Amy Feldman, Lucio Fontana, Maximilian Schubert, Alan Wiener
June 8 – July 29, 2016 | 195 Chrystie Street NY NY 10002
June Hours: Wed – Sun 12 to 6 pm | July Hours: Tues – Fri 11am to 5 pm
Gallery closed from July 2 – 4 | Gallery closed in August
11R is pleased to present Amy Feldman, Lucio Fontana, Maximilian Schubert, Alan Wiener, a group show featuring recent paintings and sculptures by three younger artists, along with a painting by Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), which will provide historical context to the exhibition. As Fontana, the founder of the Spatialism movement, adopted new possibilities in economizing a forceful, individual gesture, Feldman, Schubert, and Wiener likewise use modest means to increase the directness of their formal and spatial inquiries. Across their practices, these three contemporary artists create work that, though a gesture indicative of their hand, evidences new potentials in controlled physical transformation, a conviction shared by Fontana and embodied in his rare shaped-canvas painting featured in the exhibition, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1960.
Working in a grey-scale palette, Amy Feldman paints amorphous, cartoon-like shapes that seem squeezed within the boundaries of the picture. In two paintings on view, chains of bulbous forms find solutions to the formal problem but appear just as ready to wriggle into a new position, while in a third painting, a divergent hue is used to suggest different possibilities for negative and positive space within an open, nearly symmetrical form.
Utilizing a process akin to classical lost-wax casting, Maximilian Schubert’s Untitled paintings use the soft state of wax to fundamentally alter the nature of the painterly object. Unlike in a conventional painting, Schubert’s brushwork in the cast wax is incisive rather than additive; the gouges and distortions of the picture plane result in tense overlays of high and low relief that blur distinctions between surface, support and gesture. Cast in archival polyurethane and fiberglass and finished with trompe l’oeil brushwork, these paintings are a kind of fugitive from sculpture that reimagines the painting-as-object.
Alan Wiener’s handmade abstractions combine materials such as aquaresin, brick, slag, and stone. Wiener’s sculptures conjure geology or architecture, and like Feldman’s paintings, their reductive palette, material economy, and marriage of the natural and geometric results in an impactful, and deceptive, simplicity. Behind their formal organization, these pieces reveal irregularities that lend a more lyrical quality while concurrently pointing to the forces at play in the formation of natural and man-made materials.