Kristen Schiele, Kites, 2019, 29"x 32”, Acrylic, oil on canvas
The Center Cannot Hold
Artists: Lexi Axon, Guy de Baere, Mark Bouthilette, Chellis Baird, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Erin Gleason, Andrew Hockenberry, Markus Holtby, Mija Jung, Kelly Olshan, Claudia Renfro, Vincent Romaniello, Terry Rosenberg, María Durán Sampedro, Kristen Schiele, Linda Streicher, Deborah Winiarski
Curated by: Lexi Axon, Guy De Baere, María Durán Sampedro, Hayley Ferber, Mija Jung, Kelly Olshan
Organized by: Eric Sutphin
February 12 — March 7, 2020
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 12th, 6 — 8 PM.
The Center Cannot Hold is a collaboration from 6 curators featuring the work of 17 emerging and established artists working in drawing, painting, photography, and mixed media. Fields of diffuse color and stains appear as proxies for escape or reprieve while geometric abstraction signals a sense of order and structure. These formal strategies trigger associations to the urban landscape as a site fraught with contradictory forces; no blueprints, no site inspections.
The artists in this exhibition depart from the laws of spatial logic, creating works that upend physical and metaphysical conventions. Using diaphanous layers to construct impossible spaces, investigating spatial relationships, the artists make the intangible habitable. The Center Cannot Hold is a meditation on the perpetual sense of expansion and contraction that comprises urban experience.
The pressure of city living, the cacophony and discordant textures that comprise our day-to-day are brought into relation with one another to reflect the richness and tensions present in this environment. Expanses of negative space, nebulous forms and dream-like sequences carry one to another place, beyond the steely confines of the metropolis. As we yearn for spaces of respite, for moments of quiet contemplation, these works allude to the dichotomies between atmosphere and structure: the artists here give form to inner abstractness.
The show is the product of the Equity Gallery Curatorial Workshop Series, a members-only exhibition development program hosted, supported, and sponsored by the New York Artists Equity Association.