Seeing Red, Looking Blue, Feeling Green
Curated by Paul Laster
Opening Reception:
Friday, August 12, 5pm - 7pm
August 13 - September 18, 2022
MARQUEE PROJECTS is delighted to present “Seeing Red, Looking Blue, Feeling Green,” a group exhibition curated by Paul Laster and featuring the artwork of Reed Anderson, Jeannette Montgomery Barron, Erik den Breejen, Adam Handler, Valerie Hegarty, Greg Lamarche, Ted Lawson, Matt Magee, Donna Moylan, Jeff Muhs, Sylvia Naimark, Jennifer Deppe Parker, Erwin Redl, Stefan Sagmeister, Rhonda Wall, Taylor Anton White and Nola Zirin.
From the curator:
Exploring color, form and perception, the exhibition “Seeing Red, Looking Blue, Feeling Green” mixes abstraction and figuration in a variety of media. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, textile, collage and assemblage, the show highlights a selection of artists that I have reviewed or interviewed in the past.
Toying with abstraction, Reed Anderson sews together sections of colored nylon to splendidly simulate geometric paintings that hang on the wall or fly like flags, while Matt Magee cuts up plastic consumer product bottles to make whimsical hanging wall pieces with multi-colored shapes and Taylor Anton White recycles nearly everything at hand to construct lively, three-dimensional mashups of materials, colors and forms.
Additionally employing abstraction, Erwin Redl uses computer-controlled lighting to build dynamic artworks that dazzle the eye with changing colors; Erik den Breejen composes vibrant, hard-edge paintings that mix music lyrics with geometric forms; Greg Lamarche combines lyrical, spray-painted gestures with torn paper collage in his animated works on paper; Nola Zirin fuses spray paints and stencils with geometric forms on joined wood panels; and Sylvia Naimark applies more muted tones in her poetic paintings, which capture memories through fading imagery.
Working figuratively, Rhonda Wall makes photocopies of culled print media imagery that she collages into narrative paintings addressing current political and social concerns, whereas Valerie Hegarty creates hybrid paintings and sculptures that comment on the deteriorating state of American society. Donna Moylan, meanwhile, paints imaginary landscapes and still-lives that tap into art history and her vivid imagination, and Adam Handler revisits the past by exploring childhood, intuition and the primal nature of self-taught artists.
Ted Lawson, on the other hand, makes paintings and sculptures that are monochromatic and cerebral and Jeff Muhs follows the monochromatic path in his sculptures because of the material—concrete—that he forces into bound plastic garbage bags to create highly experimental, referential pieces.
Blurring the line between abstraction and figuration, Jeannette Montgomery Barron photographs a traditional tabletop mirror in a variety of settings to create black-and-white and monochromatic color prints, which are both poetic and austere. Jennifer Deppe Parker and Stefan Sagmeister also take representational objects for the point of departure, with Parker cutting up art, fashion and design magazines, which she intricately transforms into prismatic images of eyes from animals and people, while Sagmeister embeds painted geometric forms into 19th-century paintings to graphically indicate social changes that have unfolded over long periods of time.
Finally, it’s the visitor who completes the exhibition, which is installed in a playful way, so that the relationship between the contrasting colors and forms allow the viewer to experience the gallery’s intimate white-box space anew.
About the curator: Paul Laster is an artist, critic, curator, editor and lecturer. He’s Curatorial Advisor for Intersect Art & Design, New York Desk Editor at ArtAsiaPacific, Contributing Editor for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and a contributing writer for Galerie Magazine, Arthur, Artsy, Time Out New York, Raw Vision, Ocula, Sculpture, Art & Object, Conceptual Fine Arts and Two Coats of Paint. Laster was the Founding Editor of Artkrush, started The Daily Beast’s art section, and was Art Editor of Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine, as well as an Adjunct Curator of Photography at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1.
For further information, please contact MARQUEE PROJECTS at info@marqueeprojects.org