Curated by Lucinda Barnes

Throughout the history of modern art, the vocabulary of reductive abstract painting has proven to be a malleable and enduring set of signs, capable— in the hands of its most advanced practitioners—of addressing shifting artistic paradigms and social contexts. Rudolf de Crignis (1948–2006) configured the monochrome as an innately process-driven endeavor at the levels of conception, construction, and perceptual phenomena, thus synthesizing painterly precedent with the corporeal subjectivity of 1960s “Light and Space” sculptural practices. The paintings, mainly gray and ultramarine, are made of multiple glazes of translucent pigment, which leaves them open to subtly shifting tonal effects such that, as de Crignis wrote, “experience makes them.” This exhibition—comprising fourteen paintings and eight works on paper created between 1991 and 2006—will coincide with Radius Books’ publication of the first major monograph devoted to the artist’s work.

— Scott Portnoy