Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday

Walead Beshty, Alexandra Bircken, Sarah Braman, Wolfgang Breuer, Tom Burr, Ernst Caramelle, Andy Coolquitt, Paul Cowan, N. Dash, Tony Feher, Michel François, Joe Fyfe, Kim Gordon, David Hammons, Richard Hawkins, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Bill Jenkins, Sergej Jensen, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jason Loebs, Agnes Lux, David Moreno, Virginia Overton, Manfred Pernice, Judith Scott, Nancy Shaver, Gedi Sibony, Michael E. Smith, Josh Smith, Shinique Smith, Al Taylor, Bill Walton, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, Philadelphia Wireman, B. Wurtz, Amy Yao

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday, an exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs, the Director of White Columns, New York. The exhibition will open on Friday, June 1, from 6 – 8 PM and will run through Friday, July 27, 2012.

In a statement about the exhibition Higgs has written:

Four years ago I was invited to Berlin to present a proposal for what would have been the 6th Berlin Biennale. (My proposal wasn’t accepted - the honors went to curator Kathrin Rhomberg, whose exhibition, “what is waiting out there”, eventually opened in June 2010.) The project I proposed had the working title Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday and sought, in its most fundamental sense, to consider the complex entanglements between non-representational art and everyday life.

This exhibition at James Cohan Gallery seeks to develop these earlier ideas around what I termed “vernacular” or “everyday” abstraction: that is artistic practices that actively privilege and operate in the grey area between an essentially non-representational image/object and the use of quotidian materials and processes.

Collectively the works in Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday seem most interested in the point at which the self-contained rationality of earlier modernist abstraction is ruptured. This sense of “rupture” – both physically and psychologically - is perhaps the prevailing aesthetic attitude that unites the otherwise highly idiosyncratic artists – and art works – brought together in Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday. In the work of all these artists traces of our material culture are transformed, or perhaps more accurately, re-purposed into something that is simultaneously familiar and strange.

For additional information, please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com or by telephone at 212.714.9500.