Gerold Miller @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Gerold Miller

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

January 17 – February 16, 2025

Now exhibiting in Finland for the first time, GEROLD MILLER is a German sculptor known for his minimalistic, geometric works exploring intersections of space, form, and perception. His practice revolves around space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, with the viewer becoming merged an an integral part of the artwork. His art is distinctive for its precision, clean lines, and the use of industrial materials such as aluminium and lacquer. It blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, challenging traditional distinctions and thus inviting the viewer into a dialogue with the visual experience.

The sculptures and wall reliefs featured in the exhibition represent a reduced notion of pictoriality, a key role being played by their placement in time and space. Much depends on the viewer’s perspective in the space and how they position themselves in relation to the work. The merging of the sculpture and the viewer is an ever-evolving process: when encountering Miller’s works, the viewer can experience the world as being simultaneously mirrored and real, while themselves occupying both simulated and real space. In this way, Miller interweaves space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, viewer and sculpture, as a holistically integrated artwork.

GEROLD MILLER (b. 1961) studied sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, graduating in 1989. His work has been exhibited and is held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art in the United States, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Takasaki Museum of Art in Japan, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musée de l’Art et de la Histoire Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Italy.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

Emily Joyce @ Inman Gallery, Houston - Under The Garden

Emily Joyce: Under The Garden 

Inman Gallery, Houston 

January 14 – February 25, 2023 

EMILY JOYCE

Blue Nile, 2022

Flashe vinyl paint, acrylic, and metal leaf on canvas over panel

16 x 16 in (40.6 x 40.6 cm)

© Emily Joyce, courtesy of Inman Gallery

Former Core Artist in Residence EMILY JOYCE (b. 1976) returns to Houston for her seventh solo exhibition with the Inman Gallery. 

In Emily Joyce’s recent symmetrical paintings, she explores hidden systems of nature, the built world, and the cosmos. The paintings are composed of modular and interlocking hexagons, triangles, and concentric circles with special surprise guest appearances by the occasional lily or a bit of gilded text. 

While in her twenties and fresh out of art school, Emily Joyce worked as a decorative painter, embellishing the walls of mansions and vacation homes. Now, a few decades later, that early training has seeped into her new paintings. 

In this recent body of work, there are combinations of faux-bois, gold leafing, spatter painting, stenciling, rag-rolling, marbelizing etc.–sometimes all in one composition. By assigning each technique to its own specific shape on the canvas, Emily Joyce creates an unfolding pattern and off-beat rhythm. The decorative finishes function as sophisticated painting solutions, rather than tromp-l’oeil trickery. 

Emily Joyce’s presentation includes a site-specific painting onto which other works are hung, a self-referential work that cleverly–and playfully–exemplifies these conceptual underpinnings.

INMAN GALLERY

3901 Main Street, Houston, TX 77002

www.inmangallery.com

John McLaughlin @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - Linocuts

John McLaughlin: Linocuts

Van Doren Waxter, New York

Through May 1, 2021

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 8, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm) 

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 3, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents John McLaughlin: Linocuts, a special presentation of rare, intimately scaled geometric prints by the late modernist. A seminal figure in West Coast Abstraction, JOHN McLAUGHLIN (1898-1976) was a midcentury innovator of perception whose hard, clean edged paintings anticipated California art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including West Coast Minimalism and Light and Space.

A disciplined, self-taught artist admired among postwar Abstractionists and Minimalists for his precision and clarity of vision, John McLaughlin’s oeuvre is characterized by elegant, rectangular forms. His work evolved from an interest in Sesshu Toyo, a 15th Century Japanese artist and Zen monk, whose approach to ink painting introduced the concept of “emptiness” or the “marvelous void” into Japanese painting. “In McLaughlin’s work,” art critic and curator Michael Duncan wrote on the occasion of an acclaimed retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016), “the placement of two black forms on a white field becomes a metaphysical event.”

The eight linocuts were planned in the artist’s studio in Dana Point, Laguna Beach in his late 70s, a year prior to a solo show at The Whitney Museum of American Art (1974). These never before shown or reproduced richly textured works on paper are the result of a long-distance project conducted via postal mail.  The works were printed and cut at the French atelier of the legendary printer Hildago Arnéra, known for collaborating with Pablo Picasso. Each of the poignant works evince the artist’s interests in contemplation, silence, and nature.

An untitled linocut (all c. 1973), pictured, features a layering of two black vertical rectangular bars atop a bright expanse; while in another, also pictured, two black bands hover horizontally over a white form. In each, all measuring uniformly 18.1 x 11.9 inches, serene and solemn bars, blocks, and volumes bisect open, large fields, suggesting serenity and the natural world. The American art critic Phyllis Tuchman recently asserted that a green field in John McLaughlin’s paper constructions, also made in 1973, suggests “that such black and white forms exist in a landscape…the rest of the sheets literally traverse states of light and dark.” Likewise, the linocuts invoke the sensuous and the divine, a presence and a void.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN was an American abstract painter born in Sharon, MA in 1898 and died in Dana Point, CA in 1976. In 1935, John McLaughlin and his wife Florence Emerson (descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson) moved to Japan where they lived for three years. Upon their return in 1938, John McLaughlin established a business dealing Japanese prints. It was around this time that he decided to start painting, which was brought to a halt just a few years later with the start of the War. Fluent in Japanese, John McLaughlin was recruited as a translator by the Army during WWII. After the war, McLaughlin settled in Dana Point, California, where he started painting full time in 1946. Entirely self-taught, the artist continued to paint, with considerable success in his later career, until his death in 1976. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016-2017).

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com