Lower East Side, New York
Group Exhibition
This Must Be the Place
TotahChristopher Astley, Peter Bradley, Vija Celmins, Maureen Gallace, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Claudia Keep, Oidie Kuijpers, Richard Mayhew, Robert Moskowitz, Nicolas Party, Ellen Phelan, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Walter Price, Ed Ruscha, Aubrey Saget, Salvo, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Saul Steinberg, Myron Stout, Ryan Sullivan, Jason Tomme, Frank Walter, Stanley Whitney "Always, in painting—with every picture, there is this contrast of the picture as my dream, my vision, and as the object in front of me—which confronts me. This contrast is, also, often, and for long, a conflict: the object will not become the vision, the vision will not translate the object..." —Myron Stout, diary entry, 1960 Totah presents This Must Be the Place, a group exhibition exploring landscape in its historic and contemporary forms. This Must Be the Placefeatures twenty-five artists and is co-curated by Ivy Shapiro. This Must Be the Place engages a recent anachronistic turn in contemporary art, back toward the historic genre of landscape through its relationship to abstraction. Vistas shapeshift and dissolve into studies of light, color, and form, extending the notion of what constitutes “landscape painting”. Spanning painting, drawing, woodcut, and resin, the artists included use their medium to read environments as distillations of line, gesture, and tone. In the space between these expressions, or the ambiguous convergence of the two, a new way of seeing becomes possible. Viewers unaware of the fact that the outdoors is one of Alex Katz’s most beloved subjects might perceive his depiction of light filtering through tree branches as pure abstraction. In repetition, also, of a familiar view or a favored motif, there is a departure from immediately recognizable configurations. Claudia Keep takes an iconic downtown Manhattan view and saturates it with the heavy night sky. Christopher Astley’s molecular and macro Terrain Study stacks texture in a lush colorfield. Richard Serra’s Courtauld Transparency is as much about material density as it is situated in place and time.