Chelsea, New York
Group Exhibition
Intimacy in Discourse: Unreasonable Sized Paintings
SVA Chelsea GalleryMichael Berryhill, Sebastian Black, Katherine Bradford, Lois Dodd, Louise Fishman, Ron Gorchov, Joanne Greenbaum, Nora Griffin, EJ Hauser, Sanya Kantarovsky, Alex Katz, James English Leary, Matvey Levenstein, Dean Levin, Margrit Lewczuk, Chris Martin, Loren Munk, Catherine Murphy, Aliza Nisenbaum, Ellen Phelan, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Tal R, Neo Rauch, Julia Rommel, Cordy Ryman, Julia Schmidt, Juan Uslé, Don Voisine, Merrill Wagner, Roger White, Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage School of Visual Arts’ Chelsea Gallery and Mana Contemporary, in collaboration with the Rail Curatorial Projects, co-present a two-part exhibition, “Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable Sized and Unreasonable Sized Paintings,” curated by Phong Bui. Both are proposed experiments to explore the conditions that lead to the production of small paintings: how paintings’ sizes are determined by different artists’ conscious or unconscious intentions, and how those sizes, in turn, affect their relation to viewers in the various spaces that the artworks quietly occupy in contemporary visual culture. According to Bui, both curatorial ideas were inspired by Jackson Pollock’s admiration for Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose modestly sized paintings—such as “Moonlight Marine” (1870 - 90), which measures 11 ½ x 12"—evoke monumental scale and immensity of space, while Pollock’s larger canvases attain a sense of intimacy. Such a subtle perception of how scale mediates our responses to images like these subsequently prompted Thomas Nozkowski’s term “reasonable-size paintings,” which describes his two standard sizes, 16 x 20" and 22 x 28", within which he has consistently worked since the early 1970s. The following two selections of painters were assembled to expand the dialogue surrounding this topic. “Unreasonable Sized Paintings” (a term neither limited to unorthodox variations in canvas shape nor monumentally sized paintings), showing at SVA Chelsea Gallery, refers to the work of painters who, during occasional unpremeditated episodes, feel compelled to make paintings that are neither specific studies of larger or smaller paintings nor parts of particular ongoing series, but rather the byproduct of pure pleasure or the release of spontaneous thoughts that need to be concretized without limitations. This category is the most commonly practiced among painters. “Reasonable Sized Paintings,” showing at Mana Contemporary, is focused solely on works by artists who have been consistently making paintings approximately within Nozkowski’s proposed, modest scale. This half of the exhibition features works from Joshua Abelow, Peter Acheson, Etel Adnan, Ellen Altfest, Tom Burckhardt, Rackstraw Downes, Helmut Federle, Robert Feintuch, Mark Greenwold, Josephine Halvorson, Merlin James, Bill Jensen, Katy Moran, Thomas Nozkowski, Ann Pibal, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, James Siena and Robert Storr.