in art history and reflect the creative imagination of the past, present and future. Recent curatorial projects include the retrospective exhibition Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes / Five Decades of Painting, and the new paintings by young painter Brooke Moyse.