The pairing of work by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz in Intersection at Steven Harvey Tremendous Artwork Initiatives was a stroke of genius. Opening every week after A Planar Backyard, curated by Stephen Westfall, closed at Alexandre Gallery, Intersection is one other reminder that planar abstraction is flourishing, even when the artwork world seldom focuses on it. Each Church and Hankwitz, longtime practitioners of geometric abstraction, incorporate curving traces, which units them aside from the arduous traces and types that characterised Westfall’s exhibition, and each use black as a shade, After that, nonetheless, the variations grow to be extra attention-grabbing than the similarities.
Church’s three work within the exhibition mark a break from her best-known work, geometric abstractions that allude to the feminine physique. Even within the portray “Untitled (Undressed)” (2024), a viewer can be arduous pressed to name the outlined, rounded shapes “humanlike.” In the event you insist on studying them as buttocks — and that’s actually your prerogative — Church has positioned them round numerous irregular, sharply angled black and white types. These types, like ones within the different two work, are tough to learn as purely geometric. That ambiguity imbues the works with a way of pressure, as they by no means grow to be absolutely representational or summary.
Jenny Hankwitz, “Heartbeat” (2024), oil on canvas
Followers who preferred Church’s lighthearted, unsettling, naughty humor (myself amongst them as I included her work in a present I curated for the Maryland Institute of Artwork in 2002 ) could be shocked — these current work have shed their humor in addition to the sly bodily references. But their elusiveness carries them into a brand new perceptual dimension during which innuendo — the connection between the purely visible and the discursive — is now not the primary cost. The separation from language provides depth to Church’s work and opens up a brand new territory.
Jenny Hankwitz’s sinuous abstractions include elongated, bulbous types twisting round one another. Working with a restricted palette of 4 to 5 colours, the artist composes interlocking, overlapping, and rising shapes whose inside logic by no means discloses itself. This resistance to interpretation, which she shares with Church, is certainly one of her robust factors, significantly as a result of the work hints at issues sufficient to refuse the label of pure abstraction.
What I significantly like about Hankwitz’s work is that I can see no apparent precedent. She appears to have discovered her personal method to abstraction, with out the affect of any celebrated predecessors, resembling Frank Stella, Al Held, or Ellsworth Kelly. A tenuous connection to late Henri Matisse is obvious, however to deal with that may be a disservice to Hankwitz since her types don’t appear to return from nature.
Amanda Church, “Untitled (Everybody)” (2024), oil on canvas (picture John Goodrich)
The distinguishing attribute of Hankwitz’s portray is the whole lot it appears to be in movement. Tubular types swell and contract. The shifting figure-ground relationship is tough to discern. Are we taking a look at shade, form, or a flat object? Coloration will change between edges, at the same time as the form continues. All of the interruptions maintain our eye transferring.
In Hankwitz’s work, unidentifiable issues and summary types change identities. The artist’s bulbous tubular types share one thing with Summary Expressionism’s paint-as-paint pours. Like Pollock’s late abstractions, Hankwitz’s artwork expands past the portray’s edges. We glimpse a fluid world of shapes in round and wave-like movement whose interior workings we don’t fairly grasp.
The solidity of Church’s and Hankowitz’s work is plain. Each of them have adopted their very own trajectory with out surrendering to the pressures round them. Doing that over an extended stretch of time shouldn’t be as simple because it sounds.
Jenny Hankwitz, “Finding Rhythm” (2024), oil on canvas
Amanda Church, “Untitled (Two Legs)” (2024), oil on canvas (picture John Goodrich)
Jenny Hankwitz, “Dont Get Me Wrong” (2024), oil on canvas
Intersection: Abstractions by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz continues at Steven Harvey Tremendous Artwork Initiatives (208 Forsyth Road, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) by way of March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
