The earliest pieces, from 1972-73, are by Alan Cote, who positions thin bars in assorted colors on expanses of a contrasting single hue. His two square pictures are the show's most traditional examples of hard-edged color field painting. The latest were made by Ross Bleckner between 2001 and 2003, and are also square. They're oils whose cloud-like forms float on darker fields, and whose softly gradated pigment resembles the result of airbrushing. Where Cote's compositions suggest geometry textbooks translated into color, Bleckner's appear more organic, and perhaps microscopic.
The largest contingent is by Max Gimblett, who works major variations within a standard format. Executed between 1988 and 1997, each of the six pictures is painted on a canvas shaped in the form of a quatrefoil: a symmetrical arrangement of four protruding arcs. The form suggests a streamlined flower or leaf, or a quartet of partly overlapping circles. But the quatrefoil also evokes a cross, as Gimblett accentuates by painting a "+" sign at the center of two of the pieces.
A New Zealand native, Gimblett adapts minimalism's methodical repetition into a basis for all sorts of improvisation. The one of his pictures that's larger than the others is covered in outlined floral shapes. Several others feature gold-leaf diamonds, and one is coated with a thick, uneven mix that includes gold and copper. Two of the crosses are uniformly rendered, although the green one sits above an unruly blood-red splatter; the third cross is more of an "X," scrawled or dribbled in black over that craggy copper.
Gimblett is a student of Buddhism who teaches workshops in East Asian sumi-ink painting. The latter interest is evident in his most recent entry, 1997's "100-Yes," most of which is covered by Japanese-style free calligraphy. Yet one side of the quatrefoil lis a flat expanse of bright red, gesturing back toward mid-1960s painting. Two historical styles meet, and harmonize, within a frame that Gimblett demonstrates can contain just about anything.
Gimblett spent 1967-70 in Bloomington, Indiana, just a few years before that college town became the home of MX-80 Sound, a proto-art-punk band. That group featured two drummers, one of whom was Kevin Teare, who in 1976 left to focus on art. He moved to New York and, soon after, made the four 1977-79 pictures in this show.
Teare's vivid style combines op, pop, and industrial precedents. He paints parallel horizontal black bars on boards, sometimes interrupting their path with different arrangements of lines and colors that give the sense of boxes placed within the larger composition. The forms are symmetrical, but roughed up by ragged edges and raw textures. Held together with mortar, the wooden pieces look like stripe paintings but are actually relief sculptures as well.
Perhaps this wouldn't occur to a viewer who didn't know that Teare was a drummer, but his works are intensely rhythmic. Although the artworks appear mostly steady, the boxy interruptions play as accents to the steady cadence of the lines. As the contrapuntal insets provide pleasing visual surprises, the beat goes on.
