Abstraction at Large
Apr 11, 2018 – May 6, 2018
Gary Mesa-Gaido, Point of Departure: Puerto Rico 6#
Abstraction, one of the most radical innovations of art history, stripped away the easily recognizable, threw it to the winds, and laid bare the schematic and essential. The course of 20th century art can be read, from one angle, as the conquest of abstraction over representation. Nevertheless, from its beginning, abstraction has been accompanied by declarations of its demise.
This exhibition brings into view how abstraction shapes contemporary artistic practice, not simply as a part of art history but as a living visual language. Specifically, it draws on the creative tension between medium and abstraction, and seeks to bring figuration and representation back into conversation with the abstract. This show pushes beyond both the strategies of minimalism and the massing of volume and shape, which so often defines the boundaries of the abstract in art.
About the Juror:
Eleanor Heartney is a contributing Editor to Art in America and Artnews and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artpress, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Her books include: Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads; Postmodernism; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art; Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order; and Art and Today, a survey of contemporary art of the last 25 years from Phaidon. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art which won the Susan Koppelman Award. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Artists:
Jenny Balisle, Donald Matheson, John Gallagher, Douglas Barrett, Ajean Ryan, John Catania, Sarah McKenzie, Tony Schwensen, Joseph Ostraff, Libby Saylor, Helen Glazer, David Brewster, Matthew Scheatzle, Adam Goldman, Yu-Ting Cheng, Ken Konchel, Gary Mesa-Gaido, Buster Graybill, Jennifer de Mello e Souza, Ben Utigard, Faye Bell, Robin Apple, Virginia Bradley, Rachel Sager, Daniel Brewer, Kristina Key, Sabre Esler, Anthony Clune, Miron Abramovici, Judi Altman, Khanh Le, Ellen Burnett, Farima Fooladi, Tom Wheeler, Darcy Dangremond, John Adelman, Chellis Baird, Joan Weiss, Andrew Prieto, Fehmida Chipty, Al Denyer, Sarupa Sidaarth, McCormick Brubaker, Alan Crockett, Claudia Renfro, Leigh Blanchard, Guntis Lauzums, John Sproul, Brent Dedas, Lauren Gohara, Sarah Kreuter