HAUPTSACHE GRAU

Buzz Curated by Vik Muniz

Installation at David Richard Gallery

Optic Drive at David Richard Gallery

Optic Drive at David Richard Gallery

Artist VIPs 2012:Gabriele Evertz

To try to "explain" gabriele's art would be futile. you have to experience it, the closer the better. It's like the calm you feel after being in a loud place and you get in your quiet car and it's just a hum around you. It makes sense she calls her paintings her partners. She is interested in the way we see and the way we learn by seeing, comparing and contrasting images, ideas, colors. vertical stripes? Yes, just like a line of people at a grocery store, gabriele sees the stripes as erect humans. buildings. trees. And as you look at them, as you engage, you see things shifting, but she didn't paint shifts.

The content of my work is color and i'm using geometric shapes because i want the viewer to know what they're looking at. And then a minute later it changes and pulsates—and that's really life. It's always moving.

People think geometry is very static, but it isn't. it's moving all the time. I'm keeping the same color sequence but changing the background. So as you engage in it, it changes. The colors are the actors. These are really vessels of contemplation.

After a while you start to realize there's a center and an organization to it. Painting has to be a certain scale. When it's small, you slip through it, like a window. I wish i could work even larger. Color really wants to have a presence. And the larger a work is, the more effective the color interaction can be.

Change the color by one step and it implies a line. but i haven't actually painted the line. i'm interested in showing a situation that is split, because that's the way the world is. we desire harmony, but i really had a need to express that things are a little off.

I'm not expecting anybody to 'get it,' just look at it. Mine is expressive, but not in a way that i draw attention to myself. A painting, for me, is there to be looked at.

The choice in color is a very important thing. It's based on the 12 colors of the color wheel. That's the spectrum. and they are the most intense. And there are partners (red and green, for instance).

I leave it up for interpretation. You see what you know. This is the motion parallax—you see differently as you move your head.

The contrasting colors pulsate and come forward into your space. It embraces you without the viewer the painting is dead, it's in sleep mode. It really requires a viewer to activate the whole experience.

And It does. even if you sit with your back to her 17-foot panel, you'll hear it. It will creep in around your whole sensory being, gently throbbing, pulsating, blowing at the hair on the back of your neck.

Geometry of Color

The Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting

Gallery Sonja Roesch

ParisCONCRET

MINUS SPACE: Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz, Gilbert Hsiao

Sideshow

GABRIELE EVERTZ: RAPTURE

GABRIELE EVERTZ: RAPTURE

November 5 - December 17, 2011
Opening: Friday, November 4, 2011, 6-8pm

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
A/C to High Street | F to York Street
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm + by appointment

Gabriele Evertz in her studio
Image courtesy of Peter Canale & Stocan Films

November 5 – December 17, 2011
Opening: Friday, November 4, 2011, 6-8pm
MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Gabriele Evertz: Rapture. This is the Brooklyn-based color painter's first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new acrylic on canvas paintings conceived around the color gray.

Gabriele Evertz approaches painting as a humanist and color as a romantic. Evertz, who moved from Berlin to NYC at the age of 19, sees her work as bridging two opposing aesthetic traditions: a philosophical Northern European and a pragmatic American approach to painting. In contrast to other color painters who employ a theoretical or programmatic approach to color, she believes "color is a living thing, which gives us access to abstract ideas and concepts".

Over the past two decades, Evertz has developed and continues to refine a purely experiential, highly saturated palette involving twelve colors. For her, the history of color organization became a tool that informs her systematic color structures. She also often uses black, white, and gray in her work, but prefers not to call them "neutrals", which she feels is "inadequate to describe the experience of them". Additionally, she views complementary colors within her system, such as blue and orange, not as antagonistic, but rather as "true chromatic partners".

In recent years, Evertz has paid particular attention to the color gray, which she feels has been historically overlooked. "We need to refresh our eyes to it", she states, "words fall short to describe it". In her paintings on view at the gallery, gray is juxtaposed against subtle variations on the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), as well as part or all of her twelve-color system.

