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2/5/2003

British Abstract Painting

Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles

Kontainer Gallery is proud to present a survey of abstract British painting curated by Chris Hawtin and Katie Pratt.

Participating artists are: Tom Chamberlain, Jane Harris, Chris Hawtin, Jason Martin, Katie Pratt and Danny Rolph.

The use of the expressive, lyrical gesture was a criterion of the value of Modernist painting during the post-war period. After reaching its culmination in the work of Jackson Pollock, the signature of gesture was left, seemingly, with nowhere to go. If Modernism was relying on gesture, then it had no place in the avant-garde. Consequently, Modernism collapsed, along with the legitimacy of painting. Of course painting survived the crash, but the nature of gesture's importance within painting has changed.
This exhibition will explore how six artists have taken the concept of the Modernist expressive gesture as a catalyst for a more playful, ironic sensibility for painting.

TOM CHAMBERLAIN
Tom Chamberlain makes repeated marks, which travel in an ovular arc from one edge of the canvas to another, in near water-thin white over a black ground (or vice versa). An image is gradually created as the painting turns from dark to light where the lines repeatedly crisscross. When the process is halted, the canvasses are often close to pure white, retaining faint images, the ghost of the ground color and the tracks of the brush, hovering within a painted field. In an inversion of expressionism, the images are invoked in the areas with the least marks.

JANE HARRIS
Working within the pre-set format of one or more ellipses inside the rectangle of the canvas edge, Jane Harris plays with the pre-conceptions of late Modernist ideals. The initial relationships within these compositions seem to center around order and regularity, yet the methodical iterations of the brush marks, and their change in size and direction from one part of the surface to another, disrupt and distort this interaction. The boundaries between ellipse and rectangular ground become starkly emphasized, causing a dissonance between different sections of the work. Through the formalization of the gestural brush marks Harris invokes the de-formalization of the balance and symmetry within the paintings.

CHRIS HAWTIN
Chris Hawtin's work utilizes a marbling process combined with paint, worked, in one session, onto a blank canvas. The surface is manipulated gesturally, yet the finished work, through the materials used, has little evidence of its process, resembling something drawn or printed rather than painted. The surface is flat but for the traces of the 'event' in the flow of the marbling and the raised areas of paint, which act as clues as to what has occurred. Hawtin's paintings appear to have formed over an indefinite period of time rather than having been 'created' in a moment.

JASON MARTIN
By reducing the expressive gesture to its most basic component - the single brush stroke - Jason Martin creates a new way to open up pictorial space. He applies an ultra-Minimalist approach to a Modernist agenda, making a mark, which stretches, from one side of the support to the other, the nature of the mark means that it can be read across the surface, tracing the gesture. Yet it is only when we release the paintings from the process of their own creation that the 'fact' of the recorded moment elides into realm of poetic suggestion within the imagined space of the work.

KATIE PRATT
Katie Pratt's work involves a complex mapping out of an initial gesture. Paint is thrown, poured or roughly brushed onto a surface, which consequently initiates a developing language of systems that crawl across the surface as Pratt explores what it is that must be done to follow her decisions to their limit. Each painting demands its own set of rules, which, once decided and acted upon, cover the painting's surface in an intricate web of marks. The speed of the painting is dramatically transformed as the network of mark making usurps the gestural initiation of the work.

DANNY ROLPH
Danny Rolph deconstructs the material form of a gestural painting and re-presents it with alternative materials and found objects. These montages, whilst sparing in their use of paint, relate closely to the gestural works to which they refer. The found objects are utilized as representations of gestures; thus a ball of partly unraveled wool becomes a spindly mark leading to a proliferation of frantic actions. Often the objects are trapped between the sheets of Perspex and macralon plastic, which constitute the 'ground' of the painting, and invoke the illusionistic space within it. Paint itself is also used on the reverse side of the Perspex, giving us the shape of the mark without its physical properties. That these constructs sit on the floor a lean onto the wall allows the represented marks to drift from the imagined confines of the work onto the wall or floor itself, breaking free from the traditional frame of the canvas.

In the image a work by Danny Rolph

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 3, 2003 / 6-8 pm

Dates: Saturday, May 3 - May 31, 2003

Contact: Luana Agiu
Gallery Director

Gallery Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Tue - Sat

Venue: Kontainer Gallery
6130 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90048
Tel: 323 933 4746

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