In the art-lean summer months of recent years, Timothy Taylor has become an interesting place to go for historically focused group shows, carefully punctuated with artists from its roster. While there are enough great and expensive works in this exhibition of abstract paintings for it to smack, inevitably perhaps, of the auction-house viewing room, this is not your average seasonal filler. Rather, it’s a keyhole look into the curiously conflicted nature of minimalistic painterly languages post abstract expressionism.
‘The Minimal Gesture’ is not what springs to mind on first entering the gallery, as the different ways in which artists have developed minimalist ideas offers a visually lively conversation between artists across generations. The works range in conceptual scope and material approach: from Agnes Martin’s velvet-gloved subversion of both hard-edged and expressionistic space, with her slight acrylic and graphite lines, to Peter Peri’s skin-like, Goldfinger application of silver paint over a living, highly gestural ground.
There isn’t a work here that doesn’t contribute thoughtfully to the discussion, though there are several moments of curatorial discord. Hans Hartung’s large-format, lyrically abstract reading of angst appears corporate-lobby pretty in the viscinity of Robert Ryman’s cloud-like obfuscation of the image plane. Similarly, Jonathan Lasker’s beautifully ugly compositional flat-packing of the distance between Joan Miró and Barnett Newman, though designed to irritate the senses, appears more glib in comparison to Terry Winter’s highly intuitive, deep purple, foray into the fabric of the digital unknown.
Above all, this group’s handling of the ab-ex legacy reminds one of the difficulties in defining production thereafter and the amorphous nature of global contemporary art practices today.