With a background in both painting and architecture, Evertz assigns structure to color in her work in the form of vertical stripes. The stripes span the entire height of her paintings from top to bottom, and commonly appear in varying widths as well, often within the same painting. She continually employs diagonal shifts placed between repeating sets of vertical lines, which she describes as "the origin of action in her work". The result is an exuberant, ever-shifting color experience that elicits a sense of time in her paintings.

Throughout her career, Evertz's investigation of color has only become increasingly more experimental, impassioned, and optimistic, emphasizing research over result. Summarizing the scope of her practice, she very concisely states, "in the absence of truth, there is art".

Gabriele Evertz (b. 1945 Berlin, Germany) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Australia, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand. Her recent museum exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA (NYC), Heckscher Museum (Huntington, NY), Hillwood Art Museum (Brookville, NY), Columbus Museum (Columbus, OH), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen, Germany).

Her work is included in many public collections worldwide, including The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey State Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst Zurich, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wilhelm Mack Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Her work has been recently reviewed in publications, such as Artcritical, NY Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, and The Village Voice.

In addition to her painting practice, Evertz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, NYC. She is a key protagonist in the renowned Hunter Color School, alongside other color painters, including Vincent Longo, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. Over the past ten years, she has also curated several critically-acclaimed artist retrospectives and surveys of abstract painting at Hunter College, including Visual Sensations: Robert Swain Paintings, 1967-2010; Presentational Painting III; Seeing Red: An International Exhibition of Nonobjective Painting (co-curated with Michael Fehr); Set in Steel: The Sculpture of Antoni Milkowski; and Mac Wells: Light into Being (co-curated with Robert Swain).

Evertz holds an MFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Hunter College, New York, NY.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank Andrew Wojtas and Peter Canale / Stocan Films for their generous assistance with the exhibition. MINUS SPACE's programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE (new location)
111 Front Street, Suite 226, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO | Between Washington + Adams
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm and by appointment

American Abstraction Artists: Abstraction∞

American Abstract Artists

For Immediate Release:

American Abstract Artists presents

ABSTRACTION∞

Curated by Janet Kurnatowski

November 3 - 27, 2011

Opening reception: Thursday, November 10th 6-9pm

The Icebox

1400 N. American Street • Philadelphia PA 19122
ph 215.232.3203 • f 215.232.3616 • www.cranearts.com www.americanabstractartists.org

Press contact: Janet Kurnatowski, janetkurnatowski@gmail.com
Exhibition Hours: Wed - Sun 12-6pm

Pointing a Telescope at the Sun at MINUS SPACE

Best in Show: "Pointing a Telescope at the Sun" at MINUS SPACE
by Robert Shuster

Gabriele Evertz, Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on canvas over panel, 18 x 18 inches

Grids dominate. In Four Time, Vincent Longo has crisscrossed parallel paths of peach and pale green (a lovely palette) to make a maplike lattice that clearly honors Mondrian. From the late Doug Ohlson (to whom the show is dedicated), vertical ribbons of contrasting colors fool the eye into seeing different lengths, subtly animating the work. Likewise, Gabriele Evertz nods toward Op Art by having a square's narrow stripes suddenly change from grayscale to a candy fluorescence along a diagonal, playing with your sense of dimension. Sanford Wurmfeld presents another finely structured chart that maps small shifts in hue, value, and saturation (this one like an excerpt from his massive Cyclorama). And Robert Swain, setting aside his trademark stacks of colored blocks, offers a swarm of red and purple strokes that expand and dance across the canvas like an impressionistic vision of birds -- so uncharacteristically expressive it almost seems out of place here.

In the fall, the gallery will move to DUMBO for bigger, and more accessible, digs -- leaving behind, alas, this charming cube of Zen.

The exhibition continues through September 17, 2011. Note: The gallery will be closed Friday & Saturday, September 2-3 for the Labor Day holiday.

Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment.

A big thanks to writer Robert Shuster for his thoughtful review.


MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231 USA
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
347.525.4628
info@minusspace.com
Skype: minusspace
www.minusspace.com