10012: The Abstract Vanguard: Ross Bleckner, Alan Cote, Max Gimblett, and Kevin Teare

Kensington, MD.

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce 10012: The Abstract Vanguard, a group exhibition featuring works by Ross Bleckner, Alan Cote, Max Gimblett, and Kevin Teare. On view in Kensington, Maryland at 4228 Howard Ave, from September 14 through November 23. An opening reception will take place Saturday, September 14 from 6 to 8 pm.

From the late 1960s to the late ’70s, the 10012 area code (known as SoHo, “south of Houston Street”) was a creative mecca for abstract painters. This exhibition of paintings by Ross Bleckner, Alan Cote, Max Gimblett, and Kevin Teare, frames their mutual studio neighborhood of SoHo, as an anchor for their radical approaches to abstract painting. Across three decades, the artists of this exhibition reinterpret and advance the concerns of abstraction through their investigations of color, line, form, rhythm, and material possibility.

Affordable studio space in the not-yet-desirable neighborhood was crucial to the alchemy of time, space, and resources which afforded artists the opportunity to take risks. In a context rarely available before (and especially since) artists were situated in spacious lofts that welcomed large-scale experimentation, fueled by the energies of countercultural movements percolating in the background. Unburdened by financial restrain, and inspired by new ways of thinking, SoHo’s abstractionists shifted away from the prevailing art movements of Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Their rejection of visual excess took shape in the sparse and austere visual language of Minimalism.

Bound by a fascination with the vocabulary of geometry, whether through relief paintings, shaped canvas, or gestural lines, each artist renders an aesthetic experience which prompts the viewer to engage with fields of shapes and color. Cote’s stark juxtapositions of diagonal lines float amid a plane of color, peppering and dividing the surface with uniform lines of differentiating color. Teare’s relief paintings' horizontal stripes depict geometric compositions of stacked vertical lines rendered through the rocky texture of mortar, evoking the not visible insides of the gallery walls on which the painting hung. Where Teare and Cote harness geometric abstraction in their paintings through the linear, Bleckner and Gimblett’s techniques contrast the angular and hard-edged with the ovular by way of rounded hazes stained on canvas and unbound reinterpretations of the traditionally square canvas.

Where Teare and Cote are particularly interested in harnessing geometric abstraction to create spatial narratives, Bleckner and Gimblett introduce ideas of dematerialization and spiritual influence in their compositions, stemming from the rebellious spirit of SoHo which prompted artists to question established norms both aesthetic and social. This exhibition invites viewers to explore these diverse manifestations of abstraction, all of which root back to the inception point of 10012.