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GREENE NAFTALI
T 212.463.7770 508 WEST 26TH STREET GROUND & 8TH FLOORS NEW YORK NEW YORK 10001 WWW.GREENENAFTALIGALLERY.COM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SUNCRUSH
June 28 – July 28, 2023
Ground Floor
KENNETH ANGER
FRANK BOWLING
JUSTIN CAGUIAT
MELVIN EDWARDS
JANA EULER
SIMONE FATTAL
RACHEL HARRISON
BEATE KUHN
JEAN-LUC MOULÈNE
HOWARDENA PINDELL
WALTER PRICE
RACHEL EULENA WILLIAMS
Greene Naftali is pleased to announce the group exhibition Suncrush, featuring new and historic works by artists that
variously bind or decouple color from material form. Indeed, many of the artists assembled here wield color as base
material—as an agent not only of optical experience but of haptic, lived reality. Vibrant hues become structuring
elements, formal problems on which to build. Working across media in painting, sculpture, ceramics, and film, they use
a spectrum of color techniques to evoke both raw sensation and cultural ties, seizing on the personal and shared
associations that a given shade might hold. Suncrush takes its name from a particularly vivid 1976 painting by
Frank Bowling, in which color is used as a conduit for meaning but avoids symbolic formulas, appealing instead to a
more visceral psychology. In each of these works, color (or its strategic absence) strikes at a bodily level, freed up to say
the unsayable—stoking desire that, as Roland Barthes once remarked, “makes the entire motionless chart of language
vibrate.”
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Bowling uses abstraction to mine the emotive qualities of color. His technically pioneering paintings meld avant-garde
and vernacular techniques, from cascades of poured paint to the use of stencils or supports stitched from scraps of
canvas. Discs of pigment form Justin Caguiat’s dense grounds of patterned color, which accrue here—mosaic-like—from
rounds of grass-green and metallic gold. Wafers and orbs similarly structure the glazed stoneware of German ceramicist
Beate Kuhn, and tiny inscribed dots fill the warp and weft of Howardena Pindell’s handmade paper. Rachel Harrison’s
sculpture Sun Squad combines jewel-toned purples and shades of bronze with searing brights, titled after the brand of
Hula-Hoops that dangle from its surface—each a circle of found colors. The swirling brushwork of Walter Price’s near- monochrome Fanta has all the fizz and froth of its namesake cola, and color strides through his mural-scaled Forward
March, in paint-covered footprints that log the artist’s motion, pace, and progress.
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There’s an untrammeled optimism in Rachel Eulena Williams’s ruptures of the picture plane. Her canvases are layered
with cord and swathes of fabric and perforated from beneath, revealing stretcher bars that become new surfaces to
douse with color. A more occult, feverish color sense suffuses the films of Kenneth Anger, through torrents of images
montaged into heady, cross-cut flows. The voiding or removal of color can also be as potent as its application, and
several of the works on view engage in this type of chromatic withholding. Harrison’s BW Sunset adds a further layer of
mediation to the artist’s rephotographed prints of a found image, draining the (already banal) “original” of anything
resembling natural hues. And Jana Euler’s black-and-white diptych of a camera and washing machine joins the two
panels with a length of textile, likening the lens of an imaging tool to a domestic appliance’s round glass portal. Color is
present but also secreted beneath this protruding element, as the “laundry” that tumbles in the washing machine is
embedded in the canvas yet blocked from view. Her depictions of electronics and the outlets that power them are
deadpan riffs on the mechanics of painting—and the extent to which our devices have become extensions of ourselves.
Jutting from the wall in more ominous fashion are the Lynch Fragments of Melvin Edwards, an ongoing series begun in
the 1960s made from scraps of welded steel. Incorporating found objects—nails, chains, padlocks, saw blades—both
benign and menacing in tone, these compact reliefs entwine histories of labor and racial violence. Jean-Luc Moulène
embeds his sculptural objects with a sense of material contradiction, here forcing a coil of steel inside a torqued globe
of handblown glass. Simone Fattal makes sculptures as rooted to the earth as Moulène’s are levitational, forging totemic
figures in bronze that exude a timeless solidity. Her standing Warriors evoke both mythical heroes and more
contemporary conflict, with an unyielding, human presence that bridges cultures and spans millennia.
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GREENE NAFTALI
T 212.463.7770 508 WEST 26TH STREET GROUND & 8TH FLOORS NEW YORK NEW YORK 10001 WWW.GREENENAFTALIGALLERY.COM
Suncrush
Jun 28 – July 28, 2023
Ground Floor
Front Gallery:
Frank Bowling
Dicotyledon (Franked), 2004
Acrylic and acrylic gel on collaged canvas
30 1/8 x 23 x 1 1/4 inches (77 x 58 x 3 cm)
Justin Caguiat
All Flesh is Grass, and all its Trust Like the Flowers of the Field,
2023
Oil and gouache on linen, artist frame
Painting: 85 1/2 x 115 1/8 inches (217 x 292 cm)
Frame: 87 7/8 x 188 1/8 inches (223 x 478 cm)
Simone Fattal
Young Warrior (The Trophy), 2023
Bronze
63 3/4 x 23 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches (162 x 60 x 30 cm)
Edition 1/6
Beate Kuhn
Claws, 1970
Glazed stoneware
10 x 20 x 21 inches (25 x 51 x 53 cm)
Beate Kuhn
Disks and Columns, c. 1999
Glazed stoneware
9 x 12 x 10 inches (23 x 31 x 25 cm)