"Abstraction and Empathy" Exhibition
FiveMyles
This event has ended.
“The will to abstraction is to be understood as one of the two aesthetic impulses known to human culture, the other, of course, being the urge to empathy, which manifests itself in the naturalistic depiction of the observable world.”
— Wilhelm Worringer, 1908
It has been over one hundred years since Wilhelm Worringer wrote his classic doctoral thesis concerning how one may approach the differing perceptual qualities of the new modern art. Things have gotten quite complex in the time since then. Definitions now often slip-slide in indeterminate ways. Abstraction may now have elements of empathy. And ostensible ‘reality’ based art and even photography can be emotionally quite cool.
While the four artists in this exhibition do not illustrate any particular theory, the theme suggests how Worringer’s original thesis still resonates even as it gives way to the pressures and variousness of contemporary artistic production. Individually, work by Barbara Hatfield, Nancy Haynes, Jan Meissner, and Gwenn Thomas go from empathic to objective, from photographic ‘realness’ to resolute abstraction.
The conceptually pure and verifiable facts of paint/color, its application and controlled scale on the way to constructing a resonant visual image remain sacrosanct for Nancy Haynes. Pared down and reserved, Barbara Hatfield’s paintings and enigmatic drawings shift from stringency toward a subtle abstract evocativeness. Gwenn Thomas has been a very early pioneer investigating how photographic processes could be used to construct images that are interestingly positioned between painting with light, which is photography’s original definition, and the larger ambitions of expansive painting on canvas. Here she is less technically distanced as she transitions to making marks that are of the hand. New York’s busy streets provide accessible stage sets for Jan Meissner. Her photographs capture not only the city’s natural geometry and energy, but also its curious human activity as presented against lateral shifting planes of rich painterly colors and textures.
Media
Schedule
from March 16, 2013 to April 22, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-03-16 from 18:00 to 20:00