August 6 to September 17, 2011
Open Fridays and Saturdays, 12 to 6 pm
98 4th Street
Room 204 (Buzzer #28)
Brooklyn,347.525.4628

In April 2006 a three-year-old, web-only virtual gallery called Minus Space made the leap from pixels to bricks and mortar, launching an old-fashioned, white-walled gallery in a nondescript brick building in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. 98 Fourth Street boasted all of 175 square feet of exhibition space. Minus Space began to present an ambitious program relating to the pictorial strategy of “reductive art” and proceeded to establish itself as a primary voice, out of proportion to its diminutive size, in the field of concept-driven abstraction.

Five and a half years and dozens of shows later, Minus Space has mounted its last exhibition in Gowanus, and will soon relocate to a gallery-filled building in Dumbo. “Pointing a Telescope at the Sun,” on view through September 17, embodies both the felicities and limitations of the gallery’s physical restrictions. Bringing together one canvas apiece by five painters associated with the Hunter College Color School, the show’s necessarily understated elegance prompts speculation about the ground that might be covered by an expanded version seen in more capacious surroundings.

The exhibition’s title signals an empirical approach to the perception of the colors of the spectrum. The pictorial space of Doug Ohlson’s PU-011 (2004-2006) is primarily a function of its palette; compositionally neutral, vertical bars of variously saturated colors (including flamboyant pinks and electric blues) visually advance from a surrounding ochre-ish field while nuzzling or buzzing the painting’s edges. A gradual shift in the scale of the brush stroke establishes the space of Robert Swain’s Untitled 7-25-6 x 11-25-6 x 23-25-6 (2011). Restricted to three equally saturated hues—red, purple and pale blue-green—the precisely positioned marks diminish in size from the upper right corner to the lower left and imply distance, compression, atomization.

The expansive scale of Vincent Longo’s Four Time (2006) transcends its compact size, its earth-bound palette of sullied yellows, neutralized greens and a pale terra cotta pink somehow achieving a weightless evanescence. Sanford Wurmfeld’s II-27 #1+B (V-RO/N-Y) (2006) gently animates a half-inch wide grid. Subtle shifts in saturation and hue from one unit to the next form a veil or membrane of exquisite delicacy. With Untitled (2011), in which a square field of vertical bands is abruptly cleft by a shallow, oblique seam, Gabriele Evertz continues her investigation of how the presence of spectral colors (in this case, the yellow/orange/red range) affects the perception of gray.

Matthew Deleget and Rossana Martinez, the husband-and-wife team behind Minus Space, met in 1994 while students at Pratt Institute. While their artistic means differed—he was (and is) primarily a painter, she a sculptor and printmaker (now working with installation and performance)—they shared a conceptual orientation and a desire to foment dialogue among artists that would go beyond the chitchat of openings and become “a platform for community-building.”

The site went live in 2003 and in short order saw the “highly local” response from a handful of Brooklyn painters expand to become global in scope. Building on the social premise of their project, Deleget and Martinez hosted weekend-long shows in their Brooklyn apartment. In 2004 the couple met painter Don Voisine, soon to be elected president of American Abstract Artists, at an opening at Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn Heights. “I first heard about Matthew from Chris Martin,” recalls Voisine. “He said he’d met a young guy into minimalist stuff and he was starting a web site dedicated to that kind of work…  [Deleget and Martinez] were interested in certain kinds of art, and saw little of a like-minded community around them so they set about creating one and discovered there was a like-minded need all around the world. I drew inspiration from them for ideas to revitalize the AAA. Matthew and Rossana helped me drag the AAA into the latter part of the twentieth century.”

The pair outfitted their Gowanus studio to accommodate exhibitions, and began presenting artists’ projects in 2006. The Minus Space archive includes exhibitions by the likes of Michael Brennan, Linda Francis, Li Trincere and Mark Dagley, among many others. A flat file has been established, containing work by over 70 artists. (The author is among them). Outside-curated projects include “Escape From New York,” an influential “suitcase” show of very small (read: portable) works that traveled to three venues in New Zealand and Australia, including Sydney Non Objective. In 2007 Deleget curated “Machine Learning,” seen in New York at The Painting Center before it hit the road. Comprising paintings by Henry Brown, Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsaio, and Douglas Melini, the show proposed a breed of “pattern painting for the Information Age.

The Minus Space suffix, “reductive art,” may suggest a minimalist orientation but Deleget is at pains to dispel that notion. He objects to being characterized by a term such as Minimalism, which is “carried forward by public usage but is inaccurate to describe where our interests lie.” If anything, the gallery’s vigorous advocacy of abstraction is set within a context inflected by social utility and engagement, not art-for-art’s-sake. Examples are recent shows of vintage LP album covers designed by Bauhaus stalwart Josef Albers; the art-historically based, map-like paintings of Loren Monk; and the mathematically-derived work of the famously networked and networking Michelle Grabner. The common thread is pictorial incident as information—what Deleget calls “strategies for saying more with less.”

Reductive-art-watchers await indications of how the new, much larger Minus Space at 111 Front Street will affect the operation’s overall dynamic. The gallery will be open to the public four days a week, adding Wednesdays and Thursdays to the current Friday and Saturday hours. The inaugural show, titled “Ted Stamm: Paintings,” opens the evening of Friday, September 23. Its press release argues that the work of this New York painter, who died at age 39 in 1984, “anticipated the conceptual strategies and material inquiries of subsequent generations of artists who came of age in NYC during the past three decades.” With two-and-a-half times their accustomed exhibition space, Deleget and Martinez will have plenty of elbow room with which to make that case.

