Studio view September 25 – October 31, 2010
Escape from New York, Curated by Matthew Deleget, The Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
April 22 - May 8, 2010
MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the group exhibition Escape from New York at The Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, from April 22 - May 8, 2010. Curated by Matthew Deleget, the exhibition surveys reductive strategies by 29 artists living in and around New York City. Each artist will present a single small work, as well as an open letter to the local community of artists.
Escape from New York, Curated by Matthew Deleget, Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
May 8-29, 2009
RMIT University School of Art and Sydney Non Objective present contemporary non-objective practice from MINUS SPACE New York. A survey of reductive strategies by artists living in and around New York City. Presenting a single work from each artist, as well as an open letter to the artist community affiliated with RMIT Non Objective.
The Idea of North, 210 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Installation view April 18 – May 24, 2009 Paintings by Michael Brennan, sculptures by Cyrilla Mozenter
Non-Objectif Sud 2009 Fundraiser, Gary Snyder Gallery, New York, NY
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 6-8pm Wine bar and hors d’oeuvres Gary Snyder Project Space 250 West 26th Street 4th floor, between 7th & 8th Ave. New York, NY 10001 for inquiries please call 646 325 4581 Tickets $25 NOS Donor $50 NOS Patron $100 NOS Benefactor, includes or more acknowledgment in 2009 catalogue Raffle Win a DAN WALSH work Tickets: 1 for $30, 2 for $50, 5 for $100 All other works for sale $500 [...]
Interview with Michael Brennan, by Jacob Gossett, Kollektiv magazine, 2009
Michael Brennan: Knife Paintings MINUS SPACE project space, Brooklyn, 2006 Skeleton Star, Knife Painting #3 (left) Bishop, Knife Painting #2 (right) Jacob Gossett: How long have you been teaching here at Pratt and what brought you to this school? Michael Brennan: I’ve been teaching here for 10 years—I went here for MFA from ’90 to 92. I was out of Pratt for several years, showing some and doing a lot of writing [...]
Linda Francis: Interference
February 2009
MINUS SPACE is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by New York artist Linda Francis. Francis will show a single painting conceived in three parts for the project space.
Minus Space at P.S.1 Extended
Installation in cafe space Exhibition in cafe space continues until May 2009. (Boiler Room exhibition closed on January 26, 2009.) MINUS SPACE Curated by Phong Bui P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate Long Island City, NY The exhibition is curated by artist, Brooklyn Rail publisher, and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui, and includes the work of 54 artists from 14 countries. The exhibition marks MINUS SPACE’s 5th anniversary. [...]
Michael Brennan at 210 Gallery and P.S.1, No Hassle at the Castle blog, by Paul Corio
Installation view at 210 Gallery
Simple: Ross Neher, Michael Brennan & David Row, Gallery 210, Brooklyn, NY
October 11 – December 5, 2008 Gallery Location: 210 24th Street, Brookyn, NY; Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12-6pm.
Minus Space, Curated by Phong Bui, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate, Long Island City, NY
October 19, 2008 - May 4, 2009
MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce our exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. P.S.1 is one of the oldest and largest non-profit arts centers in the United States solely devoted to contemporary art. The exhibition is curated by artist, Brooklyn Rail publisher, and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui, and includes the work of 54 artists from 14 countries. The exhibition marks MINUS SPACE's 5th anniversary.
Breaking the White Light, Platform, New York, NY
Michael Brennan, (Fedallah) Knife Painting 1, 2007 Oil wax and acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 inches September 6 — October 6, 2007 Curated by artist Scott Malbaurn, Breaking the White Light features eight artists ranging from emerging to mid and late career. They work with abstraction and processes associated with this practice. This show is an attempt to put forth a manner of abstraction that crosses formal and conceptual ideas. Many of these [...]
Escape from New York, Curated by Matthew Deleget, Sydney Non Objective, Sydney, Australia
August 3 - September 2, 2007
A group exhibition surveying reductive strategies by artists living in and around New York City. Each artist will present a single work, as well as an open letter to the artist community affiliated with Sydney Non Objective.
Michael Zahn: This, That, and the Other
April 2007
Brooklyn artist Michael Zahn's exhibition presents simple materials, organized into a loose picture of an immersive symbolic space. His project is accompanied by an in-depth online interview conducted by MINUS SPACE artist Michael Brennan, in which the two discuss Zahn's paintings based on digital iconography.
Interview with Michael Zahn, by Michael Brennan
Michael Zahn, Stellar, 2005 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 80 inches MS artist Michael Zahn interviewed by MS artist Michael Brennan. Published on the occasion Zahn’s exhibition This, That, and the Other at MINUS SPACE project space, April 2007.
Neighborhood Beat — Profile on MINUS SPACE & Michael Brennan, BCAT / Brooklyn Community Access Television
Michael Brennan, Razor Painting #2, 2006 Oil, wax and alkyd on canvas, 16 x 24 inches Time Warner channel 56, Cablevision channel 69, (Episode 31) Jan. 25, Feb. 14, Feb. 19, Feb. 23 @ 8:30pm
Michael Brennan: Knife Paintings
December 2006
Brooklyn artist Michael Brennan's installation consists of five new paintings produced since relocating from the Bowery in Lower Manhattan to the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. The paintings reflect the change in his environment and a newfound feeling for structural form inspired by the industrial remnants — smokestack towers, derelict advertising signs, metal barges, the elevated subway platform and Brooklyn/Queens Expressway — of his new surroundings.
