Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present Field of Vision, a five-person exhibition of new paintings by Kamrooz Aram, Sarah Crowner, Suzan Frecon, Patricia Treib, and Rebecca Ward. There will be an opening reception at 176 Grand Street, New York on Saturday, May 22 from 10am - 6pm. The exhibition runs through July 30, 2021.
Explore the Viewing Room of the exhibition here
Field of Vision brings together a group of artists who are acutely sensitive to formal play in creating their own distinct painterly languages. Emphasizing the continued malleable nature of painting as a practice, each artist uses deep material knowledge in their innovative approaches to the medium, allowing for the works to be read intuitively and sensorially.
Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran) has developed a rich painting practice that reconsiders the position of ornamental and decorative art within the trajectory of Modernism. Referencing the exoticized arabesque in his paintings, the organic forms enclosed in framing borders are pulled from grids in a process of drawing and erasure. This heightens the connection to the ornamental and renegotiates ornament’s subordinated role in Western abstraction.
Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) makes graphic paintings defined by her craft-oriented methodology of sections of canvas being cut, painted, and impeccably sewn together. This reveals the painting’s composition and construction simultaneously while emphasizing an interest in production. Forming energetic works with distinct motifs, the artist uses distilled and repeated patterns in a collage-like process with a focus on texture and surface.
Suzan Frecon (b. 1941, Mexico, PA) creates paintings in which composition serves as a foundational structure, holding color, material, and light. Her compositions are characterized by asymmetrically balanced forms in precise spatial and proportional relationships. The artist mixes pigments and oils to differing effects, and her almost tactile use of color and contrasting matte and shiny surfaces heightens the visual experience of her work. Colors and surfaces vary in terms of density and reflectivity, and areas in the compositions frequently shift between dark and light.
Patricia Treib (b. 1979, Saginaw, MI) creates lyrical and fluid abstractions drawn from observations of personally meaningful objects and art historical sources. Although presenting a sense of immediacy with each painting executed in a single session, her distinctive shapes result from extended processes of repetition and refinement. Using assured calligraphic movements of wide hake brushes at an immersive scale, the saturated yet translucent forms create lively bodies of color.
Rebecca Ward (b. 1984, Waco, TX) explores the territory between painting and object through her banded, sewn, and deconstructed canvases that emphasize materiality and process. She painstakingly removes sections of either horizontal or vertical threads of fabric to expose underlying stretcher bars while converging planes of subtly painted canvas at machine-sewn seams. The works highlight the multidimensional physical structure of painting and its ability to both reveal and obscure.
