“All-over or Nothing” Exhibition

Parallel Art Space

poster for “All-over or Nothing” Exhibition

This event has ended.

All-over or Nothing is by no means intended as a survey of such, but rather as a subjective recognition of artists working in a specific, related vain, harking back to earlier days of modernism when the treatment of the picture plane changed from one with dominant points of interest to one with hallmarks of a more uniform surface treatment. This emphasis on uniformity was seen as a move toward the flattening of the picture plane, as opposed to the illusion of depth commonly found in painting since the renaissance, with the invention of pictorial perspective, etc. Particular progenitors of this approach were artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey in the 1950’s and, according to Clement Greenberg, a lesser-known Janet Sobel somewhat earlier.

From his 1955 essay, “American-Type Painting”, Clement Greenberg defines “all-over” as “filled from edge to edge with evenly spaced motifs that repeated themselves uniformly like the elements in a wallpaper pattern, and therefore seemed capable of repeating the picture beyond its frame into infinity.” It is this sense of both shallow, defined space and infinite time hinted at in the “all-over” pictorial stratagem that seems to make it such an attractive modus to art-makers today. In a visual culture that includes Google-Earth imaging and pinch and drag zoom features on electronic tablets, the repeating field of close-up and far-away graphics is an everyday, observable truth. The fact that the all-over motif typically asserts only the shallowest of pictorial depths, leads the viewer to consider the primacy of a flattened picture plane and thus, the validity of the art object unto itself. In this way, it is both a perfect example of modernist ideology and a useful tool to employ in the unpacking of an increasingly, post-Post-modern world.

With its mix of formalistic attributes and philosophical properties, the all-over disposition provides an intriguing bridge between present art-making concerns and an earlier era’s movements away from Cubist conventions and space toward something altogether more modern. The artists in All-over or Nothing carry markers in their work that can be directly related to this art-historical shift in pictorial perception, whilst moving well beyond it, into considerations and questions both current and consciously their own.

Media

Schedule

from September 07, 2013 to October 06, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-09-14 from 18:00 to 21:00

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use