Thu 2/10 @ 6-8PM
A number of events got delayed by the blizzard last week. One of those was the opening of the new show at Abattoir gallery, located in the Hildebrandt Building in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.
The new show, titled NADA and Friends, presents some artists that the gallery showed in its booth at the NADA Miami exhibition. It includes new work Kent’s Shawn Powell and Catskill, NY’s Caitlin MacBride; two artists new to the gallery, New York-based Thomas Spoerndle and Peter Demos; and wall sculptures by Oberlin resident John Pearson. They reflect the gallery’s commitment to showing contemporary work by both local/regional artists and national artists.
“These artists all share an interest in the history of abstract painting and modernism/ postmodernism,” the gallery tells us. “Powell and MacBride explore objecthood in their paintings, each guided by their particular cultural and art historical interests. Both Powell and MacBride trade in objects borrowed from different realms. Geometric abstraction lies at the core of Thomas Spoerndle’s paintings. John Pearson provides a link to reductive, conceptual work in the region. His wall sculptures, which appear as geometric objects hovering barely off the wall, tie Spoerndle’s paintings back to his own Ohio roots.”
“Finally, Peter Demos employs severely reductive strategies to create paintings which operate on both conceptual and optical planes,” they conclude. “Using only black and white, he builds paintings without traces of the artist’s hand, but which reward the viewer with close looking.”