CLOSE CORNERS
Adam Hennessy, Alan Shipway, Anna Jung Seo, Diana Cerezino, Karolina Albricht, Kiera Bennett, Magda Blasinska, Maj-Gret Gaupas, Mark Jackson, Norman Hyams, Phil King, Scott McCracken, Shahin Afrassiabi, Tim Ralston, Tom Farthing, Tom Mason
Opening: Friday, 30.6.2023, 6 – 10 pm
Exhibition: 1.7. – 9.7.2023
Curated by Scott McCracken
“I remember going to shows and seeing a painting that was 20 feet long—it’s like the 800-pound gorilla that sits wherever it wants to sit. I didn’t want to paint that way, and I decided I would paint at a size that was scaled to my friends’ apartments, that could hang in a three-room walkup tenement on 7th Street. That was the first big decision. I don’t think I would have kept to that for long, except that once I made that decision I discovered how easy it was to put an idea in the world, look at it, and then wipe it off and do something else if it’s no good.”
Thomas Nozkowski
‘Close Corners’ is an exhibition of small paintings. The works presented are all diminutive and modest in size. But they each possess their own shifting internal scale; their own pictorial space which cannot be measured. We relate to paintings differently depending on their size. Unlike big, human-scaled painting which invites entry into itself, where there is a threshold which can be crossed, the works in this exhibition cannot be entered in such a way. They are mental pictures. Tactile pictures. Currently there is an increasing appetite for large-format paintings, as if bigness is indicative of ambitious or challenging painting. The selected artists in this exhibition embrace a counterview; that small-sized works can be as formidable and as exacting as any monumentally proportioned painting. Their works are the size of heads, of hands and of pages rather than of bodies and windows and walls. Viewing them at a distance only serves to obscure their material nature. These paintings require close working. Close looking. Their edges contain (or at least attempt to). And their corners are close.
