Curated by Jenelle Porter

Can't we call it something else? “Formalism” may be a lost cause, with its connoted rejection of anything personal, social, imagined, or weird. Yet relations between front and back, inside and outside, material fact and illusion, structure and image continue to compel many of the best artists working today. Jenelle Porter, in her first show for the ICA, tackles the way formalism still resonates by focusing on six artists: Charles Long, Evan Holloway, Mark Grotjahn, Liz Larner, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Gitte Schäfer. Her selection of thirty sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installations by these practitioners hints at the possibilities of infusing the optical raptures of formalisms past with humor and brains. These “formalists” seem more the children of Tuttle and Hammons than of Olitski and Frankenthaler.

— Katy Siegel