Barbara Krakow Gallery is pleased to open its summer group exhibition, Apparent Forms. Featuring a broad swath of artists from four generations, the exhibition serves as a presentation of neighboring conceptual ideas along with strong formal conversations, all with a strong emphasis on variation within and between elements.
The exhibition is divided into three sub-sections. The first of which features Allan McCollum’s The Shapes Project: Shapes from Maine Shapes Ornaments juxtaposed with Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Stamps). This juxtaposition serves, among other things, to illuminate the two artists’ distinct approaches to the balance between formalism and humanism.
The second section (the largest of the three) consists of seven artists’s works that form a loose exquisite corpse-like conversation wrapping the gallery’s walls. The strong and chaotic lines of Liliana Porter’s installation echo the particular and directed starburst-like lines of Sol LeWitt’s portfolio. John Baldessari’s first print portfolio, Raw Prints, takes the chaos of Porter’s lines, as well as the specificity of LeWitt’s lines and chooses a place in the middle. Baldessari takes seemingly random elements from the tipped-in photographs and enlarges the forms but presents seemingly casual outlines, using different colors for each element. The play between photograph and traced/enlarged/outlined forms is echoed in the formal arrangement of Kiki Smith’s bronze mushrooms on the wall. The shadows play a significant role in situating the mushrooms on the wall (as opposed to mushrooms’ more common horizontal location) and emphasizing the tension between the small elements and the large form created by their arrangement/dispersal. On the opposite end of the spectrum of scale, is Ray Charles White’s Dune Study project. For a good number of years, White has been photographing one area of southern California’s dunes. He repeatedly returns to the same location, yet the vastness of the space is continually altered by the winds and so each photograph is in a sense, the same photograph, yet visually they are completely different.
The third section is the quietest – featuring a sculpture and print by Tara Donovan, three etchings by Brice Marden and two wall sculptures/paintings by Kate Shepherd. All of the works engage positive and negative space, perfection and casualness, and the balance between intimacy and vastness.
