ART 3 in Brooklyn Offers a Spirited Dialogue Between Four Artists

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Mar 9, 2016 6:59PM
Tableaux Américains, N° 1, 2014
ART 3
Stanza, 2015
ART 3

In “Break Ground: Amrhein-Welish, Schur-Seligson,” ART 3 gallery in Brooklyn sets up figurative dialogues between contemporary artists who have found common ground in their work. The Bushwick gallery invites viewers to be interlocutors in these spirited conversations, which play out in similarities and differences among the various artworks.

Square 2, 2002
ART 3
Swampland, 2009
ART 3

The show includes artwork by Joe Amrhein, Marjorie Welish, Richard Schur, and Judith Seligson, each of whom explores structure, geometry, and dimensionality. While similarities resonate across all the works on view, ART 3 focuses on two specific pairings: Amrhein and Welish, who share ideas of lines and layering, and the canvases of Schur and Seligson, who similarly use color and shape to structure their compositions.

Indecidability of the Sign: Red Yellow Blue 21, 2007
ART 3
Ruin, 2011
ART 3

Amrhein incorporates words and lines of text into his work, which takes a number of different forms, including installation. Ruin (2011), for example, consists of a pile of wooden sticks painted with an assortment of multilingual, multicolored words. The overlapping sticks and their scattered arrangement suggest a broken grid—a layout subtly echoed by the disrupted grids in Welish’s suite of paintings.

Fractal, 2014
ART 3
Untitled 4, 2014
ART 3

On the other hand, Schur and Seligson’s works are characterized by geometric blocks of color. In Schur’s paintings, these blocks appear light and luminous, as if they could shift and move across the picture plane. Seligson’s blocks of color appear more rooted to the canvas, carving up its surface into geometric patterns. Taken together, these vibrant explorations of line, layering, and form sit comfortably next to one another, complementing each other to a remarkable degree.

 

Karen Kedmey


Break Ground: Amrhein-Welish, Schur-Seligson” is on view at ART 3, Brooklyn, Feb. 1–Mar. 20, 2016.

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