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.
 

Kamrooz Aram
Maghreb Drapery, 2020
Oil, oil crayon, wax pencil and pencil on linen
Overall: 85 x 82 inches (215.9 x 208.3 cm)
(KA20-01)

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"Arabesque is a term that has a range of associations. The most general definition refers to the leafy and floral forms that undulate throughout a surface such as a carpet or a tiled wall, conflating figure and ground, and moving our eyes along the surface in a continuous dance. But perhaps an even more common reference for the term is that of the ballet position, which one can assume takes its name from the ornamental form. The term, of course, was coined by Europeans—likely the French, who discovered such forms in North African art and architecture. But there is evidence that the French term is derived from the Italian, Arabesco."

— Kamrooz Aram

Kamrooz Aram
Untitled (Arabesque Composition), 2020
Oil, oil crayon and wax pencil on canvas
72 x 84 inches (182.9 x 213.4 cm)
(KA20-03) 

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"Kamrooz Aram has a knack for turning binaries to dualities. In his paintings and museological displays, he finds points of convergence between historical divisions: East and West, ornament and abstraction, gesture and grid, figure and ground. Mastering seemingly opposed visual languages with floral geometries and gestural patterns, he is well-known for these acts and counter-acts."

— Nadine Khalil, “De-Construction: Create to Destroy,” Canvas Magazine, May 2019

Kamrooz Aram
Untitled (Arabesque Composition), 2020
Oil, oil crayon and wax pencil on canvas
54 x 40 inches (137.2 x 101.6 cm)
KA20-04

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“…Aram again leaves the grid lines exposed, so that they become painterly gestures themselves, a riff on the rigidity of modernist style. The grids, errors, and geometric forms found in Aram’s paintings are a throwback to modernist language, but the artist subverts these tropes by including floral patterns. This imbues his work with a sense of timelessness and puts the idea of what makes something modern into question.”

— Lee Escobedo, “Kamrooz Aram: Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth,” Artforum, May 2018

Kamrooz Aram
Untitled (Arabesque Composition), 2020
Oil, oil crayon and wax pencil on canvas
48 x 40 inches (121.9 x 101.6 cm)
(KA20-02)

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"Over the last few years, Kamrooz Aram’s paintings have sought to rehabilitate the status of ornament and pattern within modernist aesthetics. Challenging the epithet ‘decorative’, Aram uses ornament conceptually, orchestrating encounters in paint between two distinct types – a repeated floral motif isolated from a Persian carpet, and simple geometric shapes and patterns that recall key moments in modernist abstraction. These canvases simultaneously engage various tropes of modernist painting, like the all-over composition, the grid as structure, the collapse of figure/ground distinction and the mark as gesture."

— Murtaza Vali, "Kamrooz Aram: Recollections for a Room," ArtReview Asia, March 2017

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.

Sarah Crowner
Zig Zag, 2021
Acrylic on canvas, sewn
90 x 70 inches (228.6 x 177.8 cm)
(SCR21-01)

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"For me, sewing is a practical means to get to an end (a painting stretched over a frame). It is a sturdy way to join painted pieces of canvas together, and to get a very straight line. It's a method that has so far worked for me. In the same way that tiling is a pragmatic way to cover a floor surface, so is sewing a pragmatic way to join bodies of painted color and stretch again over a frame. The laborious process—the pattern making, cutting, painting, tracing, trimming, sewing, stretching, and then undoing that and doing it all over again—is a way for me to understand painting, both the history of painting and abstract form itself."

— Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner
Overlapping Red and Blue, 2021
Acrylic on canvas, sewn
30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61 cm)
(SCR21-02)

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"Moving between restraint and exuberance, hard lines and soft curves, black-and-white and bright color, the industrial and the handmade, and between wall and floor (and onto a number of objects), Crowner’s bold abstractions are born from the artist’s expansive attitude and inclusive embrace of the world around us."

— Susan Cross, Sarah Crowner, 2017

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.

Suzan Frecon
full and empty (DUST), 2014
Oil on linen
Overall: 36 x 29 1/8 inches (91.4 x 74 cm)
(SFR14-01)

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"Frecon is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she describes her lifelong practice—'speak for themselves.' Made over long stretches of time, her work embodies the durational activity of painting itself and invites the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, 'are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience.'"

