NEW YORK, NY.- A yawn is just a silent shout, and Minimalism has always yearned to yell into the void with a quiet voice. This revolutionary reductive language is like a vampire; it cannot be killed and will never die. The movement came to the fore on the heels of abstract expressionism in a desperate attempt to separate itself from the inward looking artist. So Sweet… So Perverse is wanting to explore the politics of aesthetics, and how deep meaning can be found in near absence. Frank Stella was exhausted by having his work be accused of cold intellectualism, when in fact it simply found a different kind of struggle, as if his lack of brushwork was somehow evidence of apathy or insincerity. Stella's stripes are the paths of brushstrokes, they lead only into painting. He was simply trying to find the right words to say the best things.This literal approach to art-making and the materials that facilitate it is what this exhibition strives to emphasize with panache.
Explosive gestures were not enough to keep the tastemaker’s attention any longer; this kinky formalism was the consequence, and a realistic way toward a then Greenburgian utopia. The forms their predecessors used became suddenly, hopelessly obsolete; “fiddling rustics” as the uncredited narrator of Emile de Antonio’s seminal documentary on post-war American painting explained. So Sweet… So perverse is perhaps a revisitation of these revolving values, even a remembrance or perhaps another reaction to an art world that is pivoting away from the tyranny of figuration that has reigned over the last several years.
The works on view swerve playfully amongst the personal, the subversive and the political. Minimalism as an “ism” is a declaration, and remains to be so. It's not a fad but an ethos, a way of making concrete sense of a convoluted world in the way art has always done. It is imperfectly perfect, a grid laid over a culture that is at best a mess, if not mostly interesting. Derek Franklin takes on cast-concrete, Jessica Sanders fondles wax, Peter Gronquist built a bomb, Sylvan Lionni continues his indefatigable pursuit of challenging his super heroes, Jim Lee does the same and the rest do the rest. It's a congregation of weirdoes doing unexpected things in this unexpected new chapter of the art world while still vibrating from the influence of Frank Stella’s legacy. Everything leads back to the grid, please join us as we take on the matrix with fashionable eyewear.
Derek Franklin is the Artistic Director of Converge 45 and Founder of SE Cooper Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, while concurrently maintaining his own full-time studio practice. As an artist, Franklin has exhibited his paintings and sculptures for more than twenty years. Selected solo presentations of his work include Meditation Furniture for Ten Minute Breaks (Document, Chicago); grief is on my calendar everyday at 2pm, (Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland); and Mending Capers (Thierry Goldberg, New York). Franklin’s recent work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Simone Subal (New York), Performa Biennial (New York), Melanie Flood Projects (Portland), and The Center for Creative Research (Oregon).
After receiving his MFA from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, in 2012, Franklin soon became Director of Soloway Gallery, an esteemed artist-run space in Brooklyn, NY, before eventually returning home, in 2016, to the Pacific Northwest. There, he continued to paint and pursue his art, began teaching at local schools and universities, and embarked on preparations to open his own gallery/residency program, SE Cooper Contemporary, to capitalize on the region’s relative isolation from other urban centers, its freedom from the strictures of prevailing cosmopolitan discourse and to build community.
Jim Lee (b. 1970, Berrien Springs, MI) received his MFA from the University of Delaware in 1996. He has shown internationally at Galerie Xippas, Paris; Galerie Vidal Cuglietta, Brussels; Motus Fort, Tokyo; FDC Satellite, Brussels and Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin. Additionally he has been included in exhibitions at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at University of Georgia, Athens, GA; the Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson, MD; Ratio 3, San Francisco; LAND, Los Angeles; Islip Art Museum, NY; Galerie Ruth Leuchter, Dusseldorf; Galerie Lelong, New York; Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin; IMOCA, Indianapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. Lee lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist.
Selected exhibition venues include KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Higher Pictures, New York; New York; Marianne Boesky, New York, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Socrates Sculpture Park; Long Island City and Stems Gallery, Brussels. Recent projects include a solo presentation with Lyles & King and solo exhibitions at Galerie Pact, Paris and Super Dakota, Brussels.
His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview and Interview Magazine, among others.
Ethan is a cofounder and editor of thehighlights.org and his writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Wax Magazine, BOMB, Paper Monument and others. He has also curated and co-curated multiple exhibitions at venues including The Suburban, Chicago; Lyles & King, New York and Super Dakota, Brussels.
Greenbaum is the recipient of the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, the Silver Art Residency, The Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donne’s Workspace Residency, LMCC’s Workspace Program, The Robert Blackburn SIP Fellowship, The Socrates EAF Fellowship, The Edward Albee Foundation Residency and The Barry Schactman Painting Prize. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.