Robert Yasuda at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Robert Yasuda, Coco-Palm (2006) Robert Yasuda’s work stands well in a corner. His current exhibition includes three narrow corner paintings (“Half Full,” “Simple Truth,” and “Bonjour”) that work like studs or posts, rising vertically with a strenuous elegance, adding a sense of rigor to his otherwise atmospheric abstractions. Yasuda has favored the corner for some time, and his work, even in group shows, always seems to shine from that unlikely spot. Formally, they recall [...]
Interview with Michael Brennan, by Michael Zahn
View of Gowanus Canal from MINUS SPACE project space Michael Zahn: I’m looking at your new Knife Paintings, and they’re quite unlike anything you’ve done previously. The intersecting black diagonals are visually pretty swift. The drawing has a striking, highly stylized movement to it, and this palette has a gruff quality that feels like a quick crack in the chops. These two yellow and orange color planes are fairly terse and down to [...]
Don Voisine and Richard Bottwin at Metaphor Contemporary Art, by Michael Brennan
One weekend I visited three different artists’ studios, including Don Voisine. All three are abstract painters, and I noticed that each of them was listening to blues music. Its just a coincidence, but I feel that it is also somehow indicative of our time. Blues can often be uproariously comic and bitingly incisive too, and, despite the name, the blues are anything but one dimensional. In some sense this is also how I feel about [...]
Joseph Marioni at Peter Blum Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Although he has shown extensively in Europe for many years, it’s only in the past decade, when he began showing with Peter Blum, that his stature in America has grown large in a more public way. This, despite the fact that Marioni exhibited his work at Bykert Gallery in the 70’s, was tapped by Brice Marden for a show at Artists Space, and was included in a recent Whitney Biennial. However, it took the New [...]
Stephen Ellis at Von Lintel Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Ellis’ current show at Von Lintel Gallery picks up where his last show of word-based “Jeremiad” paintings left off. In this new series the words themselves were left off. Despite the disappearance of text, and its air of desperation, these new paintings share much in common with their immediate predecessors. The rant itself has become less overt, but the seething materiality, which is fire-eating at bottom, essentially remains the same. The seven paintings included here [...]
Harvey Quaytman at McKee Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Harvey Quaytman kept a secret. He had a display case in his studio, which was often obscured from plain view that contained handcrafted models of vintage aircraft. The late Quaytman was no Bluebeard, but he did prefer to keep his hobby to himself—perhaps because he was afraid that it might lead to a literal reading of his abstract paintings. Clearly Quaytman’s work is not all about airplanes but, in fact, both his art and his [...]
Interview with Linda Francis, by Matthew Deleget
The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in December 2004 in conjunction with Linda Francis’ spotlight exhibition. Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview with a brief discussion of your background. You were born and raised in New York City (The Bronx). What was you first contact with the arts? Was visual art something that was understood and supported? Linda Francis: At the time, one could get a decent education [...]
David Reed: The Painter and Late Style, by Michael Brennan
David Reed is a grandmaster — no painter has contributed as much in terms of expanding the vocabulary of abstract painting and maintaining its relevance during this era of marginalization, although there are many in New York who currently enjoy greater status. With a rare combination of technical virtuosity, historical ambition, and genuine image innovation Reed’s work is advancing in a world that’s dissolving into total digital delusion. No other post-modern painter has developed an [...]
Tony Smith at Matthew Marks Gallery, Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, by Michael Brennan
If only everything were so black and white. The Tony Smith show at Matthew Marks was essentially all black, while the Anish Kapoor show next door at Barbara Gladstone, which was entitled “Whiteout”, was whiter than a teenage divas’ wedding cake. Both shows included heavyweight works by two sculptors mainly preoccupied with the matrimony of the material to the immaterial. Although the artists are generations apart (Smith died in 1980 at age 68 and Kapoor [...]
Johanna Pousette-Dart at Charles Cowles Gallery, by Michael Brennan
How do two planes meet? Forget Henny Youngman for a second, this is the kind of question that painters often worry over. Granted it’s an issue that most people today are oblivious to, especially masons, judging from the snaggletooth brick face one sees on any new building. This subject of planes-the transition of form within painting-has been given great and careful consideration by the painter Joanna Pousette-Dart. This was Pousette-Dart’s first solo show in nearly [...]
Jake Berthot at McKee Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Cezanne baseballs. Who are these for? The thought crossed my mind while handling some regulation baseballs that were imprinted with images Cezanne’s bathers and his wife Hortense. They were for sale, along with the usual sundries, at the tail end of the exhaustive retrospective in Philadelphia eight years ago. Although absurd, I concluded that these baseballs were somehow an appropriately American cultural response. How else might our culture make use of Cezanne, whose work is [...]
Terry Winters at Matthew Marks Gallery, by Michael Brennan
Let’s begin by dropping some stock material. Abandoning, for a moment, dystopia, information theory, or recalling Piranesi’s prison etchings for the umpteenth time, along with metastasizing mutatis mutandis and all of the Popular Science pseudo-scientific (scientistic really) rhetoric that sticks so easily to the toothy surfaces of Terry Winters’ work. Winters is an important artist. His paintings have proven relevant because they reveal the often invisible operations of the wilder, real and artless avant-gardes informing [...]
Bill Jensen at Mary Boone Gallery, by Michael Brennan
I like looking at Bill Jensen’s paintings the same way I like watching little league baseball players. In both cases, all of their emotions are right on the surface. Emotional investment is an increasingly uncommon quality in the world today, but it was visibly evident in Jensen’s latest exhibition of paintings at Mary Boone’s gallery uptown. This show, which closed just recently, was the latest in a series that has defined the painter’s newfound and [...]