NYAB Event - Paul Kolker “Halftones and Ishidots…The New Abstract!”

Paul Kolker “Halftones and Ishidots…The New Abstract!”

PAUL KOLKER collection

This event has ended.

With this exhibition, Kolker launches his return to both abstract painting and light sculpture with his yearlong series called “The New Abstract!”. In his sculptures, curved mirrors reflect, distort and thereby abstract light into infinity. In each painting, Kolker stays true to his minimal color theory and referential use of his dots, reminding us of the way we have come to see things on the digitally printed page as well as on our computer, television and smartphone screens; but, as in this exhibition, through the new abstract closeup lens of Kolker’s metaphorical microscope.

The art historical and scientific bases for the works in this exhibition are founded in the technologies spawned by the development and wide use of photography before the mid-nineteenth century. Early halftone print methods were based on the work of William Fox Talbot, Frederic Ives and Benjamin Day. Screens of dots of various sizes were used to transfer photographic images to the printed page in black and white gradients and ultimately in color. It is therefore no surprise that in 1915 when Dr. Shinobu Ishihara, an ophthalmologist in the Royal Japan Air Force (RJAF) and acclaimed for his color blindness research, had painted dots of various sizes and colors on the paper cards he used to test color vision in his patients, RJAF pilots.

Kolker (born 1935) is known for his light sculptures and also his paintings and prints incorporating rectilinear grids of dots, halftone phases and curvilinear patterns of multivariate dots; the latter which he calls Ishidots in attribution to Shinobu Ishihara.