Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of works by Alain Biltereyst, Roger Herman, and Margaret Lee.
Based on graphic designs from advertising, logos, and commercial signage, Alain Biltereyst’s acrylic works on panel combine geometric abstractions with a painterly gesture. Largely in primary colors and black or white, the works reveal minimal but complex patterns that often play with optical illusions of depth and space. Their carefully calculated patterns of rectangles, lines, triangles or parallelograms stand in contrast to their free and unrestrained use of paint that leave traces of the painter’s hand in visible brushstrokes, irregularities, and underlying layers of paint that shimmer through the surface.
Roger Herman’s ceramics continually shift between abstraction and figuration, pair vivid palettes with dark colors and shiny bright surfaces with matte earthy tones. This range of technique is held together by a gestural rawness and vibrancy that is inherent to each sculpture: drips of paint run down the exteriors of the hefty vessels and bowls with occasional window-like holes, sharply cut open.
In Margaret Lee’s Bad Immediately series, the painting’s ground can be interpreted as a metaphor for the base—the fabric of material relations upon which economic value is created. Care has been given to the preparation of each canvas, giving the gesso a compositional presence. The application of paint in lines, patches and rectangles bring to mind the incidental markings that are often visible on the walls of urban buildings and passageways. The presence of grids and simple color gradients further recalls the built environment. In their spare, non-representational poetics, the paintings weigh the possibility of what the sociologist Herbert Marcuse described as a “double reality,” where refusal is possible, established language and images fail, and form holds the contradictions that point toward psychological or social transformation. By calling the eye toward the canvas, the artworks consider the competing pressures that are contained in an object’s surface.
Alain Biltereyst (b. 1965) lives and works in Belgium. Solo exhibitions include Xippas Paris, Baronian Xippas, Brussels and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY. The artist also participated in group exhibitions at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL), Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX, Joshua Liner, New York, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, The B&W Project #5 at Transmitter, Herentals, Belgium, Spaghetti Code at Viewing Room, Los Angeles.
Roger Herman (b. in Saarbücken, Germany, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has shown widely in the United States and Europe. Solo exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Museo del Arte Contemporana, Mexico City. Many group exhibitions featuring Herman’s work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; MoMA P.S. 1, New York; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Museum Ludwig, Saarlouis, Germany; and Art Museum of São Paulo, Brazil.
Margaret Lee has organized and exhibited work at numerous venues domestically and internationally including Misako & Rosen Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, The Windows, Barneys, New York, Concentrations HK: Margaret Lee, curated by Gabriel Ritter, Duddell’s x DMA, Hong Kong, China, Made in L.A, 2014 Hammer Museum Biennial, Los Angeles, 2013 Biennale de Lyon, de, da do...da, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Caza, curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Bronx Museum, New York, NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, New Pictures of Common Objects, curated by Christopher Lew, MoMA PS1, New York, and Looking Back, White Columns, New York, amongst others. Public collections with works by the artist include: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Dikeou Collection, Rubell Family Collection, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet.
For more information please contact Kendall Kane at kendall@jackhanley.com