June 27 to August 12, 2016
531 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 9100

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In “Shapeshifters,” now at Luhring Augustine, 19 artists are brought together who explore the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay “Art and Objecthood,” though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, such as Martin Kippenberger, for example, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, as in Jeremy DePerez’s Untitled (Unknown) (2016), or in working with one form or another, such as Imi Knobel’s Kartoffelbild 15 (2012) leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

Among the large-scale works in the main gallery, David Novros’s extraordinary 4:30 (1966/2000) is a multipanel painting that extends horizontally in four joined parts, two panels running horizontal and two at an angle. The parts are stepped alternately, allowing the wall to form inducted negative shapes to the positive shapes of the panels themselves. The pale tone of the white pearlescent paint changes color to a pink as the viewer moves and the light hits its surface differently. The modular panels identify the piece as an object within an architectural context — it’s as far away from the notion of painting as a window onto fictional space as can be imaged. This is now nothing to do with a perspectival view set in a rectangular portal; it is an encounter with organized physical elements in real space. Above the doorway to the other galleries is Blinky Palermo’s Untitled (1966) a nine-by-eighteen-inch black triangle of muslin over wood. This small work punctuates the architecture like a subtle votive object, altering the straightforward experience of passing through a doorway into a consideration of passing through a particular architectural space.

Several paintings in this exhibition very successfully use actual gaps within the format of the painting itself: Kippenberger’s N.G.D. hellblau (1987), Richard Tuttle’s Red Brown Canvas (1967), and Steven Parrino’s Touch and Go (1989–95) all expose the wall behind within the painting to simple, and inventive effect. Parrino’s work shows painterliness in the form of stains and drips visible along the edges and in two cut-out segments. Ruth Root combines, in Untitled (2015), fabric, Plexiglas, enamel and spray paint in a piece that fits various planes at diagonals to each other that only in the top left corner conform to a rectangle. Elsewhere they simply amass frontally as if slotted and layered together. The feel is collage, the format a construction from disparate parts.

Although stacked vertically, like Root’s painting, 3 Part Variation #5 (2011–13) by Joanna Pousette-Dart departs methodologically. Three conjoined rounded forms contain curvilinear shapes; the relationship between them is seamless, as they appear to generate one another. The color relationships are also compelling; again, moving visually backward and forward, the colors seem to call each other into being.

There is no doubt that the artist list for this exhibition could be longer, I’m thinking for example of Joe Overstreet, Alan Shields and Al Loving, to name just three. There is much very good work to be seen already here and the point is well made that a standard rectangle is not only unnecessary, but alternatives await further exploration in any number of directions and for many reasons — one being that there is no good reason not to.

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In the 1980s, when painting was commonly said to be dead, many group shows were devoted to abstraction. Although some individual artists emerged—Sean Scully was the best—none of these exhibitions had much effect. But even when Dave Hickey and the philosopher Alexander Nehamas proclaimed that beauty was back, abstraction still was marginalized. The interests of the art world had shifted. Bob Nickas’s book takes up this story, without much concern for the longer-range perspective. “Paintings that are clearly made from the point of view that abstraction is always in a sense an assisted readymade” he says at the start, “can be seen to reanimate rather than recapitulate the histories of both abstraction and the readymade” (p. 5). He doesn’t develop that suggestive claim. What concerns him is not the pioneering abstractions of Kandinsky and Malevich, reproduced in black and white in the introduction, but eighty contemporary painters, some senior, but many younger, mostly relatively obscure figures (Robert Mangold, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman are not in the book) who paint abstractly.

“Maybe,” Nickas suggests, “abstract painting has become a form of imaginative fiction” (p. 7). An interesting idea, but what exactly does that mean? After all, Poussin, too, painted imaginative fictions.  When he describes Philip Taaffe’s appropriation of Bridget Riley’s Cataract 3 (1967), as “more of a refraction . . . rather than a mirroring of the earlier painting” (p. 10) he doesn’t take analysis very far. His categories, Hybrid Pictures; Rhythm and Opticality; Color and Structure; Found/Eccentric Abstraction; Form, Space, and Scale; and The Act of Painting serve to organize chapters containing elegant commentaries on studio visits. Judging by the accounts of the few figures I know, Ruth Root, Alan Uglow and R. H. Quaytman his analysis is reliable. Nickas is very good at doing a difficult job, summarizing briefly an artist’s career. And the publisher has generously supported him, providing marvelous color plates.  But because the commentaries are relatively brief, inevitably the images overwhelm his text.