The post The Reductive Expands: MINUS SPACE will move from 175 feet in Gowanus to a Dumbo loft appeared first on artcritical.

The Working Title, Organized by Progress Report, at the Bronx River Art Center

March 25 to April 29, 2011
305 East 140th Street #1A
Bronx, NY.
Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 3:00 to 6:30 pm
Saturday, 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
Subway: #6 train to 3rd Avenue/138th Street.

Devise a cohesive fiction, or report the scattershot facts? The nature and purpose of curation is an issue in “The Working Title,” a lively but unfocused exhibition of 32 abstract artists, mostly painters, on view at the Bronx River Art Center through April 29. The show is assembled by Progress Report, the online and curatorial project of Vince Contarino and Kris Chatterson, who opt for fidelity to abstraction’s currently schizophrenic condition rather than identify and analyze a dominant personality. According to the show’s press release, the curators eschew artists who adhere to “the doctrine of romantic sentimentality” — an oxymoron if ever there was one. Otherwise, the connective tissue is stretched thin.

The show is engaging nevertheless, as it includes fine work by both recognized and undersung talents. An inventive and resourceful colorist, Pamela Jorden contributes the shadowy but buoyant Echo Music (2010) in which brushy patches and smears of lugubrious near-blacks and rumbling, pungent blues underscore a dazzling range of scraped, glazed, silver-tinted grays. Jordan does not conceal her pleasure in finding her way forward toward the painting’s resolution, guided by impulse, taste and faith in her pictorial proclivities. If her sensibility isn’t romantic, then it’s very close.

Matthew Deleget’s work resides toward the other end of abstraction’s spectrum as the realization, on a painted surface, of a preconceived procedural idea. The colors in Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash) (2011) are selected at random—yellow, pink, fluorescent orange and copper predominate—and arranged by means of a predetermined system of recombination within a four-by-four unit grid. Abstraction as perceptual research, Shuffle is an extreme instance of the empirical attitude that underlies much of the work in the show, which is alert to pictorial strategies rather than intent on fetishizing subjectivities.

A sense of architectonic scale arises from interpenetrating rectangles and triangles in black, red, and two variants of yellow in Untitled (very tizdayle) (2009) by Tisch Abelow. Abelow’s handling is flat and graphic but the painting’s space craftily shakes itself loose from rigid geometry to suggest a modernist façade, a cantilevered balcony, a sun-washed portico, or an edifice in the middle distance. Nearby is Joy Curtis’s towering, chalk-white St. Virga (2010), a work in hydrocal, fiberglas, wood and metal in which cast fragments of fluted pilasters dangle like an ungrounded pillar, contacting neither ceiling nor floor and implying havoc and destruction—or at best, impermanence. The piece recalls the work of Lynda Benglis in its precise equivalence of process and image.

In fact, all the three-dimensional works in “The Working Title” relate at least as strongly to pictorial space as they do to physical space. Resolutely planar, Inna Babaeva’s More Than You Think (2011) consists of a half-dozen painting stretchers of various dimensions, hinged together in a free-standing accordion fold and strapped with translucent colored plastic. Letha Wilson weighs in with the peculiar but compelling Double Dip (2009), two thin strips of plywood bent into teardrop shapes, pinned to the wall by their pointy ends, and lined on their inner surfaces with photographs of verdant woodland. A punch line among colors gets a little respect in Stacy Fisher’s Fuchsia Sculpture With Wood (2010) in which a squarish blob roughly brushed with the flamboyant hue is lodged between blocks of lumber stained a plain-Jane brown. Pushing and pulling space even as it hugs the wall, the piece functions like a painting.

That undercurrent of humor is sustained throughout the show. E. J. Hauser’s spaceman (2010) inscribes a discombobulated argyle pattern in red-orange and white on a blue-black shape that reads instantly as the helmeted head of a spaceman—or motorcycle daredevil, or linebacker. Echo Helmet (2010) by Britton Tolliver reprises the domed shape, inverted and approximately mirroring itself, via juicy slabs of waxy-looking paint in quietly radiant tones. While the motif of protective headgear is completely appropriate to such a cerebral exhibition, the presence of all this recognizable imagery prompts the question of how the curators define abstraction. They dodge that task, as (from the press release again) these artists may merely “use abstraction as a starting point.” Ah.

What is clear is Progress Report’s skepticism of the high seriousness with which abstract painters of fifty years ago regarded the existential confrontation with the void of the blank canvas—as nothing less than a search for the self. Oh, well. Now that the self is swept up and bounced around in a proliferating matrix of provisional, contingent relationships, it has no fixity and the effort to locate it is a fool’s errand.

Among the show’s other standouts are Keltie Ferris’s Black Power (2010) with its jazzy, nested chevrons and fizzy spots festooning a meandering rectilinear polygon the color of dirt; Cordy Ryman’s Vector (2010), a studiously clunky low relief of two-by-fours painted serene green-blues (half-hidden, hot orange flare-ups provide chromatic sizzle) gouged with six intersecting grooves that radiate like the spokes of a wheel and allude to the face of a clock; and Dennis Hollingsworth’s maniacally overwrought Todo es Igual (2011) in which—and on which—paint is coaxed into bloom as in a hothouse. Rather than advancing an argument regarding the thrust of contemporary abstraction, “The Working Title” replicates its variety. But with friends like these, who needs curators?

The post Variety Trumps Argument at the Bronx River Art Center appeared first on artcritical.