REGINA REX
1717 Troutman #329
September 11–October 17
Sue Havens, Untitled (paper construction), 2002, acrylic, paper, glue, 8 x 4 x 2”.
If indeed, as Robert Storr put it recently in the New York Times,
“The middle of the art world is now in Brooklyn,” one might then
venture the rejoinder: And the center of Brooklyn is now Chicago.
Supporting this counterintuitive thesis is the recently formed
artist-run space Regina Rex, a Brooklyn-based project that counts a
number of former denizens of Chicago as its constituents. Having
resisted the convention of exhibiting its members, the gallery operates
with a keen curatorial eye, as evinced by this eight-person group show.
It confidently (if implicitly) wades into the perennial debate that
revolves around the question, What is to be done with abstract painting?
The answer put forth by the exhibition is: Not much. Which is to say,
where others have found antinomy, the artists here find fertile ground
for free aesthetic play. At once improvisational and exacting, Sue
Havens’s Untitled (paper construction), 2002, is a small
three-dimensional painting that subtly, and with spry humor, refigures
an everyday form; the work calls to mind a priority mail envelope come
exquisitely unloosed. Approaching the problem from the opposite
direction, Elizabeth Ferry’s contribution defamiliarizes material from
the everyday––in this case, bookbinding cloth.
Other works, such
as Carrie Gundersdorf’s paintings, torque abstraction in a way that
convincingly synthesizes high modernism with a lo-fi cut-paper
sensibility reminiscent of Montessori schooling. As the title of the
exhibition intimates, wordplay and image play, while not the same, both
utilize an economy of means that yields a surprise, pushing us to think
faster and farther. Herein lies one of the achievements of the
exhibition.
— Zachary Cahill