Jessica Sanders is mainly known for her work with beeswax, creating paintings and sculptures which investigate the thresholds and tolerances of materials. Beeswax has a storied history as an art material (lost-wax casting, encaustic painting) and has been identified with numerous artists, from Marie Tussaud to Joseph Beuys. In Sanders’ practice, the colored linen is first stretched over the artist-made frame before being poured over with hot beeswax. The abstract monochrome paintings that result from this artisanal process radiate quiet stillness, serenity and beauty.
Jessica Sanders (b. 1985, Arkansas) lives and works in New York. In 2018, Sanders was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation prize. She was the subject of solo exhibitions at Patrick De Brock, Knokke (2016), Kansas, New York (2015), Neochrome, Torino (2015) and Johannes Vogt, New York (2014).
Sylvan Lionni finished as Master of Fine Arts at the Bard College, New York in 1998. Since 1997 he has been showing in the USA with several important galleries and institutions. Though his work is mainly part of important private American collections like Derek Lam, Amy Sillman, Peter Halley (all New York) he is also part of important German institutional collections like The National Public Art Council, Stockholm, Sweden and The Daimler Collection, Berlin, Germany. Overall, Lionni focuses on geometric shapes enhanced by unexpected materials and surfaces. Figures, lines, edges and measurements change their mathematical and static hierarchies though when Lionni dissolves cultural hegemony through appropriative techniques which deconstruct symbolic objects and their clichés.
Terry Haggerty was born in London and studied at the Cheltenham School of Art, Gloucester- shire. He has exhibited widely at galleries and museums around the world, including Sikkema Jenkins, New York; Max Hetzler, Berlin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Aldrich Museum, Conecticut; and PS1, Long Island City. Commissions include wall drawings for Dallas Cowboys Stadium, Munich Re, London, and private collections in the US and Germany. Haggerty is the recipient of several awards including the For-Site foundation Award(2009), John Anson Kittredge Award (2003); and the Natwest Art Prize (1999). The concept of the trompe-l’oeil; the interplay between reality and illusion, has always fascinated artists. In this way, with the simple gesture of curving lines, Haggerty is able to create complex illusions, garnering both volume and depth. The artist carefully considers ambiguous forms and likenesses, to familiar indicators of space such as ledges, edges, corners and gaps. Nevertheless, the viewer is not only drawn to Haggerty’s paintings as a result of the suggestion of plasticity, but also owing to their cool, smooth, machine- like surface perfection.
Peter Gronquist is a multi-disciplinary artist working in diverse mediums and materials ranging from video and painting, to sculpture and site-specific installations in our natural and built environment. Whether harnessing the wind itself with a massive, silver monochrome flag rippling in the middle of the desert, or activating the soft, penumbral glow around an industrial lighting fixture, Gronquist always leaves behind a record of frozen yet fleeting moments charged with his own personal subjectivity.
He has long since dispensed with a single signature style in favor of the query or search, itself. That is to say, in lieu of an ongoing series of uniform structures and ensembles with a consistent autographic aesthetic, Gronquist pursues fluidity & flexibility as a first principle; he is constantly stalking the perfect material fusion of form and concept in a state of low-grade vigilance, searching for exploitable disjunctions in their temporal collision.
Gronquist’s paintings, for example, are defined by simple gestural strokes that slash the pictorial field, simultaneously evoking triumphal ab-ex mark-making as well as the more subtle interventions of minimalist practitioners such as Lucio Fontana. By hewing closely to the bare minimum of color and line, Gronquist is able to sidestep the more grandiose and bombastic legacy of his predecessors in favor of a slight disruption or disturbance in his visual field. He is continually fascinated by the way reflected natural light and projected man-made light interact and inform each other, creating otherworldly vibrations that hover and oscillate just above the picture-plane.
Throughout his career, Gronquist has employed aluminum, ceramic, paint, fabric, mirrors, basic lumber, led lighting systems, virtual and augmented reality to challenge reductive notions of the traditional and modern. Based in Portland, Oregon, Gronquist draws inspiration from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the pacific northwest to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence.
-david c. hunt
Peter Gronquist has exhibited in galleries and fairs across the globe, most recently at Hashimoto Contemporary, Winston Wachter, Primary Projects, and Bit Forms.
Frank Stella (1936-2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, best known for his contributions to minimalism. At just twenty-two years old, he took the New York art scene by storm with the inclusion of four ‘Black Paintings’ in the MoMA’s exhibition Sixteen American Painters. In the two decades that followed, he developed his numerous geometric series, employing grids and protractors to build rigid formal compositions.
He eschewed many efforts by his critics to lend interpretation to his work, proclaiming “what you see is what you see,” an unofficial motto for minimalist artists to come. As time went on his forms grew more asymmetric, colorful, and eventually three dimensional. By the 1980s his visual vocabulary had evolved well beyond the rigidity of his early work to push beyond minimalism toward ever evolving experimentation.
His work is in numerous major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Perez Art Museum, the Tate, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
