ANDREW SPENCE
Looking Back and Moving Forward

January 26 through February 18, 2022

Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 26 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM

David Richard Gallery, LLC 211 East 121 ST | New York, NY 10035
P: (212) 882-1705
www.davidrichardgallery.com

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Looking Back and Moving Forward, a solo exhibition of 12 artworks by Andrew Spence in his debut presentation with the gallery. The presentation also debuts a suite of five abstract paintings that were conceived and initiated as hard edge silk screen prints on canvas in 1998. Recently completed in 2020 and 2021, the suite, along with the process and resulting imagery, is the critical focus of the exhibition. The presentation also includes seven artworks that represent smaller series of paintings and prints from which imagery was appropriated and incorporated into the suite of paintings by layering certain forms and compositional elements on top of the silk screen images. Thus, the geometric screen prints serve as the ground, while the painted layered shapes and forms became the figure. The hybrid compositions combine and contrast visual and theoretical themes in art such as: non-objective abstraction and representational elements; hard edge and gestural abstraction; flat and illusory space; literal and imagined places; reality and memory; high art and graphic design; nature and architecture; original paintings and reproductions; handmade and prefab.

The artist stated, “While for the most part, my subject matter comes from everyday personal experience, the process of combining printing and painting techniques created images that were strangely abstract and appealing to me. This all began in the late 1980s when I was working on several print projects (Pace Edition [wood cuts], Parasol Press [aquatints] and Garner Tullis Workshop [monotypes]). My paintings began to move from being spatially flat to a new multi-layered space creating an illusion of depth. Figures began to float over the flat backgrounds activating a kind of deep space. Like multi-tasking, it took me awhile to adjust seeing two things at the same time. My painting is still addressing this format forty years later.”

There is discipline and rigor to Spence’s artwork, which is, not being dogmatic about process, methodology, or predetermined outcomes. The artist prefers being receptive to new ideas, influences, possibilities, and empirical processes, all rich with surprises. This approach has served Spence well with a large body of work that has a visual trajectory enduring the test of time. His shifts and changes from early days in Los Angeles (focused on process, surfaces and monochrome paintings as well as architectural and design influences) to his work in New York since 1977 (exploring objects, reducing and abstracting them to non-objective shapes—almost icons), followed by two decades of teaching at Bennington College in Vermont (which brought nature, layering, editing through printing and combining new and old work) and while still in New York today, where all of the art works well together, the focus has now shifted towards space and perceptual depth through vector geometry, color, appropriation and re-invention.

Andrew Spence’s exhibition, Looking Back and Moving Forward, will be on view from January 26 - February 18, 2022, on the Second Floor at David Richard Gallery located at 211 East 121 Street, New York, NY 10035, Phone: 212-882-1705, email: info@DavidRichardGallery.com and website: DavidRichardGallery.com. Images of the artworks, installation views and videos as they become available will be available for viewing at the following link https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/574-andrew-spence.

Details About the Exhibition:

Spence lives between two worlds: representation and abstraction. To him, it is not either / or, but that “something is fixed” (the shapes we see) and “something is variable” (the final forms and dimensions of the finished work). Therefore, his observations and turning them into paintings is more about perception and interpretation.

His artwork is rooted in the history of painting and the many challenges painting has weathered over its life, or supposed death, and here we all are, still making and debating it. As noted, print making presented itself as an opportunity and challenge along the way in the artist’s career. The recently completed suite of five paintings conflates the two mediums. In a very Warhol-like moment, Spence took a 35mm image of a painting that he liked titled Cover Up from 1993 and blew it up to make a screen and replicate the image five times on canvas using a photo silk screen process. The image was of two orange-colored shapes of the letter “M” on a white ground, one in the vertical orientation and the other painted over it in the horizontal orientation, like overlapping zig-zags. The letter “M” represented the word “Mistake” and the function of each “M” in the composition was to cross out the other one. Given the technology at the time, the enlargement included dust and imperfections on the slide and the xerographic process to convert the orange color to the black shapes created uneven tones and imperfections, all of which were captured in the silk screens.

The intention of Spence was to do something different with each of the five silk screened canvases in the suite. The grounds varied from blue, white, red and orange. Other variations included cropping some to different and smaller dimensions, even though the scale of the imagery was the same; hence, something remained fixed while a variable was leveraged so that each canvas became an experiment (as noted above). The next variation included painting and layering imagery from other series of paintings by the artist on top of the individual screen prints on canvas. The first such combination was produced in 1998, which included a painted overlay of 4 rectangular window-like shapes derived from a painting that no longer exists, Duplex. There are four other artworks included in the presentation from this “window” series, including: Duplex II, an Aquatint on paper printed by Parasol Press; two small oil on canvas paintings; and a framed photograph.

