Russell Maltz “Painted / Stacked / Site”
Minus Space
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MINUS SPACE presents Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site, the esteemed NYC-based artist’s third solo exhibition here at the gallery which will occur in five distinct installments.
For the past five decades, Russell Maltz has produced reductive artworks in a broad array of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography. Working both indoors and out, Maltz commonly uses new or repurposed commercial building materials, such as plywood, lumber, metal wall studs, cinder blocks, glass, PVC pipes, and enamel paint, which he carefully transforms and sites in response to the dynamics of a given environment. His works often appear raw and industrial upon first impression contrasting the seemingly casual nature of their arrangement.
Maltz will present a documentary exhibition at the gallery of his earliest works dating from the mid- to late 1970s that he made in response to the Land and Conceptual Art movements, both key touchstones in the artist’s early production. Starting in 1976, Maltz began working in an abandoned public swimming pool on the campus of C.W. Post College, Long Island University, in Brookville, NY, where he created a series of temporary, site-sensitive installations exploring the pool’s unique negative space as well as its surrounding environment. Works on view will include photographs, drawings, videos, and ephemera from this period. These will be complemented by a suite of seven black and white photographs by artist Abby Robinson of both Maltz’s works as well as installations created by other invited, collaborating artists, including Roberta Allen, Ted Stamm, Tony King, and more.
From May 14 – June 18, the artist will act as an “artist in residence” at the gallery where he will install works from his ongoing, multifaceted Stacked series dating from the early 1980s to the present. His focus will be on the process of making the artworks in the space. Viewers will have the opportunity to see the results of the artist at work and experience individual artworks realized at various stages of their development and reconfiguration.
For his third exhibition from June 25 – July 30, Maltz will present a suite of works from his recent Needle series, which merge glass, lumber, and other construction materials into slender vertical constructions. All of the works on view during his multipart exhibition illuminate the artist’s decades-long examination into the transformation of humble, industrial materials and ask poignant questions about what an abstract painting can be and how it can function in a given environment.
In addition to the three consecutive exhibitions at the gallery, Maltz will also realize a new site-sensitive installation consisting of concrete blocks, plywood, PVC pipes, metal wall studs, and dayglo yellow paint in an empty storefront located at 28 Jay Street (ground floor) in Dumbo. The installation will also feature a TV monitor presenting a looping slideshow of nearly 200 photographs from his ongoing FS series, which documents instances of found installations on city streets throughout the world. The exhibition will be viewable from the street 24/7 until mid-May.
Maltz will lastly present a public Scatter series project in Hillman Garden / Luther Gulick Park located at 100 Broome Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood through the summer. The artist identified and transformed existing materials from the community garden, which members of the garden will be able to repurpose and reuse for their everyday gardening needs.
Russell Maltz (b. 1952, Brooklyn, NY; lives New York, NY) is one of the leading reductive artists of his generation. Over the past 40+ years, he has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Israel, Mexico, and the United States. The first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted by the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in Germany in 2017, and was accompanied by a 230-page book published by Kerber Verlag.
Here at the gallery, Maltz has mounted two engaging solo exhibitions – Painted / Stacked / Suspended (2017) and The Ball Park Series, 1977-2012 (2012) – and also participated in the two-person exhibition Plywood alongside artist Melissa Kretschmer (2015). In 2012, he produced a major, site-sensitive installation entitled Painted/Stacked Oaxaca at the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, which was part of our survey exhibition MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico.
His additional recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Michael Sturm (Stuttgart Germany), Galerie Wenger (Zurich, Switzerland), Alejandra von Hartz Gallery (Miami, FL), Galleri Weinberger (Copenhagen, Denmark), The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), Galerie Schlegl (Zurich, Switzerland), and the Ringling School of Art and Design (Sarasota, FL).
Maltz’s work is included in many public and private collections worldwide, including The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Fogg Art Museum/Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA), Museum Moderner Kunst (Ottendorf, Germany), and the Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia). His work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Village Voice, among many others.
Maltz serves on the Advisory Board of Critical Practices Inc. (CPI), which supports the emergence and development of new practices within the field of cultural production. CPI was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Media
Schedule
from April 09, 2022 to May 07, 2022