Once Clement Greenberg’s genealogy of Jackson Pollock leading to Morris Louis collapsed, it seemed that abstraction was merely one genre of art, and perhaps not the most important one. The problem in my opinion is that an account of contemporary abstract painting needs a theoretical framework replacing Greenberg’s.  Otherwise it is just a laundry list of artists whose relationship to each other and the history of art is unexplained. What, is “Hybrid Pictures” is the connection between Wayne Gonzales’s paintings, based upon crowd scenes; Elizabeth Neel’s images, which are appropriated from the internet; and Chris Vasell’s paintings with eyes? Going on to “Rhythm and Opticality,” I like Karin Davie’s loops; Xylor Jane’s playful uses of geometry; David Malek’s forceful expanding grids; and James Siena’s elegant plays with “orgiastic abstraction” (p 96). And it’s marvelous to see Philip Taaffe’s recent decorative pictures, which draw on his library images of plants. But Nickas doesn’t explain how these very diverse figures are connected. When he links Ruth Root, whom I admire, to Gordon Matta-Clark, Lee Bontecou, Ellsworth Kely, Le Corbusier, Dorothea Tanning, African-American quilts, Sonia Delaunay and Allan McCollum then it seems obvious that Nickas is imprisoned, as it were, in a slide library. “Her paintings can be seen to have a comic, deadpan personality that is as serious as it is irreverent” (p. 164).  How these extremely various influences yield that result is not explained. “As abstract as (Julie) Mehretu’s paintings are,” he writes, “they are meant to represent, or have come to represent . . . individuals and groups caught in violent conflict and upheaval  . . . global economies, advertising, markets, and their relation to power and control . . .” (p. 258). Here we find some hint of the dilemmas posed by her much-discussed mural for Goldman, Sachs. But just as Nickas doesn’t offer a developed historical perspective, so he doesn’t deal at all with the old, still relevant question: What are the politics of abstraction? Greenberg’s enemies said that Louis and the other color field painters were merely producing plush decorations. Nickas doesn’t give any reason to think that his abstractionists are doing anything more. He tells the story of Olivier Mossel, who recently made spray paintings in Beijing employing “local car painters, who, to his amusement, saw no real difference between painting a car and a canvas” (p. 266). Were they missing anything? Christopher’s Wool’s paintings, he writes “are about one thing, and one thing alone: they are about painting” (p. 336). One would hardly know that Thomas Crow has written interestingly about Wool’s politics.

Painting Abstraction, a lucid, well-illustrated account, performs one real service. By gathering useful information, it opens the way for a commentator who would discuss the relationship of contemporary abstraction to the grand tradition of Abstract Expressionism. Such a book would need to explain how the great minimalist painters, Mangold and Ryman, and the most significant figures of the next generation wrestled with the pop artists and, in the 1980s how abstraction had to combat the postmodernists. And it would need to discuss sculpture, for you cannot understand abstract painting today without dealing with Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Jessica Stockholder. In 1964 Clement Greenberg curated “Post Painterly Abstraction.” “A new episode in the evolution of tasteis what I have tried to document,” he wrote in the catalogue.  The show was a failure, for no one was convinced that Walter Darby Bannard, George Bireline, Jack Bush and the many other painters displayed were Jackson Pollock’s successors. Nickas’s book is “Post Painterly Abstraction” writ large.

Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting. London: Phaidon, 2009.  ISBN 978-0-7148-4933-1, 352 pages, $75

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February 7 to March 16

In the 1960s, abstract painting and pop art parted company. Now and then, it is true, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol flirted with abstraction. But on the whole, there was a clear dividing line between abstract painting, whether minimalist or painterly, and visual art presenting or critiquing images of commodities. The paintings of Robert Mangold and Cy Twombly looked pretty different from those of Jim Dine or James Rosenquist. And then in the 1980s, younger abstract artists often felt beleaguered. They needed to argue for the validity of their concerns at a time when painting, especially abstract painting was so often said to be dead. But now all those debates seem very distant. Certainly that is true for Ruth Root, who entered the art world in the 1990s, and so has a very different take on this history. She an abstract pop artist, which is to say that although her pictures are entirely devoid of figurative references, they are as sleek as commodities depicted by Warhol and his peers.

Root’s six horizontal and two vertical pictures on display are all very flat and very thin. These big paintings have smooth glossy enamel surfaces. Using high pitched artificial color, she makes glistening reflective surfaces. Root loves pink, orange, and violet, shades of designer colors frequently encountered in urban experience, but not in nature. Her horizontal paintings do not resemble landscapes, and her verticals do not look like abstract-portraits. Without making any reference to these traditional subjects, she uses straight edges and gentle curves, and impersonal paint handling, to compose elegantly. In the 1960s, Michael Fried famously argued that the internal composition of Frank Stella’s paintings was deduced from the shape of their frames. Without this deductive structure, he feared that abstract art would merely become a form of decoration. Root rejects that worried way of thinking. Abstraction, she shows, has its own self-sufficient validity. For an artist of her generation, abstract painting can “come off” without any need to obey such constraints. She perhaps owes something to pattern painting, which gave visual artists warrant to create attractive pictures. But citing this historical reference hardly does justice to her originality. Beauty is back, which is to say that we can accept the visual pleasures provided by her (marvelously!) decorative paintings without demanding that their structures be grounded in some reading of art history.

In the 1980s, many young abstract artists were concerned to situate themselves by reference to some historical narrative. Root, a very economical visual thinker, gives some good clues about how to understand her art in a handout of visual sources available at the gallery and on-line. It is unsurprising that she cites Paul Feeley, Peter Saul and Richard Tuttle, for their art looks like hers. What, however, is a little unexpected is her referencing of Gordon Matta-Clark, the matching dresses and wall paper in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; and some ski socks. For an abstract painter of her generation, the older distinctions between figurative and abstract art, or between politically critical art and the consumer products of mass culture cease to have much importance. Perhaps that is why her essentially cheerful art shows no signs of that angst which inspired so many of the pioneering Abstract Expressionists.

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