This past March, painter Michael David told me he was working on an exhibition that would bring together the work of four artists: Al Held, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, and Frank Stella. At no point did he mention that he would need help, or that he was going to work with someone else, which is why I was confused when I saw the announcement for Painting in Space at Art Cake, part 12 of an ongoing series of interdisciplinary exhibitions by Rail Curatorial Projects called Singing in Unison. Perhaps that collaboration explains the one-size-fits-all title.
David, who began exhibiting his paintings in 1981, witnessed how Held, Murray, Pfaff, and Stella made radical advancements in the relationship between space and flatness, the optical and literal, and abstraction and representation in the 1980s and ’90s. These artists made no concession to what was fashionable then, and even now, when they’ve been inducted into the canon of American abstraction, it’s clear that they relentlessly pursued their own trajectory, regardless of what was going on around them. All of this had a profound effect on David’s work, as he readily admits. During an epoch that celebrated figurative painting and sculpture, and a return to conservative values in art, these four artists presented alternative possibilities. This was his motivation behind bringing these artists together: to pay homage to them.
Each artist is well represented by two large works and two works on paper, the one exception being an additional small painting by Murray, which, along with many of the other small works, came from Pfaff’s collection. Indeed, this is a DIY exhibition, put together without support from an institution or a commercial gallery.
The first revelation I had while looking at these works was that Murray and Pfaff recognized that innovation and humor were not mutually exclusive, and they were not afraid of bringing domestic objects into their work. The crucial issue for Held and Stella, meanwhile, was how to make space in their work, after Minimalism’s insistence on the flatness of what Robert Ryman called the “paint plane.” Both men found a way to muscle Renaissance values of linear perspective back into painting. Held was a pioneer in virtual space, while Stella’s innovation was the opening up of his paintings to literal space. And if they combed out human feeling and humor from their paintings, Pfaff and Murray put them back in, and more.
Murray’s paintings, “Flying Bye” (1982) and “Making It Up” (1986), are populated by cartoony abstract forms. The latter has been stretched around an almost square rectangle that curls along the edges as well as folds over like a blanket. A graphic red rectangle breaking apart has been painted on the dark greenish-blue surface. Emerging from the cracked red rectangle are tubular forms ending in blobby pale blue clouds tinged with pink. There are also four segmented red tails coming in from the corners, one of which ends in a triangle. The tension between the clarity of the forms and what they signify holds our attention; we cannot quite decipher what is going on. Works like these signaled a hinge point in her work; in the ’70s, she began moving away from subjects such as coffee cups and tables to make abstract paintings more elusive to interpretation.
Across the room, Held’s “The Seventh Step” (1995), twice as wide as it is tall, makes the viewer feel like they are inside a deep blue, futuristic parking garage. In the deep background of the painting is a narrow, luminous band filled with faint rectangles. In the middle of the foreground, cropped by the top and bottom edges of the painting, stands a pale greenish-yellow structure made largely of vertical and horizontal planes. This shape divides the enclosed structure into two parts, an obstacle that partially prevents us from feeling like we can move through Held’s space with our bodies; it posits an alternative world that runs according to its own physics. In this regard, it shares something with Murray’s painting — it makes a bodily space. We feel like we can enter the painting and move around in it. No one else was doing anything similar. That this is characteristic of all of the big paintings in this exhibition makes the pioneering artist’s influence all the more clear.
Pfaff’s “Barcelona” (1990) evokes the long, rich history of the titular city’s café culture. By melding a table and chair together, and placing them at angles to the aggregation of circular elements on the wall, Pfaff makes a work that resonates with different aspects of Catalan culture. The large discs allude to the uniform colors of both the men’s and women’s Futbol Club Barcelona teams, combining the red and blue into an empowering purple, alongside red. “Barcelona” also pays homage to Joan Miró. The table, with its turquoise, red, black, and white circles, recalls Miró’s mosaic on the Ramblas welcoming visitors to the city. Indeed, Pfaff is flexible in both inspiration and execution: She worked with and was guided by materials including steel, metal, and glass to touch upon a wide range of subjects from domesticity to foreign cities to other artists.
Stella’s “Zeltweg 3x” (1982) is a partially open, rectangular wall relief on which the artist has layered corrugated aluminum pieces that recall drafting tools, such as the L-square and French curves. The surface of the aluminum pieces has been etched, as well as painted and drawn over with a wide range of colors. Zeltweg is the site of the first Formula One race track in Austria: Stella, a passionate fan of racing cars, connected the precision of drafting tools to the rigor required to maintain finely tuned race cars, as well as evoking the curves and straight lines of a track. The top layer is dominated by a humongous black arrow pointing right, reminding us that while race car drivers cannot deviate, the artist’s freedom can be seen in gestural marks. By compressing these possibilities into a single work, Stella acknowledges that strictness and choice are inseparable.
As a whole, Painting in Space brings up the question of how to make space in a painting, particularly in work rooted in geometry and abstraction. Each of these artists found a signature route, all of them identifiably different. What they do share is a penchant for known forms, from rectangles and circles to planes in space and French curves. But though they all worked in the wake of Minimalism, the question of how to make space in painting is as relevant now as it was then. And the ways each of these artists was able to synthesize their solution with their subject matter remains breathtaking.
Singing In Unison, Part 12: Painting In Space continues at Art Cake (214 40th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn) through December 7. The exhibition was curated by Michael David.
