Edge Order Rupture

Josef Albers, Jo Baer, Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, Carmen Herrera, Catherine Lee, Tony Lewis, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Hélio Oiticica, Charlotte Posenenske, Sean Scully, Kate Shepherd

Following the trajectory of highly ordered non-representational art since the 1950s, Edge, Order, Rupture at Galerie Lelong presents work across three generations of artists who have reinvented or subverted the modernist aesthetic. The selected works range from the highly structured and disciplined to the more poetic. The relationships between these fifteen artists from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, show inter- and cross- generational influences in their approach to pushing the edge, giving shapes order, utilizing color, and rupturing the two-dimensional plane. Edge, Order, Rupture opens on Thursday, April 4th with a public reception from 6-8pm.

Considered pioneers of the re-engagement of non-objective art, Josef Albers (1888-1976), Lygia Clark (1920-1988), and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) are represented by signature works. Albers’s Interlinear N 32 bl (1962) exemplifies his use of mechanical means to create a complex spatial illusion by engraving an impersonal, functional line within a field of hand-rolled jet black ink. Oiticica’s gouache Metaesquema 286 (1958) shows the effective use of simple, monochromatic shapes to create an active, open composition where the forms appear to pulsate across the plane, expanding the field in a rhythmic pattern that infers space beyond the paper’s borders. Clark’s Bicho (1960), made of folded aluminum, is from her well-known series that plays with notions of angled planes, active space, and the possibility of variable compositions and multiple vantage points contained within a single work.

Jo Baer (b.1929), Carmen Herrera (b. 1915), Robert Mangold (b.1937), and Sean Scully (b. 1945) further explore the potency of line and color. In Untitled (1972), Baer expands the stark white center of her composition, pushing thin bands of her distinctive black and blue hues to the very edges, to create a shift in the use of central space, characteristic of her minimal works of the 1970s. Herrera creates striking spatial tension by the precise placement of a thick graphic L-shaped black line that dissects a bold field of saturated green in Untitled (1976).