For artist Jered Sprecher, painting is a medium for conveying the tensions between the abstract and the concrete. His works are balanced between the painterly and the conceptual; in the catalog for his 2014 exhibition Stacking Stones at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, Sprecher wrote: “When I work I want to create paintings that surprise, paintings that can hold competing ideas but not contain them.”[…..]
Abstraction is dead! Long live abstraction! In Linear Abstraction, the SCAD Museum of Art negotiates the status of nonrepresentational work as it exists in the 21st century and includes work in various media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital formats. While the exhibition seeks to trace commonalities between contemporary practices by engaging somewhat diverse uses or ideas of lines, the resulting effect points succinctly to[…..]
“Grids punctured with crosses in varying patterns” is perhaps the best—and admittedly, the most simplistic—way of summing up Ding Yi’s oeuvre. Ivory Black at the ShanghArt gallery is his latest iteration of these basic, severely geometric forms, in varying shades of blue, black, and white hues, distinguished only by date and serial number. Like an astronomer’s chart of the night sky, Ding’s gridded, ordered forms[…..]
In a 2012 essay for e-flux, After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social, Gregory Sholette asks whether there can be a role for abstraction within the flourishing new discipline of socially engaged post-conceptual art practice. This remains a valid question given that most activist art is still understood to be representational, based on precedents from the Civil Rights era such as[…..]
Though Susan Cantrick’s paintings are composed mostly of abstracted planes of color, they defy any notion of flatness. The more one looks at Cantrick’s rich fields of color and intricate sections of textured patterning, the more her uniquely layered perspective comes into view. Cantrick regularly employs many of the traditional elements of painting: scale, shape, color, tone, line, perspective, and texture. However, she mixes these traditional[…..]
While some artists might shy away from encouraging an open-ended, potentially endless string of associations, Brooke Reinhold Richard seems to embrace it as she leads viewers through her paintings with a loose architecture of visual clues. Her work includes motifs not unlike the tropes and symbols used in the Surrealist tradition of painting, which created numerous meaningful, often personal, associations. Richard paints serially, creating one[…..]
Jeff Depner’s commitment to one medium, in this case to painting, is rare in the current climate, in which artists work across increasingly varied platforms and often combine mediums. Depner’s paintings simultaneously explore paintings’ storied and experimental past and burgeoning future. Most of his richly layered acrylic works systematically investigate the possibilities of the medium by following a similar internal logic that in turn gives[…..]
