Ended
Primary Elements
Apr 8 – May 3, 2014
Marc Jancou Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Primary Elements, a group exhibition featuring work by Tomma Abts, Donald Baechler, Nathan Hylden, Sherrie Levine, Nick Lowe, Julian Opie, Richard Pettibone, Albrecht Schnider, and Alan Uglow. The exhibition will be on view April 9 – May 3, 2014.
The accessible, nearly universal language of primary shapes and colors has been present in visual culture since the earliest days of abstraction. Incorporating grids, elemental geometry, and found shapes, Primary Elements explores the ways in which these objects are incorporated into contemporary art. These readymade shapes may function as symbols for other concepts, as in Baechler’s Untitled (House), or may simply investigate the purity or expressive potential of form. The exhibition brings together the reduced pictorial vocabulary of Pettibone’s Piet Mondrian with the dreamlike, imaginative figures appropriated by Levine in her After Miro.
Understood by children and often aesthetically appealing, primary shapes have a character of timelessness. Primary Elements explores the ways in which these forms have been reproduced, referenced, challenged, and used for playful, subversive or spiritual means since their appearance in avant-garde art more than a century ago.
