B20A is pleased to announce Space Notations, a second solo-exhibition of new work by Louisiana-born artist, Cullen Washington, Jr. The exhibition opens January 22, 2015, on view through February 21st at the gallery, 515 West 26th Street.
Ice Cube, 2014.
About:
In Space Notations, Washington continues to defy formal expectations; canvas and found fragments circumvent and protrude organically from structural bars and packing tape functions as a graphic tool – both defining and breaking through material and space. It is within these untenable but cohesive structures that the artist suggests both strength and vulnerability and the viewer is in turn, compelled and held in abeyance, dropped and retrieved.
Infinity, 2013.
With Space Notations, Washington renews afresh his quest for essential truths, striving to reconcile order in the universe via the language of the grid and the notion of “abstractus” (i.e. subtracting space). He uses materials at hand including canvas, charcoal, powder, string, tape, gesso, and plastic filter, to create and then veer-off his concocted grid – sometimes visibly, and otherwise by implication. In doing so, he collapses dimension, media, and eventually our perception of order vs. chaos. He questions random vs. deliberate occurrence. He contemplates the logic of interconnectivity in the world today.
Influences in the work are ongoing and range across media; from traces of the coterie of New York School painters who deconstructed to build, and championed the notion of the informal painting, to echoes of the unexpected stresses and accents of syncopated music found in classical music, jazz, hip-hop. For this exhibition, Washington introduces a second new body of work; animated collographs – drawn and collaged upon. Smaller, and restricted to standard boundaries, these works translate the artist’s signature explorations in surprising ways, to the page.
No-Thing 2, 2013.
Cullen Washington Jr. was born in 1972 in Alexandria, Louisiana. He holds an MFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. He was most recently included in Distrust That Particular Flavor at Bitforms Gallery in NYC and Abstract America Today at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Washington was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Program in 2009; in 2012 his work was included in the deCordova Biennial in Lincoln, Massachusetts and in the same year, he was an Artist-in-Residence, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where his work was shown in Things in Themselves. In 2014, he was included in Black in the Abstract, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and has had solo-shows at the Boston University’s gallery, as well as the Jack Bell Gallery, London. Recent acquisitions have been made by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Saatchi Gallery, London.
(press release gallery)
