Participating Artists:
J[ulie] L[ee] Abraham / Lee Apt / Linda King Ferguson / Ryan J. Brady /KAYla gibbons / Kyra Husbands / Paul Michael Graves / Jim Osman / Myke Karlowski / Esther Podemski / Kim Uchiyama / Beth Reisman / Gary Stephan / Ellen Weider / Kevin Wixted
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 11th at 6PM
245 Broome Street, NY
The modernism informing Geometric Abstraction, as filtered through the Greenbergian lens, opened a formalist critique presenting a new reality distilled to its purest, most basic structure ⎯a seemingly impossible utopian vision comprising a pure and harmonious expression of space, color, light, and design. Informed and permissible aesthetic debates on an artwork’s perceived merit (or lack) focused on this reductive plasticity as form, as opposed to content, given modernism’s wholesale rejection of the need to paint or sculpt “something” or represent or allude to anything outside of itself.
The curators of The New Math propose a number of artists working today whose aims closely align with those of the transcendental painters, and who as quoted by TPG artist Raymond Jonson, seek “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world… and widen the horizon of art”. Though their approaches, methods and outcomes when dealing with their plastic problems vary from a scientific balancing of the elements involved to an emotive expression of the creative urge itself, overall they share an overarching metaphysical motivation and an aspirant vision that reflects upon the cultural developments, philosophical arguments and societal divides of our time.