Harriet Korman: Permeable/Resistant
Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Fourth Floor, New York

Phyllida Barlow: tilt
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, New York

Penelope Umbrico: Monument
BRIC, 647 Fulton Street, enter on Rockwell Place, Brooklyn

Glenn Goldberg: Beach and Quiet (a rest stop)
Studio 10, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn

Timings: Introductions and Barlow discussion followed by Umbrico at 30mins; audience responses to the first two shows at 47mins; Korman at 1h; and Goldberg at 1h23mins, followed by second round of audience responses.

Next panel: February 13, 2019

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March 1 – April 14, 2012
514 West 25th Street , between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

For more than three decades, Harriet Korman has been on a mission to strip her work down to its irreducible elements. The current exhibition of thirteen modestly-sized yet surprisingly monumental paintings finds her boiling away what little fat remained of her vision. Those familiar with her work might have thought there was not much left to do without, as her previous exhibition featured simple biomorphic shapes rendered in solid blocks of color sans shadow, overlap, or dimensionality.  As it turns out, for Korman curved lines are expendable too.

Replacing the swooping forms of the preceding works is a series of triangles within grids of rectangles, with patterns and layouts resembling a child’s first geometric coloring book.  The resulting deadpan compositions work decisively to undermine the viewer’s ability to project meaning–subjective or otherwise.  In short, by deleting curves along with their subtle underlying hint of personality, Korman’s paintings appear to a startling degree to be purely objective.

There is another curious element to these artworks that may at first elude notice, so infrequently is it a factor: they are 100% flat.  In his famous 1955 essay “Modernist Painting”, Clement Greenberg suggested that to move forward painting should eschew the traditional depiction of space in favor of embracing the reality of the essential flatness of the painting surface.  Yet while this concept has found a secure place in the practice of art, it is hard to name abstract painters from Greenberg’s time to ours whose paintings actually appear without any illusion of visual depth.  Overwhelmingly, from Pollock’s drips to Chris Martin’s slavered brushwork, the perception of space, of foreground and background persists.  Not so in Korman’s work, which refuses to imply anything beyond the surface, adamantly inhabiting a single plane of existence.

What remains?  Denuded of meaningful subject, other than the painting itself, or of figure/ground relationship, or of any of the content available to traditional depictive strategies, Korman bets everything on the three things left: color, brushwork, and line.   Color, naturally, starts off the conversation as it reaches out from the greatest distance. Indeed Converge, 2011, beckons convincingly all the way from the far back wall of the long floor-through gallery space.  Like everything else in this body of work, Korman favors a simple, rather than simplistic, palette.  Luminous variations of blues, reds, yellows, greens, and oranges predominate, rounded out with violets and tertiary red-browns.  Each solid color, subtly fluctuating, is applied with a careful but not overly fussy touch.  The oil is not strictly speaking a wash, but is thin enough to allow the ground to abet the painting’s substantial glow.  If one looks closely, one can discern the elegant yet matter of fact brushstrokes.

Once you get close to the brushwork, the sensitivity of Korman’s minimal draftsmanship reveals itself.  For whether the artist creates the under-drawing defining the shapes with a straightedge or not, it is clear that each tenuous border is painted without one – the color gently pulled to obey by Korman’s hyperconscious hand.  This tremolo effect, though barely perceptible, supplies the paintings with their undeniable warmth and humanity.  So, although what remains is reductive in the extreme, there is material aplenty for deep meditation on what painting can achieve.

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April 16 – May 28, 2004

For many reasons there has been a lasting mystique surrounding the work of Harriet Korman. She is revered by her peers as well as by older and younger artists. Her new show at Lennon, Weinberg is likely to perpetuate that particular regard. Early twentieth century abstraction or “non objective painting” as it was called then, comes immediately to mind. This however is not Korman’s aim or interest. Her work comes more out of conceptual-process work of the seventies. Abstract is the key word here. Illusions, allusions, light and space are assiduously avoided.

The compositions are improvised and unpredictable. They fall into two categories, curvilinear and rectilinear. There are also multi-panel and single panel works. The curvilinear based on a kind of looping line that creates overlapping shapes; the compositions work off the edge and confound conventional organizational logic by turning away from every readable image. The linear are arrangements of squares off set by triangles connecting oddly to the edges.

The astonishing feature in all of the work is the use of color. It’s pure out of the tube oil paint, evenly applied, in strong (and generally uninflected) color. Korman uses little white, except occasionally on it’s own. The result is a really intense color experience in stasis.

Korman’s colors are anything but ingratiating. Browns and other earth tones appear next to full force greens, different reds are combined with full force blue. The compositions are such that each color gets the opportunity to interact with four or more others. The color relationships are almost always unexpected. The paintings are mostly of a medium size and there are also a number of small ones. The smaller pieces are especially satisfying little blasts of active yet monastic feeling color.

A lot of people will look at and puzzle with these paintings. They are uncompromising and even what might be called difficult. The game plan is singular to Korman and will most likely remain so.

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