— Suzan Frecon and David Cohen, Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun, 2015

Suzan Frecon
tessera 3, 2021
Oil on linen
10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
(SFR21-01)

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"Within a fantasia of color, Frecon suspends the force of her structure. Offsetting the unseen mathematical foundation, her visible surface is organic and irregular, as if she were working against herself ... Her paint, especially along ellipsoidal contours, develops an uneven appearance due to the distribution of the pigment and its oil binder as she works the material against the resist of the linen. Add to this the transient effects of ambient light from which Frecon's surfaces are designed to benefit, and what began as a logical geometrical structure has become suspended in a web of living sensation.”

— Richard Shiff, Suzan Frecon: painting, 2017

Suzan Frecon
sunsnare (2), 2004
Oil and burnished gold leaf on fiberboard
14 x 22 5/8 inches (35.6 x 57.5 cm)
(SFR04-01)

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"The more one studies Suzan Frecon's paintings and watercolors, the more they appear to elude comparative explication, and the more complex and singular they become. It is possible to describe Frecon's art but not to reduce it to any fundamental message. It cannot be definitively related to a specific posture or 'school.' Her painting is not some last territory added to the continent of postwar American abstract art as already explored. Rather, it is an island awaiting discovery in the sea of world art."

— Matthias Frehner, form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting, 2008

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.

Patricia Treib
Circumscribe, 2021
Oil on canvas
78 x 59 inches (198.1 x 149.9 cm)
(PTR21-01)

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"In my work, I want a sense of activation where things are slippery and moving, a feeling of immediacy and presence. But this activation stems from something I’ve sat with for a long time, like a meditation point, something that I’ve spent a long time looking at. I’m also trying to focus on the non-spaces, or the little spaces between things. I’m building on something that’s barely there and using it to generate the forms and images. I want the work to seem deliberate and pondered, while also being immediate and simultaneous."

— Patricia Treib

Patricia Treib
Le Pietre II, 2021
Oil on canvas
78 x 59 inches (198.1 x 149.9 cm)
(PTR21-02)

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"Kindred but differentiated glyphs, flat and of varying sizes, repeat over time and across space in Patricia Treib’s recent paintings. Her quasi-alphabetic forms are abstract even as they resemble sundry objects: a pitcher, a cornice, a stylus, a bone, and a ribbon. But these figures have other referents, too, known only to Treib and to those familiar with her eccentric lexicon. And in some instances, the artist references the negative spaces between objects that she sets up in her studio."

— Mira Dayal, "Patricia Treib," Artforum, January/February 2021

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.

Rebecca Ward
sun dog, 2021
Acrylic on stitched canvas
64 x 48 inches (162.6 x 121.9 cm)
(RWA21-02)

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"The thing that first struck me when I approached painting is that you are dealing with a very complex support system that has three dimensions. From the wall to the surface to the frame, different layers interact with each other. This is why I chose to reveal the support structure. The frame can dictate the work in a way that also acts in harmony with the painted surface. Transparency sensationalizes all this dimensionality and makes you question what you’re really looking at."

— Rebecca Ward

Rebecca Ward
fog, 2021
Acrylic on stitched canvas
64 x 48 inches
(RWA21-03)

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"For her more recent works Ward continues her investigation into materials and process while examining the place of gender within the art world. She combines the traditionally male dominated field of hard edge geometric abstraction, with techniques and materials associated with femininity, and domesticity. Hard edge geometric abstraction reveres flatness, and while Ward uses the aesthetic language of hard-edge geometric abstraction, she creates works that are the opposite of flat."

— Eliza Gregory, Rebecca Ward: aphesia, 2015

Rebecca Ward
under water, 2021
Acrylic on stitched canvas
64 x 48 inches (162.6 x 121.9 cm)
(RWA21-01)

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"These works are created by unweaving, unraveling, and deconstructing fabric. Then it’s all re-stretched and re-stitched one thread at a time. It looks like a solid form, but it’s really a precarious situation. If you take a pair of scissors to even one string, all of the tension would be lost."

— Rebecca Ward

Rebecca Ward
fade, 2021
Acrylic on stitched canvas
32 x 24 inches (81.3 x 61 cm)
(RWA21-04)

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"While Ward's influences include Post-War Italian Art and Arte Povera, her style diverts from the likes of Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases. She uses techniques associated with home crafts such as dyeing, weaving, patching, and sewing. Ward sees herself as making feminist statements by this use of domestic activities often associated with women."

— Mark Beech, "Rebecca Ward Makes Her Mark on Minimalism," Blouin Art Info, 2015