A conceptual artist who’s spent the past 50 years painting the same repeating marks in a variety of formats, Niele Toroni rarely shows in New York. This career survey is his first here in 25 years. As usual, the work consists of strokes made with a No. 50 brush spaced 30 centimeters apart. They’re applied to fabric, canvas and paper, as well as on the gallery’s walls and windows.
Toroni’s roll of waxed canvas from 1968 displays hundreds of orange brushstrokes on the titular material, running down the wall onto a platform. Similarly, 25 paintings, from 1987, presents 25 compositions wrapping around the space, each a 39-square-inch canvas covered with precisely 14 brushstrokes.
Still, Toroni’s site-specific “interventions”(a pyramid of black brushstrokes above an entryway, a series in blue on an electrical panel door and three Zen imprints in white on a window) are the main attraction. They provide the icing on the cake for an exhibit made compelling by its deceptive simplicity.—Paul Laster