KADAR BROCK – OLIVER MARSDEN – ISABEL YELLIN: UNTITLED MIAMI

1 - 7 December 2014 
South Beach, 12th Street and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139, USA
 

 

Kadar Brock (born 1980, New York)

Kadar Brock is a leading light of the ground-breaking generation of abstract painters working in New York today. He is also a perfectionist. His most recent phase in his production grew from the creative destruction of his last. Dissatisfied with the body of geometric abstract work he had been making, Brock decided to transform them through a process of erasure using sand paper, and scraping tools followed by chance based interventions. Taking the technique to an extreme, Brock sands the painted surface down on the rough studio floor till the canvas is worn through in myriad places, revealing the chromatic beauty of the painted layers in the process.

Oliver Marsden (born 1973, UK)

Oliver Marsden’s singular practice updates the principles and concerns of Op art to make powerful, contemporary abstract works. His current ongoing series, Fade, explores the idea of movement in a static work, through a subtle and technically accomplished manipulation of the mechanics of the psychology of perception and especially the interaction of light and colour. Each painting is beautiful and deceptively simple, comprising of the calculated fading and blurring of hues and colour into each other. The resulting works are dynamic, changing dramatically accordingly to varying light levels in which they are perceived. The Fade series grew out of his decade long exploration of the movements and nature of sound waves in water, manifest in his series of circular paintings, Harmonic.

Isabel Yellin (born 1987, New York, Lives and works in London)

Yellin makes fizzy, contemporary, painterly, abstract works. Attractive, sharp and playful, they look like catchy 1980’s pop songs trying to burst out of a clutch of heavy 1950’s action paintings. Generally wall-hung, Yellin’s are collages of found and bought materials and fabrics; denim, polyester, old cotton bed sheets and passages of netting and mesh, onto which Yellin then paints. Hanging loosely, stretcher-less, the works occupy a space between sculpture and painting. They read like paintings but some of their critical characteristics are sculptural. The way the works hang and droop, the folds and undulations of the fabrics and their varied textures, all heighten the presence of the works in space. Yellin deploys the fabrics with compositional verve, using their colour and forms to create each works’ pictorial substance. Onto all this Yellin then paints with a happy fluidness, sometimes, brief scribbles, sometimes, thick bands of paint.

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