ABSTRACTIONISTS UNITE! WHO GIVE YOU JUST ENOUGH TO LAST A LIFE TIME.

Curated by Nancy Chaikin

Mary Heilmann Tic Tac Toe oil on canvas 1988 54" x 54"

IMAGES (please click to enlarge)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - GLENDALE COLLEGE ART GALLERY IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE OPENING OF:

ABSTRACTIONISTS UNITE! WHO GIVE YOU JUST ENOUGH TO LAST A LIFE TIME.

OPENING SUNDAY JUNE 21st 2009 THRU AUGUST 8TH, 2009
Reception from 6 to 9:00 PM

A GROUP SHOW OF 13 INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACT ARTISTS
Curated by Nancy Chaikin

This show was made possible with a generous contribution from the Glendale College Foundation and the Peter and Barbara Benedek Family Trust.

Artists: Richard Aldrich, Raoul De Keyser, Fergus Feehily, Joe Fyfe, Mary Heilmann, Max Jansons, Thomas Kiesewetter, Liz Larner, Rebecca Morris, Scott Olson, Josh Smith, Katja Strunz and Mary Weatherford.

This show spans generations, continents and practices. All of the works in the show function using suggestion rather than dogma.  The works reveal how form and content can become inseparable. The artists shy away from boundaries and limitations and their options become limitless.

Richard Aldrich’s delicate touch gently asks the viewer to pay attention to detail, enjoy the moment and revel in small triumphs. He utilizes an offhanded, casual approach and exploits the depth and variety available in the practice of abstract painting. His work gestures to Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo and Richard Tuttle.

Raoul De Keyser lives and works in Deinze, Belgium. At 79 years old, he creates canvases that seem to float in space where the gesture is buoyant and the content open ended. His works can at once seem like landscapes, or mere fragmented forms, but remain ambiguous as if the subject of the work remains outside of the confines of the canvas. He is known in Belgium as the father of contemporary abstract painting and has influenced a number of contemporary European artists. This exhibit will be the first showing of his work in Los Angeles.

Fergus Feehily hailing from Dublin, Ireland creates his own context as an artist. He flushes out his practice with drawing, collage, painting, using found objects and assembling them to form compositions. He makes no distinction between his various disciplines as he views all of his work as an ongoing project. His work functions as an observation in stream of conciousness, exploring the architecture of his thinking.

Joe Fyfe is an accomplished artist, writer and critic based in New York. His paintings rarely use paint, rather they are constructed from sewn swatches of colorful fabric in which the painting and support become one. Fyfe’s work contains brevity of touch and attention to detail. He creates wonderfully jubilant combinations of texture, color and examples of endless freedom. The work creates a place where every nuance and detail function as a clue to the work's meaning.

Mary Heilmann Mary Heilmann seems to extract emotion from every gesture of her paintbrush and every drip of paint. Her vibrant, expressive paintings are inspired by New Wave and Punk Rock music, fashion, lovers, landscapes, and fellow artists. She has been known to say; “I worked hard all summer long to make it look easy”.

Max Jansons’s quiet investigations in abstraction are both free and ordered, painterly and refined. His small-scale paintings teeter from representation to abstraction and from abstraction to representation.  They are introspective and sensitive to surface and color. His palette is sophisticated and he allows himself to explore and indulge in his curiosities. Max Jansons lives and works in Santa Monica.

Thomas Kiesewetter lives and works in Berlin. His sculptures are primarily first constructed in cardboard and then cast in bronze. His sculptures posses quirky sometimes anthropomorphic qualities and are both painterly and visceral.  His work takes humble, casual gestures and elevates them to the status and stage of classical sculpture.

Los Angeles-based sculptor Liz Larner’s piece “1845,“Ingres” references the French Neo-Classical painter Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres.  In this work she address ideas about painting and translates them into three dimensions.  Her overall project is diverse and far-reaching, and ranges from intimate objects to large-scale installations and monumental sculpture.

Rebecca Morris mixes up a serious cocktail of painterly; Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, neon and a little Metallica thrown in. Rebecca Morris lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Manifesto (for Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective).

Scott Olson makes improvisational, small-scale linear abstract paintings. The works use varied supports and grounds as a backdrop to his experiments in the alchemic nature of paint. There is a whimsical delicacy to the compositions, that often reveal themselves slowly. 

Josh Smith explores ideas of authorship and authenticity.  Through systematic processes, replication and serial repetition, his work strives to expose the purpose of painting itself. He employs a casual style and questions traditional ideas of painting and conventional aesthetics.  

Berlin based Katja Strunz elegant works relish the materials from which they are made.  Her spatial compositions often hint at movement that is arrested in flight, and achieve a breezy lightness that reveals the equal importance of the structured form and the space that surrounds it. 

 Los Angeles based painter Mary Weatherford conjures a bridge between landscape and abstraction. Her paintings are often titled after a place in nature. She paints on jute using flashe, a paint that absorbs rather than reflects light. This brings one's attention to the work's physicality and the textural, playful qualities of her materials. It reveals how a painting serves not just as an inert object,  but also how its presence can be physically felt.

Admission to this exhibition and its opening reception is free and open to the public.