The Hogar Collection is very pleased to announce
the upcoming group exhibition, Obsessive Reductive, featuring
abstract painting and sculptural wall reliefs by Peter Barrett,
Cecilia Biagini, Peter Fox, Heather Hutchinson, Miki Lee and
Michael McCaffrey. The show includes work by six diverse artists
who are all exploring rich post-minimalist pictorial terrain.
While at first glance the work appears to share the same cool,
detached quality that characterizes much minimal work, upon
closer examination all these pieces are clearly made by hand,
with the resulting imperfections and vicissitudes not hindering
the result but in fact being essential to its effect. The handmade
surface gives the work a warmth and depth that belies its formal
rigor.
Michael McCaffrey’s seeming monochromes
are in fact compositions of circles, bands, crosses, and targets-
archetypal divisions of the square- made of two extremely similar
yet slightly complementary colors. The close colors, applied
with foam rollers for a blended edge, makes for a subtle but
intense vibration that never quite resolves; they insist upon
their instability with a quiet force, to the point where one
has the feeling that they continue to pulse even in the absence
of observing eyes.
Heather Hutchison also divides the square, but
in her work the physical depth of the pieces and nature of the
materials makes light both the subject and literal object. Appearing
by turns natural, like sky over water, then synthetic, like
a road or a wall, they become stand-ins for our experience of
the sublime: glowing, yet confined within a box; gorgeous, but
partially obscured. Her meticulous use of materials, and the
balance between the hard-edged (plywood, plexi) and the liquid
(wax, paint) allow her to wring a startling variety of experiences
from a few elements.
Miki Lee uses a deceptively simple device: non-repeating
colors defined by undulating contours. The varied results show
just how much energy can spring from adjusting a few parameters:
whether they ignore or are bound by the edge of the canvas,
to what degree each color is influenced by its neighbors- whether
in color, or contour, or both- and where the palette is keyed
for each painting all have dramatic impact on the outcome. The
result is a dynamic equilibrium- a tension between busy and
tranquil- that creates perpetual motion.
Peter Fox has a very different take on the possibility
for complexity to emerge from a narrow set of rules. Letting
gravity pull his paint toward the floor, he intervenes as it
drips, creating fascinating intricacies where hand, accident,
and physics all contribute. The resulting layers of color upon
color read as a kind of super-dense language, so the paintings
seem constructed not just out of paint, but of paint deliberately
formed into something more than itself- paint imbued with intelligence,
that can form, be, and explain a painting all at once. All of
this seething syntactical energy takes place within the boundaries
of traditional canvas squares and rectangles, at once emphasizing
and superseding the medium.
Cecilia Biagini’s shim pieces use off-the-shelf
materials to create playfully elegant forms that transcend their
humble origins. She uses the subtle variations in length from
shim to shim and a careful awareness of the ways in which the
wedges can compound into curves- and also cancel them out- to
generate richly varied undulations. The bright, saturated colors
she uses seem random up close, but from farther away they create
a sense of light across the whole piece, acting as an almost
chiaroscuro modeling that gives an added sense of volume and
drama to each work.
Peter Barrett works principally in painted reliefs-
paintings that edge into the third dimension without becoming
fully sculptural. Painted in gradated bands, they simultaneously
evoke both extremes of several visual vocabularies: analog/digital,
organic/geometric, natural/synthetic, and scientific/psychedelic.
By varying the form and color, and moving between symmetry and
asymmetry, he creates hybrid forms that push painting into the
third dimension without giving up its essential nature and, like
all of the above, affirm the potential for handmade images in
the digital age.
• For additional information or images,
please contact the gallery.
Opening Reception sponsored in part by:
http://www.brooklynoenology.com/
Subway directions: L or G Train to Lorimer
St., exit on Metropolitan, walk under BQE towards Manhattan,
Left on Marcy Ave., 2 blocks turn right on Grand (@ the corner
of Marcy) also: L Train to Bedford Ave. walk south on Bedford
Ave. to Grand St. left on Grand St., walk 3..5 blocks (between
Havemeyer and Marcy) and the JMZ to Marcy Ave., walk 5 blocks
north to Marcy, turn left on Grand St.
By car from Manhattan: Drive over the Williamsburg
Bridge. 2nd immediate exit at S. 5th St., Left at light on Havemeyer.
Right on Grand Street, 3/4 block on right