The second in the suite, Bennington, was created in 2008. It included a painted overlay of an image taken from a print on paper of a bathroom vanity and mirror from a home renovation project. The woodcut relief print, Vanity, from 2004 is also included in this exhibition.

Combo I, produced in 2014, is the largest of the artworks in the presentation, a tryptic measuring 72 x 120 inches. More significant is that this artwork pulls both imagery and most of the completed physical painting from two different earlier sources of images and paintings. The image of alternating black, green and yellow lines painted over the screen print with a red ground is reductive, yet optically active (largely due to the contrasting and vibrational colors) and represents an interior corner of a room with perspectival angels at the top and bottom of a perpendicular line to represent the juxtaposition of walls with the ceiling and floor, respectively. This shape references an earlier painting from 2007 titled Corner, which is included in the exhibition. The overpainted screen print is positioned between an earlier pair of larger white and black, reductive geometric paintings that comprised a diptych. Thus, demonstrating Spence’s willingness to combine both earlier imagery and physical works to create a new artwork. Pulling earlier images, concepts, and artworks forward into new works not only produces something novel, but creates historical and aesthetic continuity within the artist's oeuvre.

The fourth and recently completed work in the suite of five screen prints on canvas is Wildlife from 2020. It has a vivid orange ground and layered on top are four colorful and textured shapes in oil paint that reference a painting of a rabbit’s footprint in the snow, Rabbit Running from the same year, 2020. When Spence lived in Vermont, the snow-covered property became a source of imagery from wildlife traversing the land and constantly changing the marks and leaving imagined activities in the snow.

The fifth and most recent in the suite is Hedge, completed in 2021. It also references the Vermont landscape and specifically “a property with a looming sculpture” according to the artist. It has a white ground with the black silk-screened geometric forms and two very large vertical rectangular shapes layered on the surface on either side at the bottom with bold impasto surfaces.

Collectively this suite and the additional referenced paintings and prints embrace the range of binaries and contrasts noted above that Spence uses in his process driven approach for creating abstract imagery. He has mastered taking places, objects and observations, then altering and making them non-objective through layering of imagery, imagination, and interpretation, while maintaining reductive and clean compositions. He has almost come full circle back to his Los Angeles years with surfaces and flirting with prefabrication becoming the focus in completing this silk screened and painted suite.

About Andrew Spence:

Andrew Spence received his BFA from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in 1969 and his MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1971. His first one-person exhibition was at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974. His work was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

In 1977, Spence moved to New York City where he lives presently. He has been included in several museum exhibitions nationally. In 1987 his work was in the 40th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. and later included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Spence has exhibited his paintings exclusively at Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Max Protetch Gallery and Edward Thorp Gallery. His paintings are known for their eccentric distillation between abstraction and reference. Spence received a National Endowment for the Arts award in painting in 1987 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1994. His artwork is in major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum Of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walker Art Center and the Albright-Knox Gallery.

About David Richard Gallery:

Since its inception in 2010, David Richard Gallery has produced museum quality exhibitions that feature Post War abstraction in the US. The presentations have addressed specific decades and geographies as well as certain movements and tendencies. While the gallery has long been recognized as an important proponent of post-1960s abstraction—including both the influential pioneers as well as a younger generation of practitioners in this field—in keeping with this spirit of nurture and development the gallery also presents established artists who embrace more gestural and representational approaches to the making of art as well as young emerging artists.

In 2015 David Richard Gallery launched DR Art Projects to provide a platform for artists of all stripes—international, national, local, emerging and established—to present special solo projects or to participate in unique collaborations or thematic exhibitions. The goal is to offer a fresh look at contemporary art practice from a broad spectrum of artists and presentations. The Gallery opened its current location in New York in 2017.

All Artwork Copyright © Andrew Spence, Courtesy David Richard Gallery.


For additional information please contact:
David Eichholtz, Manager
Mobile: 917-853-8161
D@DavidRichardGallery.com
David Richard Gallery, LLC
211 East 121st ST., New York, NY 10035

Download:   Press Release - Andrew Spence Looking Back and Moving Forward

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