Liminal 6, 2018. Oil, acrylic, pen, pencils on canvas. 36x36 in.

PRESS RELEASE

MARQUEE PROJECTS

The Messy Minimalist

New Works by Larry Wolhandler

August 30 - September 30, 2018

OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, September 2, 5 - 7 pm

MARQUEE PROJECTS is pleased to announce The Messy Minimalist, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by New York artist Larry Wolhandler.

A reception for the artist will be open to the public on Sunday, September 2nd from 5 to 8 pm. The exhibition of Wolhandler’s new paintings will run from August 30 through September 30, 2018.

Over the past four decades, Larry Wolhandler has been making paintings that explore and challenge conventional assumptions of the abstract minimalist cannon as it relates to beauty, design, and artistic subjectivity. His new paintings continue to celebrate the deconstruction process of composition, as well as revel in the distortion of accurate applications.

Thick, messy, rectangular areas are painted and juxtaposed with delicately refined ones. Penciled and penned lined boundaries are proposed only to be discredited with sprayed overlapping color fields and attempted failed erasures. The new works contain plenty of scaffold-like structure, while perpendiculars appear happenstance and straight lines at times veer off with slightly uncomfortable angles. The use of various masking tapes, T-squares, and sanding machines reveal their marks and are exposed in the painting’s history.

Wolhandler enjoys the process of painting and all the struggle it takes to reduce compositional elements. It is in observing the informal formalist components of his paintings that we discover his real mastery in the exposing of subtle negative space. We can imagine him working like a mad scientist-architect who’s determined to convince us that his plans to build in the 4th dimension are entirely possible. The more we look, the more we’re inclined to believe him…the void is alive.

Larry Wolhandler studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. During his 10-year residence there, he taught art at the American University in Paris. He received a French government fellowship at the American Cultural Center and a 3-year residency at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts in the Marais district. During this period, he showed his work extensively at various galleries, such as Galerie du 7ème and Galerie Angus Françoise, and was featured at Le Festival du Marais in Paris.

In the United States, he has had various one-man exhibits and group shows - in New York at the O.K. Harris Gallery and in East Hampton at Lawrence Fine Arts, in Hoboken, New Jersey at PROTO Gallery, and in Baltimore, Maryland at Sascha One gallery. His works are held in numerous private collections and he has been covered by various publications including The Long Island Advance, Artfix Daily, Street Art News, and The New York Times. The artist lives in New York and maintains studios in Hoboken, NJ, and Brookhaven, NY.