SUMMER GROUP SHOW: Richard Artschwager, Steve DiBenedetto, John Duff, Mel Kendrick, Barry Le Va, Alexander Ross, Jorinde Voigt

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its summer group exhibition, running through September 25, 2010. The show features drawings and sculpture made by artists from several generations, each with their own unique approaches to abstraction.

Richard Artschwager (American, b. 1923) has made a long career of playing with the edges of the so-called abstraction/figuration dichotomy. Well known for his sculptures that look like functional objects such as tables and chairs but are in fact considered art, Artschwager's lesser known drawings are atmospheric explorations of ambiguous, abstract spaces and objects that are at once familiar and uncanny. In this exhibition we show four drawings by Artschwager from the late 1960's until 2008.

The two colored pencil drawings of Steve DiBenedetto (American, b. 1958) are inspired by the shiny glass architecture of skyscrapers. His renderings of these buildings are fractured and bewildering, reflecting the vertiginous experience of seeing these structures on the street as they reflect sunlight, streetlights and their urban surroundings.

The precise geometric and organic forms of the two sculptures on view by John Duff (American, b. 1943) are from the series titled "Inside the Kepler Conjecture," referring to the complex mathematical theories proposed by Johannes Kepler, a 16th century astronomer who was the first to explain planetary movement. Duff's cast resin sculptures are composed of the negative space left by clusters of spheres that were stacked on top of one another and connected by steel rings.

Mel Kendrick (American, b. 1949) is most well known for his sculptures carved out of blocks of wood. Kendrick paints the wood on the outside, cuts through the block, dismantles the pieces from its original state and then recomposes them. The simple procedure behind making the sculptures belies the complex compositions and sense of movement Kendrick achieves by experimenting with interior and exterior spaces, presence and voids. We present a sculpture made of plaster and plywood by Kendrick entitled "Double Core" from 2005.

Barry Le Va (American, b. 1941) has revolutionized the field of sculpture, pushing the medium's limits to the point of dematerialization. Le Va likens his works to crime scenes, where commonplace objects such as wood, felt, ball bearings, shards of glass, even chalk dust, are staged as evidence of an act happening in the past, whether it be an act of violence or simply one of carefully premeditated thought. Utilizing the dialectic of order and flux as well as notions of invisibility and transience, Le Va attempts to classify and catalogue ways of thinking by distributing objects in space as complex markers or traces of process. Drawings by Le Va from the 1960's through the 1980's are on view.

The geometries of nature are the inspiration behind the five black and white drawings on paper by Alexander Ross (American, b. 1960). The biomorphic forms in Ross's drawings appear to be cells viewed through a powerful microscope. He filters objective fact into art through obsessively detailed marks rendered in stark black and white, highlighting the exquisite formal perfection of nature.

The arcs and undulating lines of Jorinde Voigt's (German, b. 1977) drawings are constellations of ideas given visual form. They represent situations, events, and actions from everyday life, from music to ambient temperatures to acts as intimate as kissing, with the incidences noted in relation to each other according to complex algorithms. Voigt's works show the underlying subjectivity behind what is conventionally thought of as objective truth. In this exhibition, we present drawings from two series: "Blickwinkel (Perspective)" (2008) and "Symphonic Area" (2009).