New York (December 20, 2006) – Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present a
group exhibition with work by John Baldessari, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson,
Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and William Wegman.
The exhibition is centered on the strategies of omission employed by these six pivotal
artists, and the notion that what they choose to omit from their work is just as
significant as what they choose to include. Stemming from John Baldessari's
comment that, "What I leave out is more important. I want that absence, which
creates a kind of anxiety." Each of the works selected for the exhibition deals with
methods of erasure. For example, Baldessari blocks out his own face with a sheet of
paper in an early photographic series. The paper, on which he has scrawled his first
name, expunges his visual identity and becomes the signifier within the tradition of
self-portraiture.
The skewed bits of narrative and obscured imagery present inconclusive evidence; the
presence of absence is crucial. McCarthy equips his sculpture with chunks of
information and fragments of reality in order to represent and at the same time
distance archetypal characters from a familiar world of illusion. Matthew Day
Jackson's fourteen-panel mixed-media work ,The Pitfalls of Utopian Desire, exists as
drawings on posters of a Conestoga wagon accompanied by the cover story from
Time Magazine's 1978 issue on the Jonestown, Guyana mass-suicides. Jackson uses
charcoal to trace the blueprint remnant and hides the pages of the magazine article
behind a spectrum of colored vellum in order to highlight both the optimism and the
failure of a so-called utopian society.
From Kelley's variation on a modernist grid made up of a vitrine of systematically
arranged comic books and colored panels, to Adam Helms' drawings of masks and
hoods, to William Wegman's more than 30-year exploration of conceptualism, editing
and censoring merge with questioning and foregrounding. As visually impressive as
each piece in the exhibition is, the things that we cannot see become the ultimate
mode of seduction.
Concurrently on view at our 526 West 24th Street gallery is Matthew Day Jackson's
THE LOWER 48, a series of photographs taken over the course of approximately
four months while the artist drove through the continental U.S.
On view from January 6th to February 10th in our 527 West 23rd Street space is
JUDITH, a group exhibition of new works by painter Jānis Avotiņš, sculptor Anthea
Hamilton and installation artist William Hunt, in collaboration with London's IBID
Projects.
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
534 West 24th Street
526 West 24th Street
527 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
T 212-627-8000, F 212-627-6336, E info@perryrubenstein.com
www.perryrubenstein.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.
Members of the press please contact:
Sara Fitzmaurice / Dan Tanzilli
FITZ & CO
212-627-1455 x226
dan@fitzandco.com