Renée Green “Excerpts”

Bortolami

[Image: Renée Green "Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words)" (2020) Poly Duck 28 banners, each: 42 x 32 in.]

This event has ended.

Bortolami Gallery presents its first exhibition with Renée Green. Since the late 1980s, Green has explored the concept of color in myriad ways. Spanning the artist’s three decades of working with color’s polyvalent effects, the works in Excerpts manifest her open-ended questioning of invented yet established taxonomies, in order to play with and to displace designations that may seem to be known.

For the exhibition, Green presents two recent Space Poems, a series of works which expand and contract language and color in order to facilitate its exploration over space and time. Green’s 2020 Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words) is composed of 28 banners hanging from the gallery ceiling, and Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words) (2011/2020), a colorful silkscreen suite surrounding the gallery’s perimeter. Invoking the words of poets May Swenson and Laura Riding Jackson, both Space Poems unfold a series of linguistic collisions punctuated by Green’s spatial and chromatic operations.

Indicating the artist’s ongoing methodology of transmutation and translation, the exhibition includes two early works, Color / No Color (1990) and Colour Games (1989). The categories to which these artworks refer slide between their definitions, exceeding their own delimits in the process of attempting to define their forms. Green’s early paintings in the exhibition seek to dismantle an understanding of color as “natural,” in turn revealing the concept to be a pretext for ever pervasive ideological constructs, but at the same time, as an excellent vehicle for the artist’s poetic imaginings and thought.

Renée Green (b. 1959, Cleveland) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Portikus, Frankfurt; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, among many others. Green is also a Professor at the MIT Program of Art, Culture, and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning.