An exhibition of new work by Anthony Pearson. A catalogue designed by Brian Roettinger, with an essay by Liz Kotz, will accompany the exhibition. Anthony Pearson's sculptures and photographs are, on the one hand, records of a studio practice dedicated to non-representational mark-making and the pursuit of free aesthetic movement; on the other, they are the elements of a vocabulary designed to systematize the irrational and inexplicable facets of artistic endeavor. This oscillation between generative and curatorial instincts is man... Read more

An exhibition of new work by Anthony Pearson. A catalogue designed by Brian Roettinger, with an essay by Liz Kotz, will accompany the exhibition. Anthony Pearson’s sculptures and photographs are, on the one hand, records of a studio practice dedicated to non-representational mark-making and the pursuit of free aesthetic movement; on the other, they are the elements of a vocabulary designed to systematize the irrational and inexplicable facets of artistic endeavor.

This oscillation between generative and curatorial instincts is manifest in the solarized silver gelatin prints that form one of the central aspects of Pearson’s work. These unique prints are photographs of ink drawings on foil: images, in essence, of hand-drawn marks that have been mediated by the optical and chemical processes of photography. By arranging them in sets or pairing them with sculptural works, Pearson distances himself even further from the individual acts of expression that give rise to each composition.

For the first time, the artist has created large-scale steel sculptures whose forms are derived from two of these photographs. Compositions originally made with ink and brush have undergone a complete alchemical transformation, passing through the photographic process to become templates for three-dimensional objects in space. Until now, photography has served as a way to create conceptual distance between the act of making non-representational compositions and the act of displaying them in the context of other artworks. Here, however, photographs have been cycled back through the studio practice, and have led to an expansion of physical scale, the adaptation of new technical procedures, and increased conceptual reach.