EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE
Halsey McKay is pleased to present Shapes, a group exhibition organized by Ellie Rines, featuring work by Graham Collins, Rand Hardy, Mary Heilmann, Sadie Laska, Matt Rich, Keith Sonnier, and Blair Thurman. The show will be on view from August 13th through August 29th, 2016.
This exhibition assembles work by seven artists who make shaped paintings and further push the lineage of emphasis on the object over the picture. Painters in the 1960’s associated with Minimalism and the Washington Color School built shaped panels to support their work, and rejected the assumption that painting should be done on rectangular fields that brace an illusion. Shaped canvases proliferated over the following decades, resulting in work that played in the generative space between painting and sculpture.
The works gathered here articulate a kind of lyrical response to the bold forms and rigorous geometries of shaped painting. Graham Collins cuts away narrative content from paintings he buys at thrift stores, and pulls the resulting shapes over custom-build stretchers. Mary Heilmann makes small geometric paintings that exploit negative space with deceptively simple gestures in black and white. Sadie Laska exaggerates familiar objects, making monochrome paintings on two panels shaped like an electric guitar and an oversized foot. Matt Rich collages fragments of colorful canvas into geometric compositions, and hangs the unstretched piece directly on the wall.
Other works in the exhibition hew closer to the concerns of sculpture, but are made to be hung on a wall. Blair Thurman uses neon tubing to sketch pinstriping patterns familiar from muscle cars, and mounts them to wooden panels shaped like hoods. Rand Hardy makes mysterious forms with aqua resin that he paints to suggest the look of industrial design. Keith Sonnier casts fiberglass that he covers in flocking, approximating the form and texture of a giant pachyderm. Concerned with weight, texture, and dimensionality, these pieces work to complicate the status of the more painterly works on view.
Halsey McKay is open Thursday through Monday, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For more information, please contact Ellie Rines at (631) 604-5770, or ellie@halseymckay.com