Debra Ramsay at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Installation view of Debra Ramsay's Painting Time

From the Press Release:

You might be surprised to learn that this installation— comprising a profusion of colorfully painted and curled strips that pile, unfurl, and tumble across the floor—is a landscape. Yes, a landscape.

Debra Ramsay generates a strict set of rules to guide her creative process for each new body of work. For this installation, she distilled her daily walks in the woods to pure color. What you are seeing is her color record across four seasons.
Painting Time is at once reductionist and exuberant. While Ramsay reduces the complexity of color change in nature to momentary snap- shots over a year of seasons, the swirling heaps of color evoke nature’s abundance.

That the conceptual rigor of her work doesn’t overpower the aesthetic pleasure of the experience is a testament to Ramsay’s artistic power. Painting Time exists in the aesthetic realm—a place where interpretation is nuanced and fluid, and where understanding can deepen each time an artwork is experienced, revisited, or discussed.

— Mara Williams, Chief Curator


This artwork is about time. I used the landscape as a time- keeping device by documenting the change in its colors at the same location in New Berlin, New York, over the course of a year. I think of the work as a pure landscape, reduced to the actual colors I found there.

To make the work, I first captured colors from nature photographically. I returned to the same trail in the forest in the spring, summer, fall, and winter of one year. Each time I walked the trail, I took a photo every 100 steps, resulting in 18 photos on each walk. I then selected one color from each photo to translate into a paint color. Seventy-two distinct colors mark this year of time.

As I worked on this project, I was reminded of Josef Albers’s statement: “There is a profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color.”

— Debra Ramsay



Debra Ramsay: Painting Time
June 22 - September 24, 2018
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
10 Vernon Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301

Patrick Heron: Painter of Soul, A Film by ArtTop 10

Film still from Patrick Heron: Painter of Soul

Patrick Heron: Painter of Soul. A film about the renowned British artist Patrick Heron by painter and ArtTop10.com Founder Robert Dunt coinciding with the retrospective of Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives. Follow ArtTop 10 here.

Film still showing Robert Dunt, artist, film maker and narrator of Patrick Heron: Painter of Soul

George Warren at Hillsboro Fine Art

A piece from George Warren's current exhibition in Dublin

Real Blonde, 2016, painted bronze, 25 x 40 x 8 cm

A piece from George Warren's current exhibition in Dublin.

Widow Blonde, 2017, oil on hyperseal

George Warren in his studio.

Installation view at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin

Installation view.

George Warren: Misprint

Through June 2, 2018

Hillsboro Fine Art
49 Parnell Square West
Dublin 1, Ireland

*All photographs courtesy of the artist and Hillsboro Fine Art

Willard Boepple at Cynthia-Reeves

Untitled (Green Lock), 2016, bass for steel, 49 x 55 x 50 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

Untitled (Purple Lock), 2016, bass for steel, 46 x 40 x 40 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

From the Press Release:

Willard Boepple is an unabashed modernist: an innovator within a strong and defined sculptural tradition that renews itself through the rigor he brings to his process, and by his being open to the element of surprise. His aesthetic is refined, with enormous emphasis on economy and restraint. 

In this exhibition, his monoprints are accompanied by larger scale floor-based sculptures and by a series of 3D printed small sculptures, a new area of exploration. To make his sculptures, he rarely works from drawings or maquettes, but draws the sculptures after they are made, as if to figure out what he has done. It was this drawing practice that led to the inquiry into 3D printing. Boepple’s colorful works on paper are derived from the shapes and shadows of his sculptures. Those positive and negative shapes evoke structures that are the underpinnings of the prints. The compositional structure of each print is built much the way his sculptures are: geometric shapes placed and reshaped until they click or, in Boepple’s words, “sing.” Base colors are laid into each of the shapes, layer upon layer in a progression that allows the colors to mask and mute, or deepen and intensify. In his words, “it is a thrilling process, building with color.”

The artist writes: “I am an abstract sculptor and I want my work to speak directly without narrative or message other than what is communicated by the sculpture’s own form and presence. Abstract sculpture’s privilege is to be driven purely by the viewer’s visual experience of it -- to reach through the eye into the mind and, when it is really good, straight on into the heart.” 

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, VT in 1945 and currently splits his time between Vermont and New York City. His work is included in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville; and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, among others. He was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in 2010 and his work was included in their 2015 invitational exhibition. 

Two views of Untitled (Red Tuxcedo), 2016, bass for steel, 52 x 40 x 42 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

11.10.17. G, 2017, monoprint, 13 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

11.10.17. A, 2017, monoprint, 13 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

11.10.17. F, 2017, monoprint, 13 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

29.11.16. E & 29.11.16. O, 2017, monoprint, 26 1/8 x 24 1/4 inches
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

Burnley, sintered iron, 7 1/4 x 14 7/8 x 5 1/8 inches, edition of 25
Photo by Etienne Frossard 

Willard Boepple: Built and Printed

Through June 23, 2018

Cynthia-Reeves 
1315 MASS MOCA Way
North Adams, MA 01247

Christopher Stout at Lichtundfire

From the Press Release:

Lichtundfire is pleased to announce SONIC OPERA, an exhibition of new intimate-sized, abstract reductive paintings by New York based artist Christopher Stout. This marks the second Lichtundfire solo show by the artist, and also his sixth exhibition project with the gallery. Christopher Stout’s first solo exhibition at Lichtundfire was COME OUT 2 SHOW THEM in April of 2017.

