Color-Time-Space at Lohin Geduld

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Looking in: This view, through closed doors, will orient you to the tour below

Painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama curated a sublime geometric show, Color-Time-Space, for the gallery that represents them, Lohin Geduld, on 25th Street. I'm writing about it on the last day of the show, and you're seeing it posted four days later, but not to worry: I'm going to show you around.

In making their selections, the curators noted the relationship between art and music. Rhythm, tone, and visual space (or musical time) are shared elements within the two disciplines. Seeing each perfectly chosen piece initially, I wasn't sure why the premise was necessary. Each work does indeed have a visual musicality, but the visual relationships between the works are substance enough.

Yet as I think about the installation, I can see how well orchestrated it is. Flat, saturated color is a feature of each painting, amplified and echoed in a kind of high-volume harmony in relation to the others. More persuasively, each work has a percussive rhythm in its repeated geometry--rectilinear, angular, banded, curvilinear, pah pah pah, pah pah--a polyrhythmic syncopation as the angles and curves pulse and snap.

Starting with the view through the window, above, we're going to swing to the right: .

On the wall facing the door: Thornton Willis, Blue Sky with Lattice, 2008 (first seen in a solo at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery earlier this year)
On the right wall: Joanne Freeman, Bent, 2009; Gary Petersen, Wish You Well; Kevin Wixted, Flowering Tree, 2009

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Clockwise from above: Better views of Freeman; Uchiyama's Untitled, 2009, which you glimpsed in the doorway, top, and Petersen

Swinging back to the wall facing the door: Julie Gross, Trema Disc, 2005, and a glimpse of Stephen Westfall's My Beautiful Laundrette


Arc over to the left: Jennifer Riley, Modernissimo, 2009; Yvonne Thomas, Untitled, 1963; Stephen Westfall's, My Beautiful Laundrette, 2009

In the smaller back gallery: full view of Westfall's painting; foreground, Laurie Fendrich, Don't You Dare, 2007
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James Biederman, Ben LaRocco and Kazimira Rachfal were also in the show. You can see images of their work on the gallery website. (Rachfal, a lovely surprise.) A second part of this curatorial effort took place at the Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Brooklyn.

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On the sidebar of this blog, right, you might want to try out the new "Search This Blog" feature. I've written previously about a number of the painters in this show. Type in any one of these names for more about them: Joanne Freeman, Julie Gross, Ben LaRocco, Gary Petersen, Jennifer Riley, Stephen Westfall, Thornton Willis, Kevin Wixted.

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Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Click here for
Stephen Haller: Remembering Morandi

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Warrior, 2008, oil on canvas, 70 x 59 inches; Flash Back, 2008, oil on canvas, 83 x 61 inches

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On the face of it, Thornton Willis’s “lattice” paintings are exactly what you see: hard-edge grids with a slight visual overlapping, as wide bands of color float over or dip behind one another. The construction depicted is as old as human culture, used in physical form for baskets and cloth.

The paintings take liberty with this structure, challenging our spatial perceptions of foreground and background, of what’s smack up against the picture plane and and how that relates to deeper, more ambiguous space. Their proportions, vertically oriented and of roughly human height, function as a kind of visual window into which you can fall, taking your perceptions with you. It’s a thrilling sensation, not unlike standing at the edge of a cliff—although your ideal viewing distance is about six feet away.

Each painting is a variation in color and structure. Even when several paintings have the same long rectangular proportion, the placement and structure of the bands—and certainly, their color, often modulated rather than flat—change, along with their individual cadences and rhythms. Looking at them in this way, music rather than textiles would seem to be the touchstone for the work.

Up close there’s another perceptual shift. What appear initially to be hard-edge paintings are in fact emphatically handmade with wavering lines and unexpected drips, pentimenti, and often a vigorous, textural overpainting. There’s a catalog photograph of Willis standing before an in-progress painting that’s taped where the colored bands are laid down. That must have been early in the process, because it’s only after the tape comes off that things get really interesting.

Summer House, 2008, oil on canvas, 68 x 43 inches; Conversion, 2008, oil on canvas, 97 x 70 inches

This latter painting, the catalog tells us, was the pivot between earlier, triangular compositions and the body of work in this show

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Triple Play, 30 x 30 inches; Gotham's Rhythm, 106 x 65 inches; both 2008, oil on canvas

Below: another view of Gotham's Rhythm

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Warrior in foreground; Blue Sky with Lattice and Trellis in the Sun, both 2008, oil on canvas, 61 x 34 inches

Peeking around the corner, Flash Back, a detail of which is shown below

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The paintings appear hard edge from a distance, but up close they bear the enthusiasm and energy of the artist

The show is up through April 19 at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea. See more on the gallery website.
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Grids and Lattices

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Grids viewed through a grid: Mary Heilmann's Two Lane Blacktop, up through February 21, at 303 Gallery (the gallery has a no-photo policy, but that doesn't extend to the sidewalk). This exhibition follows her fabulous show at The New Museum

If you read this blog even ocasionally, you know I go looking for geometry and grid-based abstraction. But sometimes even I’m astonished by the synchronous appearance of so many really good exhibitions on one theme. I'm a bit late with this post; between Marketing Mondays and Blogpix (see sidebar also) my posting time has been tight. While some of the shows are down, many live on in the galleries' respective websites. Let me connect some dots for you:

Robert Irwin's Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting installation at Pace Wildenstein, up through February 28.

