Peter Blum Gallery

Field of Vision brings together a group of five artists who are acutely sensitive to formal play in creating their own distinct painterly languages. Emphasizing the continued malleable nature of painting as a practice, each artist uses deep material knowledge in their innovative approaches to the medium, allowing for the works to be read intuitively and sensorially.

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present "Abstracting Representation," an online group exhibition that brings together individual paintings and drawings spanning from 1949-2020 by seven artists: Paul Fägerskiöld, Helmut Federle, Alex Katz, Esther Kläs, David Rabinowitch, David Reed, and John Zurier. Although from diverse backgrounds and generations, each artist demonstrates through these works their unique visions of abstraction that emerge from representational elements and influences, whether they be architecture, landscape, Baroque art, or the human form.

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Rebecca Ward of new paintings entitled, infinite plane. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception at 176 Grand Street, New York on Saturday, March 19, 2022, from 1-6pm. The exhibition runs through April 30, 2022. Rebecca Ward has continually investigated painting’s multifaceted relationships with object, craft, and dimensionality through her deconstructed and sewn canvases that have come to define her practice. Emphasizing materiality and process, a distinct visual language and formal ambiguity permeates the artist’s paintings, arising from diverse sources of inspiration. In the exhibition’s new series of polychromatic, horizontal paintings, formal elements and tones have developed from recent experiences and investigations into geometry, body, and the link between the two. Ward has expanded her vernacular to include more curving and organic forms alongside the hard-edged, stemming from the influence of geometry textbooks and eclipse maps to Albrecht Dürer’s anatomical graphs and her own recent pregnancy. Although not direct depictions, she connects painting with both the corporeal and the mathematical, and these elements have coalesced into a spatial play of specific proportions and tones, meticulously prepared digitally before being converted to a more craft-oriented and physical process. Ward converges cut planes of painted and dyed canvas at machine-sewn seams that both physically combine and graphically divide the works. Creating exuberant environments of grassy greens, silky violets, or variegated maroons, foreground and background are accentuated by lighter washes or raw canvas contrasting with saturated tones. These sections give way to an unraveling of the overall picture at the bottom of the paintings where she painstakingly removes sections of horizontal threads. Revealing and obscuring the underlying stretcher bars, Ward emphasizes the multidimensional structure of painting and highlights the geometrical elements that make it possible. The paintings create a panoramic effect installed together within the exhibition while each composition individually asserts its own unique internal logic and character.

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by John Zurier entitled, The Future of Ice. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception at 176 Grand Street, New York on Saturday, September 18 from 1-6pm. The exhibition runs through November 13, 2021.

Throughout Robert Zandvliet’s oeuvre, his paintings created primarily in egg tempera have depicted subjects including abstracted landscapes and quotidian objects. Zandvliet’s characteristically muted and dense palette has largely been a result of his chosen imagery. To gain more insight into his own use of color, Zandvliet’s newest series of paintings entitled, Anatomy of Color probes the properties and essence of color itself. The artist began these investigations into color theory by concentrating on the lectures of Rudolf Steiner, and specifically the philosopher’s assertion that color is under no circumstances ever real, but always an image of something more tangible. Departing from Zandvliet’s usual approach, the artist now aims to find what he terms “the color’s body,” or the shape in which a particular color is optimally manifested. In the seven new paintings of the exhibition, each one in the same large-format of 84 x 106 inches (213 x 270 cm), Zandvliet takes a single color as its starting point and develops a unique approach in finding its ideal form. In Tangerine, the artist visualizes the color orange through the form of a sun set adrift among clouds of unpainted linen, while in Bumblebee the blur of a speeding taxi creates a diagonal band of yellow in motion, and in Azure a vivid blue sky is crisscrossed with two condensation trails and a corner of architecture forming a distinctive perspective. These works intend to heighten the capacity to interpret and perceive the form of color.

Helmut Federle has developed a body of work over four decades that is characterized by both painterly and geometric imagery rooted in spirituality, symbolism, and a closeness to nature. He engages in the tradition of geometric abstraction, renewing and expanding it, exploring the relationship between figure and ground, between order and disorder, between movement and stillness. Federle began exploring the “reclining H” in 1979 while living in New York, using the first letter of his first name as its basic, now iconic, form. Subsequently he created the series primarily in 1992 and 1993 entitled, Basics on Composition. He has resumed the series since 2019. Each of the variations in the series measure 15 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches (40 x 50 cm) and emit their own unique, emotional presences. The bars of the “reclining H” and the two squares that result from it as open ends on the left and right become individualized, equivalent geometric surfaces that repeatedly reverse the traditional figure-ground relationship and deny balance and cohesion. Gestural entries, both in the dark bars and in the typically yellow, green, or yellow-green squares, formulate among the defined edges, sometimes lyrically and sometimes defiantly. Many of the paintings have subtitles that do not reference their content, rather they are associations and stimuli in Federle’s life which accompanies and determines his work. Federle defines his painting as “vegetative” and “climatic" applying this to the interplay of color and form that are characteristic of his seminal work.