As a metaphor of the words of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the French nobleman and ground-breaking scientist who was guillotined during the French Revolution due to his aristocratic background, who stated that, “…nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms,” SONIC OPERA is both an expansion of, and a focused convergence on the work from his previous solo exhibition. Stout forms a vocabulary that is the result – in its original sense of res ultima (lat.) – of a synthesis of the visual disciplines of abstract reductive painting, abstract minimal sculpture and sound art composition.

Alike chords in music, or the floors of a building in architecture, the volume of a generative process of layering of materials provides the dialectic foundation for each work. All these works are serially congruent layered, with the exception of the top shape layer that bifurcates into porcelain circles or a parallelogram. With this approach, Stout, evokes a visual sense of a musical/ operatic monument – reality shrouded inside of a 5-sided plexiglass box.

In a discourse about the philosophy of sound, the German electronic composer, musical visionary, and theoretician Karlheinz Stockhausen clarified, that “…what is important is neither linearity or non-linearity, but the change, the degree of change from something that doesn’t move to other events with different tempos in particular.”

To that end, the artist remains steadfast in a constituency of replication, connection and reconnection, a mandate of restraint, negative space, aerial mapping, and Stout’s own tenet that, “subjective matter may be provided artifice through insertion into an established system.”

Conversely, the installation of these small size paintings hovers aesthetically and philosophically between the reductionist assumption that every thing, and every idea, can be reduced to its more simple and coherent form while emphasizing the imperfections which come with all things created.

Christopher Stout was born and raised in Maryland and lives and works in New York City. He is an abstract reductive artist whose work addresses and places itself between questions of “what is the construct of painting?” and “what is the construct of sculpture?” and is concerned with the additive outcome in merging the vocabularies of both disciplines. He lives in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan and works from his studio in the artist neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Christopher Stout is the founder and director Art During the Occupation Gallery in Bushwick, which is not affiliated with his personal art practice. ADO Gallery is a contemporary art gallery showing subversive and difficult work by New York City artists. It serves as a platform for discourse on work that challenges authority paradigms, feminist, queer, anti-establishment, hyper-aggressive, mystic, and/or joyously sexual, with a focus on performance and video artists as well as on contemporary sculpture and painting. He was the founder of Bushwick Art Crit Group (2013-2016), Bushwick NYC’s artist lecture and exhibition series, with a mission to foster an understanding of Contemporary Art through the lens of art and artists in Bushwick. Stout has received numerous public accolades for his work as an artist, Bushwick gallerist and curator.

Christopher Stout: Sonic Opera

May 11 - June 3, 2018

Opening Friday, May 11, 6 - 8 PM

Lichtundfire

175 Rivington

New York, NY 10002

Kirk Stoller at Romer Young Gallery

Kirk Stoller, Untitled (spun), 2018, wood, metal, stain, enamel, 72 x 23 x 23.5 in

Kirk Stoller, Untitled (victory), 2018, wood, paper, stain, metal, 11.5 x 8.5 x 14.5 in

From the Press release: 

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition with artist Kirk Stoller, the Color ran from his face. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, April 27th, 6-9pm.

Using minimal color, Stoller distills the essence of the work down to its structure and its form. While traditionally the artist has used color as an emotional implicator to invite psychological, emotional and speculative engagements with the viewer, this time around he has chosen a muted, monochrome palette. By neutralizing the spectrum, Stoller minimizes the distractions and interpretations thus allowing for an experience with the larger gestalt. In these subtle and understated sculptures, line creates form and structure provides support; together they offer the basis for the visible shape of things. Decidedly non-representational, Stoller's work is "broad enough for all viewers to be able to create their own unique relationships with each piece. Following this strategy has helped him make pieces spare enough - like poetry, in a way - to talk softly and carry a big stick." (Maria Porges)

KIRK STOLLER lives and works in San Francisco and Brooklyn. He received his BA in French Language from Portland State and his MFA from UC Berkeley. Stoller's work has been exhibited at the Mary Ryan Gallery and Leslie Heller Gallery, New York, Storefront BushwickGallery and GRIDSPACE, Brooklyn, The Property, Los Angeles as well as Galerie Axel Obiger in Berlin. Stoller was an Edward Albee Foundation Fellow. He was also awarded the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Studio Residency, NY, the MacDowell Art Colony Residency, NH, the Willapa Bay Artist Residency, WA and this fall, the Golden Foundation Residency. Stoller was a studio resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Stoller would also like to thank Yaddo for its gift of time and studio space that helped in creating this show. For more information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.

