September 29 to November 14, 2015
81 Barclay Street (between Greenwich Street and West Broadway)
New York City, 212 220 8000 ext. 3013

“Diphthong,” a group exhibition of 17 artists curated by participating artists Stephen Maine and Gelah Penn, offers an axial slice into process-oriented abstract art being made today. By focusing on work that involves procedure and improvisation, touch and distance, this show raises intruiging questions about unpredictability and intention

The artists here are performing openly, making work that materializes physically in ways that remain apparent to the viewer. This can be a kind of misdirection, with “nothing up my sleeve” yielding something surprising and mysterious.

Distant descendants of Surrealist automatism, many of the works here are made free of conscious control. All the artists — who are working in a wide range of modes — are heir to Process Art of the 1960s and 1970s and more recent conceptually oriented painting that uses process as a meditative or exploratory practice.

The works organize themselves into degrees of directness of method and feeling. And while everyone here shares a highly charged visuality, they differ in the qualities of human feeling that they embody. This sense of “the ghost in the machine” is a kind of haunting in work that has its origins in the purely concrete.

At one far end of the spectrum is work that suggests a kind of fictive “painting machine,” with the artist as the operator. In the compelling paintings of Anoka Faruqee, for instance, pigment is furrowed by a custom-made trowel into moiré patterns. The effect is to see math made material, in a system set to a default mode of repetition and obsessiveness, all the while acquiescing to the inevitable glitches that arise in production.

In a parallel register, Stephen Maine confronts us with the residue of process, a material memory. He has layered a series of off-printings from floor mats and extruded foam to create his complex painting. In high-key green and magenta, the canvas has a kind of psychedelic, ruined glamour, making a painterly virtue out of the necessity of loss. It plays with our continual impulse to find a meaningful signal in the perpetual noise.

John Zinsser’s Nebraska Night Driving is a devastating painting, achieved with six tracks of blue roughly squeegeed on black, and an errant line of paint escaping, like a wild arrhythmia. The whole effect of this work is inexplicably moving.

There are two artists in the exhibition whose process is strongly improvisational, but each with their own emotional valence. Gelah Penn’s large, wall-mounted drawing employs Yupo (a synthetic paper), lenticular plastic, acrylic paint, graphite, and monofilament with photographic imagery of installations, this last element managing to implicate the viewer in the very process of memory. Six angular sheets of translucent Yupo articulated with folds, parts of a fractured whole, each bear an eruption in plastic and paint, suggesting a series of ruptures, both physical and emotional, in the precinct of art’s formal serenity.

Also in the improvisational mode is a rather hilarious work by Denise Treizman, Who Let the Stripes Out?, that sprawls from wall to floor. With her painted ceramic elements and found materials including a duster, matting, tape, foil, and colored sand, she has made something improbable, a multi-directional sculptural party, full of color and high spirits.

Of the works that incorporate a sense of conscious making, notable are the stitched canvas paintings of Rebecca Ward, which actually entail a subtle kind of unmaking. Deconstructing areas of the canvas into the threads of its vertical warp generates a kind of scrim. The result is to have the simplified, quilt-like field dematerialize and reveal reality beyond its bounds.

For a number of the artists, their process is one of accumulation — Leslie Wayne building and then depicting glowing cairns of discarded paint, Rosemarie Fiore collaging the residue of fireworks, and Michael A. Robinson assembling an all-black installation, comprised of a desk with objects, including a laptop displaying images that are also in black.

For the three sculptors in the exhibition, process becomes an idiosyncratic method for creating expressive forms. Kara Rooney’s digital collages use images of her sculptures, which are made by casting manufactured materials into cryptic black and white fragments. Julia Klein’s five sculptural elements, wrapped and plastered, are tall, spindly presences, funky, tree-like, and somehow animated. Susan Still Scott’s sculpture in painted canvas seems to hide a human presence, like the Venus de Milo in shrouds.

The painters include Elizabeth Cooper whose flows and gestures of paint suggest emotive uprisings, and Michael Brennan with hallucinatory, icy monochromes. Jaq Chartier’s dispersions of color have the quality of scientific, photographic documentation. Carrie Yamaoka and Thomas Pihl are the most minimal of the painters here, Yamaoka with reflective fields of color on mylar, Pihl with glowing expanses of finely grained color.

Artists have a knack for taking the art in their orbit and crystallizing it into intriguing exhibitions. In curating this show, Maine and Penn have gathered work of widely divergent methods, impulses, and poetics, signaling an open-ended, generous process of looking and relating.

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June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

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