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READ AN ACCOMPANYING TEXT BY CRAIG BURNETT
The group exhibition A place for modernism brings together five artists, all based on or near the East Coast of the US, whose work responds to the wide-ranging legacy of modernism. Rather than treat the movement as a closed historical episode, Josiah McElheny, Carrie Moyer, Hasani Sahlehe, Arlene Shechet and Dan Walsh view modernism as a perennial method that can be adapted to address the political and aesthetic questions of the present day.
A place for modernism proposes that our engagement with an artwork is a model for how we engage with the world at large, hence the emphasis on the principles of colour, form, ambiguity and perspective. With its geometrical arrangement and primary colours, Josiah McElheny’s sculpture Chromatic Modernism (Blue, Yellow, Red) (2008) stands in the gallery as a model of the movement. Examining viewpoints, literal and metaphorical, McElheny suggests a multiplicity of histories, thus granting the viewer a radical interpretative responsibility.
‘I was trying to retool the high modernism to make space for myself. I was interested in reimagining its strategies and undermining its assumptions from my position on the margin as a woman, a feminist, and a lesbian. This required finding a way to obliquely sully the customs of modernism, such as adherence to the picture plane and the grid, the use of undisguised or “pure” materials, and the rejection of illusion. So, into my paintings came glitter, so-called decorative color, destabilised spaces that combined flatness and illusionism, forms that were neither representational nor abstract but hovered near legibility. Thirty years later, that sense of gleeful contamination has become much more than a critique; it’s a worldview.’
– Carrie Moyer
Modernism becomes a space for renewal in Arlene Shechet’s hands, too. As its title suggests, her work There Then Now and Again (2024) feels suffused with time and life, as if it were a Cubist painting that dropped from the wall, came alive and reinvented itself as sculpture. As with McElheny, modernism, in Shechet’s hands, becomes a way to reconsider both the past and the present moment, reconstituting the project as a space for constant renewal.
Characterised by dynamism and wry wit, a Dan Walsh painting seems to emerge from another era, future or past. A pyramid constructed of interlocking red, orange and green ovals, and suspended in a pink halo, Release (2023) looks like a monument to a lost episode of modernism. His painting Extent (2024) vibrates with austere energy, an effect conjured by the diminishing intensities of the painting’s tube-like forms. The top bars are solid blacks and whites, but both grow more and more diluted – the black lighter, the white greyer – as they repeat in an even beat down the canvas.
