Breaking the Frame

Leah Guadagnoli Justine Hill Dana James Eric Shaw Jason Stopa

Hollis Taggart Contemporary presents Breaking the Frame, a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists. Breaking the Frame explores the ways in which the featured artists are engaging with the physicality of traditional painting, from the incorporation of illusionistic brushwork to the use of architectural motifs to the layering and morphing of materials to create depth and alter form. The exhibition also highlights new approaches within abstract painting, considering how today’s practitioners continue to engage with the aesthetic and conceptual underpinnings of significant art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism as well as the ongoing relevance of geometric painting and the shaped canvas.

In his paintings, Stopa combines architectural motifs such as windows, fences, and arches with gestural brushwork. In doing so, he confuses the spatial relationships within the surface plane and produces an ambiguity around the confines of the canvas itself. Hill, alternatively, melds painterly mark-making with the effects of the shaped canvas, creating sculptural compositions that evoke in instances three-dimensional graffiti tags and in others organic life. Hill’s forms, which interact dynamically with the wall and project into the viewer’s space, evolve from hand-made sketches that she develops further in photoshop and then translates into paint. James, who often finds inspiration in her memories of suburban landscapes, cuts up her paintings and reassembles them into new multi-part constructions, leaving visible seams that are sometimes paired with scar-like scribbled marks.

Guadagnoli and Shaw more deliberately reference the environment around them with allusions to architecture, graphic design, and urban spaces. Guadagnoli’s textured pastel-hued relief-paintings are inspired by Greek diner logos and Swahili architecture. Influenced by commercial design and logos seen throughout New York City, Shaw’s paintings are filled to the brim with maze-like networks of interlocked abstract forms. Rather than physically projecting his works forward into space, Shaw creates an illusion of depth by building up his imagery in layers. Before beginning each new layer, he photographs the painting and then digitally draws on the photographed image to experiment with new shapes before adding them to the canvas.

Using vibrant, expressive colors, the featured painters create abstractions that are layered with references—sometimes to the artistic process and other times to the world around them. Whether by incorporating painting into architectural space, activating the wall with a shaped canvas, evoking graphic design seen on the city streets, or using the processes of collage, drawing, or digital tools, these artists share a commitment to a practice that challenges painting’s traditional confines. Breaking the Frame is organized by Efstathiou, and curated by Jillian Russo, Hollis Taggart’s Director of Exhibitions.