OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, April 20, 2017, 6-8pm
Derek Eller Gallery announces an exhibition of new paintings by David Korty.
Continuing his Word Painting series, Korty creates new canvases which contain a rich collection of patterns, gestures and deconstructed text rendered in ink on paper and collaged both beneath and above the surface of a matte, dark blue Flashe paint. These alternating surfaces create a deceptive play between additive and reductive processes. At the same time, energetically hand painted gestures work against precise geometric cuts, producing an elastic tension.
The Word Paintings gleefully dismantle language. Legible text is cut and rearranged to become digested information serving as building blocks for iconographic shapes, and reconfigured letter forms. Here words are stripped of their signifiers and presented as formally equal with pattern (polka dots, complexly latticed grids) and gestural brushwork. Where Korty’s earlier Blue Shelf Paintings flattened space into a graphic frieze existing in limbo between abstraction and spatial representation, these Word Paintings present a more actualized abstraction.
Since 2010, Korty’s paintings have incorporated a border of three graphite lines on off white strips of paper. This repeated formal device is strictly adhered to. It simultaneously echoes the underlying structure of the painting and establishes boundaries, both literal and regulatory, to be pushed against and improvised within. In the exhibited paintings, this border is highly activated and serves to create a sense of gravity for the depicted forms. The blocks of collage are perfectly wedged, solidly grounded, or rest teetering against the walls of these framing lines. Compositions reference Russian Structuralism, Suprematism, and at times Cubism, while playfully subverting these formal tropes.
David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at Sadie Coles HQ, London and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. His work is included in numerous public collections such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Collection Olbricht, Berlin; Judith Rothschild Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Derek Eller Gallery is located at 300 Broome Street between Eldridge Street and Forsyth Street. Hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 11am to 6pm and Tuesday by appointment. For further information please contact the gallery at 212.206.6411 or visit www.derekeller.com.