Dan Christensen, Keltie Ferris, Katharina Grosse, Jacqueline Humphries, Rosy Keyser, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Moskowitz, Jules Olitski, Stephen Prina, Sterling Ruby, David Smith
July 8 - August 13, 2010 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 8th, 6-8pm
A valve is opened and thousands of liquid particles of paint are rapidly forced from a sealed pressurized container, emerging as a fine mist. Spray!, a group exhibition that examines artists who have embraced the invention of aerosol spray paint in making art. This cross-generational group of artists includes pioneers of the technique as well as a vibrant new generation of painters. Imbued with an ethereal quality, these works celebrate spray paint's ability to create atmospheric layers that seem to extend beyond the frame. As spontaneity coexists with restraint, atomized contours of spray provide an immediate record of a single moment of gesture and action.
Acting as the historical anchor to this exhibition is David Smith's "Untitled" 1963 drawing. Using commercial spray enamel as early as the mid 1950's, almost immediately following its introduction, Smith stencils the outlines of objects onto paper, reversing the solidity of his sculpture by offering an image of absence. Smith's use of negative space is echoed by Kusama's 1978 ghostly outline of a fishing net. Color Field painter Jules Olitski's 1972 work exploits the enveloping mist effect of this industrial application of paint. Dan Christensen's 9 x 11 foot Pavo from 1968 records the immediacy and physicality of spraying as an artistic gesture. A large canvas by German painter Katharina Grosse, known for site-specific installations saturated with sprayed color, evokes burning flames while Robert Moskowitz and Sterling Ruby use black spray paint to more directly reference smoke saturated skies. In contrast, Stephen Prina emphasizes spray paint's ability to create a uniform, uninterrupted surface. Works by Keltie Ferris, Jacqueline Humphries and Rosy Keyser chronicle the gestural freedom that aerosol spray enables and the intuitive action implicit in its application.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Polly Apfelbaum / Nicole Cherubini: Studiowork
July 8 - August 13, 2010 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 8th, 6-8pm
D'Amelio Terras is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring sculpture by gallery artists Polly Apfelbaum and Nicole Cherubini. Never before exhibited together, both bodies of work showcase an improvisational studio practice and engage an exchange about the dimensionality of clay and its potential for abstraction. In this exhibition, both artists raise their work off of the floor; Apfelbaum experiments with the elevated surface of a pedestal-like shelf whereas Cherubini's work reclaims the conventionally painterly territory of the gallery wall.
Partially inspired by Eva Hesse's tabletop 'studioworks,' a mélange of experimental works discovered in her studio posthumously, Polly Apfelbaum's miniature samplers invoke a practice in which process and material are primary to object and abstraction explodes automatically from an exuberant dialogue between color and pattern. Apfelbaum's nickname for these tactile works, "feelies," pays homage to a trio of multimedia references: work by the same name of American potter Rose Cabat, the brightly colored canvases of Color Field painter Paul Feeley and the 1980's underground rock band The Feelies. Unfired and still malleable, the polymer and plasticine clay panels present a kaleidoscopic landscape outlining a narrative built of compositional impulse. Uneven checkerboards, latticed squares, strident lines and multicolored spirals invite open-ended associations and defy precise categorization. Presented in a grid, the works both complement and oppose each other as irregular edges, right angles neighboring undulating arches, create surprises in negative space.
Nicole Cherubini's crushed boxes act as non-functional containers, exhaling compressed volume as their tops cave, sides buckle, and seams strain. Originating from a point of formal affinity, each of these works is initially shaped by the one-time mold of the particular corrugated cardboard packaging in which the clay came. Embodying a minimalist tendency towards repeated form, Cherubini's sculptures simultaneously deny it as individual shape materializes from her folding, finger-prodding and flattening. In discussion with Robert Rauschenberg's 1970's cardboard box sculptures, some of which were illusorily rendered in clay, these works emphasize an interplay between the two-dimensional surface of three-dimensional sculpture and its occupied space. Mounted on the wall, terracotta and earthenware act as unruly canvases whose contours guide the path of gleaming falls of exploratory glaze. Like paint, these aquatic and terrestrial splashes of color and texture adorn the surfaces of abstract forms, creating depth from movement and mark making.
Polly Apfelbaum will have an upcoming solo exhibition at D'Amelio Terras in September of 2010. She currently has work on view at Clifton Benevento Gallery in New York, NY and the Kunsthallen Brandts in Odense, Denmark. Her recent exhibitions include: Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, MT; the Carlow Visual Center for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland; Helmhaus in Zurich, Switzerland and Milton Keynes Gallery in Milton Keynes, England.
Nicole Cherubini will have upcoming exhibitions at Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Canada and Samson Projects in Boston, MA this Fall and at the RISD Museum of Art in Providence, RI in November 2010. Recently, she has exhibited at the Project Room at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Santa Monica, CA; the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA; and held two concurrent exhibitions hosted by D'Amelio Terras and Smith-Stewart in New York in 2008.
For press and visuals requests please contact Miriam Grotte at 212.352.9460 or at miriam@damelioterras.com. D'Amelio Terras shows Adam Adach, Polly Apfelbaum, Massimo Bartolini, Delia Brown, Jedediah Caesar, Nicole Cherubini, Tony Feher, Roland Flexner, Joanne Greenbaum, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, John Morris, Robert Moskowitz, Rei Naito, Noguchi Rika, Demetrius Oliver, Cornelia Parker, Dario Robleto, Heather Rowe, Sam Samore, Karin Sander, Noah Sheldon, and Yoshihiro Suda.
