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.
Carrie Moyer revels in contaminating high modernism with imagery, illusion, brash colour or splashes of glitter. H.M.S. Permafrost (2024) is at once an abstraction and an image of ecological decline, with rigid, drill-like forms penetrating the sedimentary layers of the earth. Rivulets of paint, meanwhile, hint at the melting of the earth’s permafrost in subarctic regions.
Spores, Orbs & Flagella (2023) shows another side to the artist’s practice, with natural forms overlapping as if they were suspended in a pond. Introducing elements of ‘beauty, seduction and play’ into the history of abstraction, Moyer wants the viewer to experience the painting as a kind of living organism that changes according to the distance or level of attention one brings to its apprehension.
‘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
Arlene Shechet conjures the monumental in the intimate, and the intimate in the monumental. Her sculptures are both robust and generous, engaging space in a variety of tones and textures.
As its title suggests, the artist’s multifaceted 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 a sculpture. 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.
Equally, the viewer could invert how they view the work, so that the grey bars achieve greater solidity as they ascend. Despite being composed of solid colours and hard edges, a Walsh painting conjures a visual paradox, expressing both limpid clarity and restless movement.
With their wobbly edifices of joyful colour, the paintings of Hasani Sahlehe uplift the viewer, transforming their experience of space.
The work My Paint (2025) invites the viewer into a virtual space conjured by colour. Bars of solid colour – orange, yellow-green, primary blue – are held by bricks in different shades of blue, yellow and green. Between the bars, washes of pale colour create a sense of vertiginous space, as if the painting is climbing into the stratosphere, held together by the internal gravity of the colour blocks. The painting seems to continue both top and bottom, as if it represents a fragment of perpetual ascent.
