Thierry Goldberg Projects is pleased to present Kadar Brock, Logan Grider, Joyce Kim, Luis Macias, Mark Schubert, and Stas Volovik in Night Fishing. Through abstraction, these six artists track the spaces between the knowable and the unknowable, angling after an ever elusive meaning.
The work of Kadar Brock shows how abstraction doesn’t offer a clear path for the artist. Brock takes this position quite literally by rolling a set of Dungeons and Dragons dice to determine the course of his painting—the number of marks he will make on his canvases, and the titles he chooses. Straddling the intuitive and the strategic, the straight lines and crosshatchings on the canvas simultaneously serve to assert and negate the painting. The work becomes a game of abstraction, one in which the status of the mark hangs between significance and insignificance.
In a similar exchange between sense and nonsense, Logan Grider’s paintings are a constant play of whimsy and precision, flatness and depth, movement and stasis. Harkening back to modernist art, the crisp, elegant geometric shapes in Grider’s work exude a quiet sense of loss and remembrance that is countered by his sometimes comic clash of colors. Although, as he states, his paintings “do not have clear visual representations (sounds, emotions, actions),” they are endowed with a quality of the undeniably familiar, so that shapes resonate uncannily in the mind of the viewer, and meaning seems almost in reach.
As in the work of Grider, the paintings of Joyce Kim border on recognition, representation. Kim’s canvases are composed of swashes of flat color and an array of abstract shapes that are often on the brink of the sculptural. These backgrounds of solid color, in contrast with the agile, more fanciful forms that are painted or placed across the canvas, suggest a movement between the ironic and the nostalgic, the humorous and the melancholic. Her muted abstractions propose what she calls a “faded-out sublime,” creating a work that contains an aura of the impalpable, where viewers are left to navigate somewhere between the haiku, the riddle, and the explicit.
By foregrounding the work surface above all else, Luis Macias also exposes the rift between the representational and the abstract. What remains are the traces of process: spatters of paint and blue strips of what looks like painter’s tape, creating an ambiguity between what constitute the signs of manufacture of the work, and what can be defined as a finished piece. The paintings conjure up cosmic gray atmospheres, which are interrupted and tempered by a myriad of flat strokes and dashes. In this way, Macias plays with the notion of what qualifies as art, and challenges the role of the viewer.
Like Macias’ work, process is prioritized over finished product in Mark Schubert’s sculpture. The artist’s aggressive, sexual, and quirky combination of materials comprise the subject matter of his work. By marrying or juxtaposing the incongruent, Schubert’s sculptures flirt with the strange, and yet at the same time they unmistakably harbor associations with the more tangible and everyday. As a result, while the unidentified forms may be suggestive of clouds, human figures, growth, and decay, in the end they always shirk definition, striking out at meaning only obliquely, amorphously.
In Stas Volovik’s paintings, meticulously rendered geometric abstractions are placed on broadly painted backgrounds comprised of looser strokes. These shapes in turn clash and harmonize with the spaces in which they exist on the canvas, in a kind of dialogue of color and style that is never quite resolved. Volovik adheres to a visual aesthetic where “form is most important,” and “everything is reduced to the visual impression which is indescribable.” In this sense, his work emerges from and exists in that abstract space, whose limitless facets, as we have seen, are exposed, manipulated, and played with by each of the artists included in this exhibition. Here, meaning toys and is toyed with, as it either narrowly escapes the hooks let down by the artist, or catches on them, even if only momentarily.
KADAR BROCK lives and works in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art and has shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Exit Art, New York; Motus Fort, Tokyo; Buia Gallery, New York; and Mike Potter Projects, Cologne, Germany.
LOGAN GRIDER lives and works in Philadelphia. He holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York; Okay Mountain, Austin, TX; Yvon Lambert, New York; and Jack Tilton Gallery, New York.
JOYCE KIM lives and works in Brooklyn. She received an MA from New York University and has shown at Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York; Marian Spore, Brooklyn; SAKS Galerie, Geneva, Switzwerland; The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium; The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; The St. Etienne Museum of Art, St. Etienne, France; Gasser & Grunert Gallery, New York; Peres Project, Los Angeles; and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.
LUIS MACIAS lives and works in Brooklyn and received an MFA in painting from the University of Barcelona, Spain. He has exhibited with Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona; Roebling Hall Gallery, New York ; Michael Steinberg Gallery, New York; and Foxy Production, New York. He was awarded grants by Fundación Arte y Derecho, Madrid; Marcelino Botin Foundation, Santander; and Banesto Foundation, Madrid.
MARK SCHUBERT lives and works in Brooklyn, He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin and has shown at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; and South First, Brooklyn. He was recently awarded an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
STAS VOLOVIK lives and works in Frechen, Germany and has exhibited with Gallery GAD, Berlin; Kunstverein zu Frechen, Germany; and Gallery A-3, Moscow. He will be included in Qui Vive?, the second Moscow Biennale for Young Art.
