NYAB Event - Stas Volovik Exhibition

Stas Volovik Exhibition

Thierry Goldberg

This event has ended.

Thierry-Goldberg Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition of Stas Volovik. Featuring an extensive selection of paintings created over the past five years.

Volovik presents a series of geometric abstractions, where carefully arranged forms stack, clash or harmonize, over flat color fields. Mostly modest in scale, the 25 paintings on view were made intuitively, with no preconceived design. And while the earlier paintings are somewhat simple and reduced, the recent works are more elaborate and sometimes textured.

Despite his adherence to the purity of color and form, Volovik’s compositions also evoke representational references and follow a sort of physical logic. The weightiness with which the forms rest and balance upon one another recalls a sense of gravity, a physicality which demands a closer encounter.

In one of the more minimal paintings, from 2009, a right-angled triangle hinges from the left edge of the canvas and connects at the tip to five smaller triangles in black, white, and pink. The small triangles, also attached to one another at the tip, hang top to bottom in perfect alignment, and resemble a string of flags hanging off a cliff.

In a later painting from 2012, the triangles make another appearance, this time in purple, green, and gray, pointing in the other direction and hanging upside down from a popsicle stick that is glued onto the canvas. A hollow circle on the upper left and a black dot to its right complete an image that may recall a human face with two eyes and a nose. In essence, Volovik’s post-minimal sensibility and playful compositions, balance color and form within each painting against the sum its parts.

Stas Volovik (b. Uzbekistan, 1974) currently lives and works in Frechen, Germany. His work was previously included in the gallery’s group exhibition “Night Fishing”, and in solo and group exhibitions at the Tashkent Museum of Modern Art, Uzbekistan; the International Biennale, Moscow, Russia; Art Baltika, St. Petersburg, Russia; Gallery GAD, Berlin, Germany; Gallery A-3, Moscow, Russia; Grube Carl, Frechen, Germany; and Gallery Ilchom, Uzbekistan.