Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce Patterns, a group exhibition presented in both our Chelsea and Tribeca galleries. On view from June 21 through August 2, the show highlights over twenty artists whose work explores pattern in diverse ways—as a motif, organizing principle, compositional device, and strategy. Working in painting, weaving, quilt-making, mosaic, and sculpture, this cross-generational group of artists includes:
Tauba Auerbach, Athos Bulção, Lygia Clark, Melissa Cody, Sarah Crowner, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers (Qunnie Pettway and Loretta Pettway Bennett), Alfred Jensen, Rashid Johnson, Emily Kraus, Liu Wei, Kim MacConnel, Eric N. Mack, Jeremy Moon, Rebecca Morris, Ryan Mrozowski, Richard Rezac, Frank Stella, Philip Taaffe, Rosemarie Trockel, Juan Uslé, Jack Whitten, Christopher Wool, Yves Zurstrassen
Rather than adhering to rigid repetition or structure, these artists invite interruptions and deviations from prescribed forms through varying strategies, opening avenues to new ways of making and seeing. Painterly approaches to pattern in the exhibition range from the “bedsheet paintings” of Kim MacConnel, a seminal figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, to Emily Kraus’s process-driven, stochastic abstractions produced with a self-made apparatus. Athos Bulção required that the tiles of his intricate, puzzle-like murals be installed at random in order to create disruptions in the formal pattern of his original designs. The potentiality of such “slippage” is embraced by many artists in the exhibition, as evidenced in Christopher Wool’s early stamp and roller paintings, in which he focused on the small failures that occurred when using these everyday tools—glitches that subverted the mechanized framework with painterly gesture. A “perceptual stutter” continues in the paintings of Ryan Mrozowski; symmetry and asymmetry abut, resulting in lyrical patterning that often reimagines nature with methodical order.
Jeremy Moon exploited the opposing forces of rigid organization and flexible expandability inherent in the grid; similarly, Tauba Auerbach plays with repetitive geometric forms through tubular glass sculptures that are reminiscent of molecular structures and reference global traditions of ornament. The multi-layered works of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, represented by mother and daughter Qunnie Pettway and Loretta Pettway Bennett, feature experimental processes and compositional languages passed down through generations; the interplay between symbols and asymmetry refers to histories of African textiles while also evoking the formal qualities of Modernist painting. A rhythmic energy resonates through the work of all the artists featured in the exhibition, punctuated by their diverse disruptions to the expected regularity of form.
