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Installation view

 
 
 
 

Surface of a Sphere

Curated by Daniel Gerwin
July 13 - August 25, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13th 6-8pm
Curator-Led Walkthrough: Saturday August 11th, 11am-12pm

 

Loren Britton
Martha Clippinger
Daniel Gerwin
Justine Hill
Tomashi Jackson
Nick Kramer
Fabienne Lasserre
David Lloyd
Becca Lowry
Cordy Ryman
Rachel Eulena Williams

 

The 1960s saw an explosion of art reimagining the relationship of space to the object, turning void into matter to be shaped as previous generations worked with stone, metal, and pigment. In that decade, artists began to abandon the self-contained rectangle in favor of shaped paintings that definitively announced themselves as objects engaged with their surrounding environment, often with sculptural qualities. Surface of a Sphere considers how far contemporary artists have traveled since modernism’s exploration of space and objecthood, revisiting and extending the legacy of shaped painting while generating new possibilities. The artists included are from the East and West Coasts as well as North Carolina and Berlin, and the exhibition will travel to the Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York City in 2019.

 

Among today’s painters who eschew the rectangle, there is a tendency toward complexity, fragmentation, and irregularity, rather than the clear geometries and solid hues preferred by Ellsworth Kelly, or the flat stripes and shapes of Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons or his Protractor Series. This shift constitutes a move away from modernist orthodoxies such as purity and idealism toward the idiosyncrasies of postmodernism, as well as an argument that real life is best embodied by art that is untidy, even awkward.

 

Rejecting the 20th century conception of an object that represents only itself, today’s shaped painters use formal strategies to inject signification directly into their work. Contemporary shaped painting owes more to artists such as Elizabeth Murray and Joe Overstreet than to minimalists and geometric abstraction. While previous generations typically wrapped canvas over a form in order to paint it, artists now work on all manner of surfaces, developing eccentric structures with disparate elements, materials, and off-kilter arrangements. This emphasis on heterogeneity feels particularly important in a political moment when the push for oligarchic hegemony is stronger than ever, and resistance is arising through diverse coalitions.

 

Some of the included artists are concerned primarily with interactions of form and color in space, including Fabienne Lassere, whose paintings extend from the wall like diaphanous insect wings, and Martha Clippinger, whose painted assemblies of found wood are joyful inventions in vivid hues that draw upon game boards as well as Southern and Mexican folk art. Cordy Ryman creates brightly colored wooden elements that he combines and arranges to alter the energies of the architectural environment. David Lloyd’s works, with their textured marks and collaged passages, reflect his investment in the big relationships of shape, chroma, and surface. Rachel Eulena Williams’s painted constructions, at once coarse and fluid, fully exploit the capacity of interrelated shapes to embody active movement. All these artists share a common language of clunky and at times abject material, transfigured into unfamiliar beauty. The artworks posit a world in which value is found not in the refinement of sleek design and expensive materials, but rather in our own aging faces, surprising discoveries of color, and the rhythms of people rippling along the sidewalk.

 

Other artists assembled here use the context of abstraction to conjure broad representational functions. Nick Kramer’s cast aluminum pieces are ecological paeans, painted in camouflage pattern and including cast clam shells, they were completed over more than a five year period, a rate of development aligned with the natural world. Becca Lowry’s polychrome wooden wall works are oddly organic, suggesting skeletons of fantastical creatures, as though assimilating the powers of other organisms to become protective talismans. Justine Hill’s paintings are developed through shapes and marks reacting to each other through successive iterations, yet the finished works have biomorphic qualities, distinct personality traits, and seem capable of movement, while also suggesting graffiti tags or displaced letters of an unknown alphabet.

 

Material and symbolic strategies can explicitly articulate the political, often through the personal. Loren Britton’s paper pulp wall reliefs extend the language of Queer Abstraction, steeped in political concerns through their materials (pulp made from used papers and documents donated by friends, emphasizing collectivity) and their subject matter, each piece being a tender response to a personal ad in Transvestia, a transgender lifestyle magazine that began in 1960. Daniel Gerwin’s paintings on wood arise from his experiences parenting two young children, each work driven by specific aspects of family life. His use of trompe l’oeil wood grain evokes hardwood floors, tabletops, and other furniture, situating his images in the psychic space of domesticity. This emphasis on children and home rejects old models of masculinity, particularly as they relate to the archetype of the egomaniacal male artist. Tomashi Jackson’s Still Remains includes postal election flyers and Georgia red clay, instantly summoning the long history of Jim Crow in the South and the efforts to overturn it. The contours of the piece recall an electoral district with borders distorted by gerrymandering, a contemporary practice of targeted disenfranchisement.

 

The show’s title, Surface of a Sphere, refers to the fact that although the earth’s surface is a non-Euclidean space, on a sufficiently local level Euclidean geometry is functional. The seemingly paradoxical coexistence of these two mathematical systems evokes the relationship between shaped and rectilinear paintings, art history and the contemporary moment, as well as the multiplicity of perceptions and perspectives that constitute contemporary life. Our political moment makes it especially important to reject false binaries and reconcile apparently contradictory thoughts. In this exhibition, artists use linguistic, material, and symbolic means to demonstrate that abstraction is not a withdrawal from the world but rather its keen embrace. Abstraction’s open imaginative field becomes a portal through which to explore new conceptions of self and our relationships to each other and our environment. Within this context, newer and greater freedoms may be posited.

 

Download Press Release

  • Surface of a Sphere Installation view
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  • Surface of a Sphere Cordy Ryman

    Offshoot Vine
    2018
    Acrylic, enamel, metal hardware and wood
    95 by 128 by 154.5 inches

    12690
  • Surface of a Sphere Daniel Gerwin

    What Happens When We Die
    2017
    Oil and acrylic on wood
    47.5 by 8 inches

    12679
  • Surface of a Sphere Nick Kramer

    Long Island Sound
    2010-18
    Acrylic on cast aluminum
    40.25 by 31.5 by 2.5 inches

    12813
  • Surface of a Sphere Nick Kramer

    Long Island Sound
    2010-18
    Acrylic on cast aluminum
    40.25 by 31.5 by 2.5 inches

    12814
  • Surface of a Sphere Tomashi Jackson

    Still Remains
    2018
    Charcoal, gouache, and Georgia red clay on brown paper bags and congressional flyers from the 2017 race between Jon Ossoff and Karen Handel in Cobb County, Georgia
    87 by 83.5 inches

    12406
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    August
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, thread, spray paint, India ink and oil paint)
    35 by 30 by 8 inches

    12789
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    August
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, thread, spray paint, India ink and oil paint)
    35 by 30 by 8 inches

    12790
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    August (detail)
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, thread, spray paint, India ink and oil paint)
    35 by 30 by 8 inches

    12791
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Untitled
    2018
    Paper pulp
    12.6 by 14 inches

    12804
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Me’l
    2018
    Paper pulp
    15.4 by 14.6 inches

    12812
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Untitled
    2018
    Paper pulp
    9 by 7 inches

    12807
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Checkin
    2018
    Paper pulp
    10 by 13 inches

    12806
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Good
    2018
    Paper pulp
    12.6 by 15.7 inches

    12817
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Good
    2018
    Paper pulp
    12.6 by 15.7 inches

    12811
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Wow
    2018
    Paper pulp
    10.6 by 14.2 inches

    12808
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Child
    2018
    Paper pulp
    11 by 14.5 inches

    12805
  • Surface of a Sphere Loren Britton

    Geist
    2018
    Paper pulp
    14.6 by 13 inches

    12809
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    parcheesi
    2015
    Acrylic on wood
    13 by 13 by 1.75 inches

    12683
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    pinwheel
    2013
    Acrylic and fabric on wood
    11 by 11 inches

    12682
  • Surface of a Sphere David Lloyd

    Strange Matter
    2018
    Acrylic, oil, encaustic, collage and velvet on wood
    94 by 96 inches

    12697
  • Surface of a Sphere David Lloyd

    Strange Matter (detail)
    2018
    Acrylic, oil, encaustic, collage and velvet on wood
    94 by 96 inches

    12699
  • Surface of a Sphere David Lloyd

    Strange Matter (detail)
    2018
    Acrylic, oil, encaustic, collage and velvet on wood
    94 by 96 inches

    12698
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Tacubaya
    2015
    Acrylic on wood
    13 by 3.25 by 2.25 inches

    12684
  • Surface of a Sphere Nick Kramer

    In the Log
    2010-18
    Acrylic on cast aluminum
    28.5 by 21.5 by 4.25 inches

    12815
  • Surface of a Sphere Nick Kramer

    In the Log
    2010-18
    Acrylic on cast aluminum
    28.5 by 21.5 by 4.25 inches

    12816
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Whirl
    2018
    Acrylic on wood
    31 by 8.25 by .75 inches

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  • Surface of a Sphere Justine Hill

    Bookend 7
    2018
    Acrylic, pastel, crayon and oil stick on canvas
    51 by 41 inches

    12680
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Gold Rush
    2013
    Acrylic and fabric on wood
    10 by 7 by 1 inches

    12700
  • Surface of a Sphere Daniel Gerwin

    Evening Meal
    2017
    Oil and acrylic on wood
    55 by 29.5 inches

    12675
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Untitled (hexagon)
    2018
    Acrylic on wood
    18 by 15.5 by 1.25 inches

    12688
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Untitled
    2017
    Acrylic on wood
    15 by 4.5 by 1.5 inches

    12701
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Untitled
    2017
    Acrylic on wood
    15 by 4.5 by 1.5 inches

    12702
  • Surface of a Sphere Daniel Gerwin

    Garden by Day
    2017
    Oil and acrylic on wood
    46.5 by 49 inches

    12674
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    Come Soon
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, woven thread, spray paint, India ink, and oil paint)
    18 by 28 by 6 inches

    12705
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    Come Soon
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, woven thread, spray paint, India ink, and oil paint)
    18 by 28 by 6 inches

    12706
  • Surface of a Sphere Becca Lowry

    Come Soon (detail)
    2018
    Mixed media wood carving (linen, woven thread, spray paint, India ink, and oil paint)
    18 by 28 by 6 inches

    12707
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Peachy Keen
    2011-16
    Acrylic on wood
    14.5 by 11 by 1.75 inches

    12703
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Peachy Keen
    2011-16
    Acrylic on wood
    14.5 by 11 by 1.75 inches

    12704
  • Surface of a Sphere Daniel Gerwin

    Backyard Burial
    2018
    Oil and acrylic on wood
    68 by 24 inches

    12676
  • Surface of a Sphere Martha Clippinger

    Connect Four
    2017
    Acrylic on wood
    14 by 10.5 by 3.5 inches

    12686
  • Surface of a Sphere Daniel Gerwin

    Space Puzzle
    2018
    Oil and acrylic on wood
    34 by 44 inches

    12678
 
 

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