Luisa Rabbia blends the distinctions made between the human and the natural, expressing solidarity with the cosmos through the organic, bodily landscapes of her expansive paintings. The scale of Rabbia’s paintings suits the themes she explores, oftentimes depicting overlapping abstracted figures joining and breaking apart, seemingly overcoming their physicality. In the exhibition she alludes to interconnected natural processes such as mitosis, forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Continually in flux and transforming like a rainbow, her forms created in expressive hues also evoke spiritual transitions. Upon closer viewing and bringing this substantial work to a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with its rhythmically scraped paint, the stratification of pencil marks, and imprints of fingertips. Rabbia alludes to the minute traces that each person leaves over the course of a lifetime, yet simultaneously asserts an expansive and interconnected vision of a wider universe. Image caption: Luisa Rabbia, Whole, 2019,colored pencil, pastel, acrylic and oil on canvas, 118 x 53 inches (300 x 134.5 cm) Viewing room: https://www.peterblumgallery.com/viewing-room/luisa-rabbia

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Erik Lindman entitled, "Fal/Parsi" at 176 Grand Street, New York. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, September 12, from 10am - 6pm by appointment. Please email, call, or book online to arrange a viewing time. Since the beginning of his artistic practice, Erik Lindman’s incorporation of anonymous found surfaces as compositional elements in painting has occupied a central place in his work. Reinterpreting and repurposing cast-aside materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing, he combines a variation of surfaces in a cascade of decisions with a focus on scale and negative space. Lindman lays down and builds up marks and gestures, ultimately articulating value and attention while asserting the materiality and tactile nature of each painterly composition. His topographical surfaces become the final result of what is buried beneath them, and upon closer inspection, layers of paint reveal further color and traces of discarded elements. As Lindman states, his practice and methods are the most efficient means he has discovered to create a space of reflection and contemplation for viewers to generate their own meanings. Underpinning the exhibition is the allusion to the myth of the Arthurian knight Parsifal and his quest for the Holy Grail. The title "Fal/Parsi" literally means “Pure Fool” in the Arabic origin of the name. As Lindman comments, “I see the ‘Pure Fool’ as an analogy for the painter of modern life, the artist who can only manage to take a stab at creation through ignorance of its futility, and yet paradoxically because of this serves as a vital channel.” His practice with its inherent content and subject matter intends to add to the complex discourse of abstract painting for his own generation and time. Lindman pursues a new mediation of abstract traditions, both original and eclectic, while instilling subjective importance into his multifaceted process. Erik Lindman (b. 1985, New York) lives and works in New York. He earned his BA from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2007 and received a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. Lindman was honored at the Hirshhorn Museum’s "Artist x Artist Gala" in 2019. He has also received The Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Columbia University in 2007, and has also received an Ellen B. Stoeckel Fellowship for Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2006. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstalle in Freiburg, Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, White Columns in New York, le 109 in Nice, France, Kaviar Factory in Henningsvær, Norway, and Foundation Hippocrène in Paris, France among others.

Nicholas Galanin works from his experience as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist, simultaneously exploring his Indigenous identity and contemporary art practice. With a keen observation of past and present, Galanin exposes intentionally obscured collective memory and barriers to the acquisition of knowledge while celebrating the resilience and strength of Indigenous people and their culture. As Galanin says, the exhibition’s title implies that "to carry the songs of Indigenous people, to carry the songs of the land, is inherently disruptive of the national anthem." Expressing his art through sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance, and textile-based work, Galanin asserts cultural, political, and creative sovereignty for Indigenous people. Galanin’s contemporary practice builds upon an Indigenous artistic continuum and responsibility to the land, thereby contributing urgent criticality and vision through resonant and layered works.

Su-Mei Tse is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary work contemplates existence, notions of time, and rhythm. She expresses life questions by capturing fleeting moments of memories and feelings through various media including photography, sculpture, film, and installation. Impressions in everyday existence whether they be a passing thought, transitory state, or a visual or auditory experience are lyrically translated in her work. Tse was initially trained as a classical cellist before completing visual arts studies. This leads her to reflect on the nature of music and self, while the perception of visual and auditory elements remain central to her work. The artist’s practice is not solely seen and heard, but it is felt. In the new film Shaping, Tse presents an ongoing act of clay being formed by hand and then dissolving, accompanied by a soundtrack based on low frequencies. This is not towards a final result, but to demonstrate continual movements creating an endless choreography. Similarly responding to her background of Chinese and British descent, Tse offers contemplations of cultural variance stemming from her own relationship between East and West.

Detail of "Harriet Tubman as Buddha," 2017, plastic and glass beads, metal, thread, yarn and rocks, 40 x 25 x 15 inches (101.6 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm)

Installation of "Excavation" (Photo Credit: Etienne Frossard)

Daniel Rich,"Athens," 2017 acrylic on Dibond 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm)

Detail of "Birth", 2017, colored pencil, fingerprint, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 202 inches (274.3 x 513.1 cm)