Structuring Light - Curated by Raymond Foye

Overview

Three contemporary masters of abstraction are brought together, each representing a slightly different generation of New York painters. Working with light, color, and form, their works challenge and inspire our conception of what painting can mean.

MARUANI MERCIER is pleased to present three contemporary masters of abstraction: Marina Adams, Paul Mogensen, and Joanna Pousette-Dart. Each of these artists represent a slightly different generation of New York painters, all working with light, color, and form, creating works that challenge and inspire our conception of what painting can mean. The result is a crystalized moment of vision and a manifestation of stasis: a quiet reflection in a fast-moving world.

Structuring Light refers to the current state of abstraction, particularly its vitality and adaptability to an ever-changing environment. The exhibition title was suggested by Joanna Pousette-Dart in a comment to curator Raymond Foye where she noted, "I think all of our work involves the alchemical transformation of color into light.”

Marina Adams (b.1960) synthesizes a wide range of influences in her work, from music to architecture to textiles. Although working in a non-figurative mode, physicality and movement are integral to her work. While Adams achieves great lyricism, every painting is nonetheless a record of a struggle, calling to mind the work of Joan Mitchell and late de Kooning—often cited by Adams as important influences. The artist's strong commitment to the important social role of art in furthering progressive values remains a fundamental inspiration, and integral to her notion of artistic expression. Adams is a 2016 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the 2018 Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her works can be found in important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Joanna Pousette-Dart (b.1947) has explored the objecthood of the painting, through her unique formal vocabulary, where color, light, and form continually bend, grip, and shape one another. After period of living in the American Southwest desert, the enormity of the sky and the curvature of the earth slowly induced a move away from the rigid rectangularity that so much of painting takes for granted. In this way, the artist embarked upon a radical re-evaluation of interior form and exterior shape. Her work is collected by several prestigious institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The enigma of Paul Mogensen's compositions derives from his engagement with the abstract science of mathematics. Using the principle of arithmetic progression as a generative, compositional device, his works are created through a sequence of consecutive forms based on a mathematical 'constant' (i.e., n + 1), a principle at the root of harmonics. Born in 1941 in Los Angeles, the artist has been exhibiting in New York since his first exhibition in 1966 at the historic Bykert Gallery. In 1967 he participated in the Bykert Gallery group exhibition that heralded the arrival of the Minimalist aesthetic: Paul Mogensen, Carl Andre, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, and David Novros. His work has since been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, among many others.

Raymond Foye is a writer, curator, editor, and publisher originally from Massachusetts. He is a regular contributor to Gagosian Quarterly, and in 2020 received the American Book Award for editing the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. Foye has organized exhibitions for numerous artists including Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Carl Andre, David Salle, Philip Taaffe, and Elyn Zimmerman.