Kirk Stoller: The Color Ran From His Face

Through June 9, 2018

Romer Young Gallery
1240 22nd Street
San Francisco, CA 

*Images courtesy of Romer Young Gallery

New in the Studio

The Overcoat, 2018, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 36 x 36 in

The Overcoat (detail)

The Overcoat (detail)

The Overcoat (detail)

Studio Portraits and Snapshots

Gili Levy in her studio in Bushwick, 2014

This post is a collection of some favorite portraits and snapshots that have appeared on Structure and Imagery since I began the blog in 2011.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed revisiting them.

Art Guerra in the doorway of Guerra Paints and Pigment on 13th Street, New York, NY

Ann Purcell in her Red Hook studio, 2018

Ana Wieder Blank in her studio, 2018

Stephanie Theodore, founder and director of Theodore:Art, at her space at 56 Bogart, Bushwick, 2013

Amanda Church

Alison Sirico, co-founder of ALT ESC

Alex Paik, 2014

Arvid Boecker and Don Voisine at Boecker's opening at Stout Projects in Brooklyn

Barbara Takenaga at Mr. Fong's on Market Street, LES

Beth Gilfilen 

Brenda Goodman, 2014 in Hudson, NY

Brian Wood in his studio, New York, NY

Debra Drexler, Brooklyn 2015

Dave Pollack with his work at Stout Projects in Bushwick, 2016

Debra Ramsay in her Manhattan studio, 2013

Dale McNeil in his studio in Memphis, TN, 2013

Robin Stout at the Visual Essay on Gutai exhibition at Hauser and Wirth on East 69th Street, 2012

Kerry Law with work in his studio at the Pencil Factory, Greenpoint, 2011

Christopher Quirk at Gary Giordano Gallery, Bushwick, 2017

Brece Honeycutt at the Moore Street Market in Bushwick, 2011

J. J. Manford at an exhibition of Peter Acheson's work that he curated for Novella Gallery, LES, 2013

Erin Lawlor contemplating a painting by Joan Mitchell in Chelsea, NYC

Me at my exhibition, An Awful Rainbow, at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Chelsea, 2013
Photo by Robin Stout

Fran O'Neill with her work at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, 2017

Painter and gallerist, Gary Giordano in Lambertville, NJ

Hamlett Dobbins in his studio in Memphis, TN, 2011

Henry Samelson in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2011

Photographer Meryl Meisler and art writer and executive editor of The New Criterion, James Panero in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2016

Amy and Dr. Vittorio Colaizzi in my studio in Bushwick, 2016

Artist and Art During the Occupation Gallery director, Christopher Stout, Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2017

Vincent Como and Rebecca Murtaugh discussing Murtaugh's work in Bushwick 2017

Rob de Oude discusses his work in Doppler Shift at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2014

Jamie Powell in her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2014

Jason Rohlf, Greenpoint, Brooklyn 2014

Matthew Neil Gehring and Rebecca Murtaugh in the Hampton's, 2014

Jeff Frederick, Brooklyn, 2014

James Erikson and Debra Ramsay at the Half King in Chelsea, NYC

John Yau and Michael David, Life on Mars in Bushwick, 2015

Jon Cowan speaking about his work in Brooklyn, 2016

Artist and curator Julie Torres with Brett Baker at an exhibition of Baker's painting at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 2013

Karen Baumeister at Cheim & Read with work by Milton Resnick, 2011

Julie Torres with her work at Taller Boricua in Harlem, 2012

Painter Karl Bielik viewing a work by Mali Morris in London, 2016

Catherine Haggarty in her studio in Hoboken, NJ, 2017

Robin Stout, Kevin Finklea and Debra Ramsay, Manhattan, 2014

Matthew Neil Gehring in his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2012

Melissa Dunn, Memphis, TN, 2012

Nicholas Hamilton, Greenpoint, 2011

Paul Edwards at his home in Mississippi, 2012

Ravenna Taylor, Lambertville, NJ, 2012

Richard Timperio in his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2015

Robert Otto Epstein, Mapelwood, NJ, 2014

Sabine Tress in her studio in Cologne, Germany, 2016

Sharon Butler at a photo shoot with Meryl Meisler, Stout Projects, 2016

Tom Burckhardt in his Manhattan studio, 2013

Vincent Como, Brooklyn, NY, 2016

William Bradley, Brooklyn, 2017

A photo of me outside our apartment in Manhattan taken by Robin Stout, 2016

Gallery owner, Brian Morris at his gallery on Chrystie Street, 2013

Painters Karen Baumeister and James Erikson visit an exhibition by Diana Copperwhite at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel on West 25th Street, NYC, 2013

Tops Gallery founder and director, Matt Ducklo in Memphis, TN, 2016

*All photos by Paul Behnke unless otherwise noted.