"What I'm trying to do is eliminate the frame . . and put you in direct relationship to the real power, which is your ability to perceive, " Irwin has said

Irwin's work, fluorescent lights in a non-repeating grid installed on large walls, is shown above and below

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Light without the electricity: Susie Rosmarin at Danese.
The show ended February 7, but the wattage is undiminished. Rosmarin's meticulously crafted paintings draw on op art, hard-edge abstraction and even textile pattern

Above: detail of the acrylic painting shown below



Installation view: Susie Rosmarin at Danese

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Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris. This is a peek at Willis's upcoming show, March 19-April 18

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Imi Knoebel at Mary Boone Gallery, Chelsea. The show ended February 14.

Knoebel makes dimensional paintings, or planar sculpture, whose inviting hues and slight dimension create an almost cinematic viewing experience.

And how perfect is that architectural echo?

All the works are wall size except these three below:

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Unexpected:

On the way top MoMA, I saw the grid, above, in the subway.

When I got to the museum and looked down into the atrium, there was the grid in progress below. Sol Lewitt channeling Agnes Martin?

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Acute Conditions, Part 2

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Thornton Willis at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery

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I've got a TON to write about, not least of which is Material Color, the show I'm in at the Hunterdon Museum (as well as a terrific Bram Bogart show at Jacobson Howard that couldn't possibly be any more material or colorful) . But that's a reportorial piece, so while I'm working on it, let me connect a few dots for you in this post.

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Previously I looked at the work of Sharon Butler, Joanne Freeman and Nancy White. The subject: angular elements in geometric abstraction. I'd like to continue with some work I saw this past week, paintings whose geometry has a crystalline quality, which is to say that the angular elements are amassed into a larger whole.

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Thornton Willis, a fave of mine, is in a Gallery Artists show in the enormous second gallery at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery. His painting opens this post. Willis's geometry pushes right up to the picture plane. The angles may suggest a deeper space, but the composition is so insistently two-dimensional--those angles really grip the corners, don't they?--that the image is formally and satisfyingly flat.

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Mary Heilmann, who is having a major moment right now--and long may it last-- is the subject of a small retrospective at Zwirner and Wirth, where the image below was shot, and at The New Museum, where her first museum retrospective, "To Be Someone," will run October 22 through January 26, 2009. I'll have a full report on the New Museum show in a few weeks, but in the meantime, the Zwirner and Wirth show, titled "Some Pretty Colors," was a beautiful show--hot color, often expanding from one canvas to another, restrained by the crispness of her geometry and the parameters of the cool white box.

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Above: Mary Heilmann at Zwirner and Wirth.

Foreground: Spider's Strategem, 1995, oil on canvas, 54 x 36 inches; middle: Yoshimi, 2004, oil on canvas, 40 x 52.25 inches; back: Black Dahlia, 2001, oil on canvas, 34 x 40 inches

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Below: Chartreuse, 1987, a shaped painting in her solo "To be Someone" at The New Museum

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I haven't yet seen the Heilmann painting shown above--it's in The New Museum retrospective (I pulled this image from the New York Times online feature)-- but it provides an excellent formal transition to the work of Chris Duncan, whose solo show, The FaithVoid Split was at the Jeff Bailey Gallery. Duncan is a crafty guy who stitches his drawings together and does installations with thread (there's an enormous mandala-like construction in white thread on a black gallery wall). But for this post, what interests me are the angles in his paintings and works on paper--and, as you can see below, the acute-angled doorway through which you enter the show. Go ahead, walk through . . . .

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Above and below: Chris Duncan at Jeff Bailey Gallery

The painting below: A New Way to Cope, 2008, mixed mediums including acrylic and gouache, 72 x 96 inches

. . . . I love this painting, its circle the two-dimensional counterpart to the orb hanging next to it. The angular elements that comprise the circle, and the deep visual space into which the circle is set, give it a pulsing, spinning, throbbing , glowing energy that feels more dimensional than its globular counterpart.

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At Kinz, Tillou and Feigen, upstairs from Elizabeth Harris, Jennifer Coates shows paintings that contain sprawling crystalline forms afloat in an indeterminate space suggestive of both landscapes and galactic nebulae. The dreamy dimensionality of her work is a nice counterpart to Duncan's tightly wound ball of angles--though they both have a kind of sci-fi quality to them--Heilmann's loose-brushed geometry and Willis's flat formalism.

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Jennifer Coates: Thoughts for Naught, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches