EXHIBITIONS
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Artist Reception: Sunday, 3/30/14, 3-6pm Pictures of Nothing or Pictures of Everything? Does abstract art empty out content and subject matter, or does it pile on those concepts in order to make a painting that says even more than the thousand words a picture is supposed to have assigned to it? People have been debating the simplicity or complexity of abstract painting for more than a hundred years, and continue to be moved by new abstract works in one way or another, both emotionally and intellectually. Several years ago Kirk Varnedoe, former Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, delivered an important series of lectures about Abstract art since the 1950s called Pictures of Nothing. Starting with the famous drip paintings by Jackson Pollock, he described how abstract painting moved from active, expressive imagery to the more rarified “empty” forms of minimal art and beyond. But what has happened since then? When we look around, much of the abstraction being made now seems full of content: ideas, emotion, form, color, drawing -- and sometimes even images that seem to be appearing or disappearing. In this exhibition we take a look at what is going on currently in the world of abstract art through the contributions of these artists, and the statement it suggests recalls the title of one of our exhibiting artist’s paintings: Everything Included. For our new exhibition, PICTURES OF EVERYTHING: ABSTRACT PAINTING NOW, DRAWING ROOMS gathers nine artists in the NY/NJ area who have taken on the task of exploring and re-inventing abstract painting to make their own personal, visual statement. Curated by James Pustorino and Anne Trauben, PICTURES OF EVERYTHING: ABSTRACT PAINTING NOW features artists Robin Feld, Stephen Cimini, Greg Brickey, Robyn Ellenbogen, Eileen Boxer, Glenn Garver, Elizabeth Gilfilen, Raymond Saa and Maria Pavlovska Exhibition highlights include Robin Feld's dense layers of atmospheric color and rawly drawn marks which suggest glimpses of the light of day or the coming of night. Eileen Boxer paints into and over images from advertising and fashion and the resulting works possess a cool intelligence and yet a warm evocation of the human form and emotion.Greg Brickey’s hyperactive, graphically overloaded canvases are constructed of brilliantly colored, sharply defined forms that mass together into waves and swarms. In Stephen Cimini’s work glowing, distressed rectangles of shifting hues lock into one another in a stable, solid lattice of light. Maria Pavlovska, an artist from Macedonia working in Jersey City, makes poetic imagery combining desperately inscribed scrawls of writing with stark, bold movements of black and white. |
