Priska Juschka, the co-founder and current director and curator for Lichtundfire, is presently offering a large group show of nearly thirty artists. Juried by Juschka herself “Minimal/Maximal” embraces a complex set of ideas and ideals, mostly inherent in philosophy. Juschka, always gifted in her curating choices, once again embraces (mostly) abstract artworks, which illustrate the notion of a minimal/maximal esthetic.
As it stands in the show, the notion of minimal/maximal derives from an intricate concept–one postulated by the French philosopher Pascal. His notion was that when opposing extremes meet and slowly merge to become unified, that merger would demonstrate how the differences between the two conflicting poles were likely more indicative of the other position or attribute than might at first seem.
In the case of Minimal/Maximal,” the first term might be taken at face value–as an adjective describing the highly influential minimalist movement in the 1970s. The idea of maximal art might also be an intellectual description of the 1970s movement called “Earth art,” which included efforts such as Michael Heizer’s mile-long drawings in America’s southwest desert. But the title also suggests that the relations between large and small, fullness and emptiness, are closely related, meaning that ideas of incomplete and complete composition intimate the opposing value. This happens inevitably since extremes inevitably suggest something entirely in contrast. Indeed, wouldn’t be seen as they are if opposing values did not exist.
The painter Bettina Blohm presented a very good untitled abstract work from 2019. It consists of a blue foreground whose four dimensions are partially taken up by black squares and rectangles, which move from the edge into the slightly dark blue taking up the center. In each direction, right and left and on top and below, there are four black planes; the ones on the corners perform a double duty by serving in two sets. On each side, one or two of the black forms has a thin gray bar separating the shape from the uttermost edge of each dimension. Blohm is a gifted painter who has spent a long time in New York City. This painting is representative of her subtly abstract phrasing.
In the next work, Gianluca Bianchino, an Italian-born sculptor now residing in Jersey City, presented a very good relief sculpture made of plaster and pigment on aluminum and wood. The center of the relief is taken up with a dark blue rectangle: a low relief with lines incised into the plaster. Beneath it are two shapes, with angular edges that meet mostly in the middle of the work. The lower part is dark gray, and the upper part is white. On the top part of the white side, there is a small gray oblong shape. All of these shapes carry cuts made into their surface as well.
Bianchino, an excellent sculptor, has well internalized the insights of modernism. The piece owes more than a little to modernist reliefs made in the previous century. At the same time, something of our urban experience clings to the work: its jagged surfaces, created by lines embedded into the forms, along with the irregular shapes themselves, demonstrate a randomness that we often meet in city life.
Andréa DeFelice has a two-dimensional work called By the Millions: Cluster (2019). One assumes that the word “millions” in the title refers to the galaxy image in the work: a central circle of white, from which white angled, arm-like extensions extend. This structure occcurs on a dark-gray background. The image is simplified to the point where it could easily be taken as something abstract; at the same time, it also makes the impression, a first impression, that we are looking at a star formation. One hesitates to see so visually exact a work as an example of inspired metaphor, but artists have often represented the night sky—think of Vija Celmins’s wonderful drawings of the stars—as a portrayal, in metaphorical terms, of the imagination. Thus, DeFelice praises both the skies and our minds.
The Swiss artist Stella Pfeiffer, from Lausanne, presented a wonderfully charged work called Tape No. 10, made this year. Is made with black tape that cuts, mainly diagonally, through layers of colored tape that lie beneath the black tape. The black foreground is accentuated by the brightly hued polyhedrons, whose layers of colors mostly include pink, lime green, and brown. The sharply angled shapes veer off in different directions; their angles animate the composition. Pfeiffer has a precision and sharpness of form in this tape work, which is at once highly regular and a bit chaotic (at least in the placement of the colored tapes). One thinks a bit of the Bauhaus movement, a Swiss and German undertaking, and their affinity for a linearly expressed abstraction. Pfeiffer, recently in New York for a residency, presented a very well-done extension of geometric abstraction.
George Goodridge’s outstanding abstract sculpture from this year, titled Anomaly I, consists of two parts: a long, narrow bow-shaped form on the right, curving in a slightly convex form to the left. And just to the left of this shape, one looks at a large form, shaped like a quotation mark. Both parts are composed of elements that are organically abstract and give a different tonality, as well as intricacy of shape, so that the viewer can see the different parts clearly.
Goodridge’s wonderful abstraction, more than a wall relief but less than fully three-dimensional, reminds us that, like all the work remarked upon, non-objective art is far from gone. The question, How do we relate this work to the title “Minimal/Maximal?”, is fair to ask.
DeFelice’s starry vision is a maximal image, while Pfeiffer’s work is smaller in conception and is determined to a considerable extent by color. Intense hues vie with dark tones from one work to the next. Sometimes the sculpture is flat, and sometimes it is more extended from the wall. The different variations may most easily be linked to formal attributes, but they may also be extended to intellectual themes or motives. For example, Bianchino’s excellent flat piece is both historically charged and new, while Goodridge’s three-dimensional piece also takes influence from historical abstraction; one might think of 20th-century sculptor Jean Arp as a distant relative.
In Blohm’s engaging effort, color, perhaps inherently minimal, coexists with a broad expanse of hue, often used to fill a space in maximal fashion. Her effort is also historically influenced, being in dialogue with geometric abstraction from the previous century.
These contrasts find their expression briefly but effectively described in Juschka’s title for the show. Often, in philosophy, oppositions tend to resolve in unification. Since this exhibition is a subtle one, favoring abstraction over figurative art, the dualities are not so easy to find. But Juschka operates correctly within the show by suggesting that differing outlooks can be brought together—without being violently joined. What does this mean? It means that contrarieties need difference to survive as differences, and that their unification is the goal of images and idea. Since we usually hope to proceed into a singular clarity from division, perhaps the larger metaphor of the show, that of a unified image field, defines a large part of Juschka’s goal.
MINIMAL | MAXIMAL
The Principle of Convergence
Les Extrêmes Se Touchent – The Extremes Touch (after Blaise Pascal)
With Simcha Brian Adam, Gianluca Bianchino, Bettina Blohm, Rachael Bohlander, Krystyna Borkowska, Richie Budd, William Carroll, Katie Chin, Judy Collischan, Fernando Colón-González, Andréa DeFelice, Maura Falfan, Otero Fuentes, George Goodridge, Elizabeth Knowles, Matthew Langley, Grant McGrath, Michael Nathaniel Meyer, Victoria Palermo, Stella Pfeiffer, Fred Poisson, Joan Reutershan, Marybeth Rothman, Arlene Rush, Jane Sangerman, RJ Wafer, Pamela J Wallace, Mariana Carolina Wuethrich, and Cassandra Zampini.
Concept and Curation by Priska Juschka.
Exhibition Dates: June 27 – July 27, 2024
Gallery address:
175 Rivington Street
New York, New York USA 10002
