In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. Kim Krause | Morgan | Sabina Ott

Nov 2022 - Jan 2023

Curated by Matt Morris

Opening Reception: Friday, November 4 | 5-7pm

This exhibition is an analysis into the shared project of abstraction among contemporary artists and their predecessors. Featuring concise surveys of three inveterate artists' oeuvres, a timeline will be established against which we might consider the tumult of world events and the nuanced evolutions of a studio in solitude. It's not only their relative ages and deep commitment to abstraction as a visual language these three artists have in common: they have also worked as educators in various studio art programs around the American Midwest for many years. This combination of geographic region and pedagogy as additional shared influences will be examined, as will the many ways each artist's careers have been shaped by their genders, race, and other capacities for being marked by the social.

To be sure, what Krause, Morgan, and Ott have respectively done as painters and artists demonstrates the finest capacities for abstractions joy and opacity, generosity and stubbornness. Treatments of form as unique as a signature entangled with the most rote compositional building blocks. Most of all, in a time when aspersions are cast over abstraction as adjacent to 'fake news,' 'gaslighting,' and 'subterfuge,' all three of these artist's practices demonstrate indelible ways for material, process, painting, and abstraction to add up to a radical approach to world building, liberation politics, and strategic alterity. 

 

image:

Kim Krause. Rough Magic Series 2 #16, 2021 
oil, spray paint, paint marker, graphite, colored pencil, on wood panel