NEW YORK, NY.- Lehmann Maupin is presenting cart, horse, cart, a group exhibition that spans both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations, co-organized by Curator Michael Goodson and Lehmann Maupin Curatorial Director Anna Stothart. The exhibition brings together the work of 15 artists, three of whom—McArthur Binion, Angel Otero, and Lari Pittman—are part of the Lehmann Maupin program. The works presented emerge from more traditional formal, material, and spatial concerns, while also explicitly engaging with social, political, and psychological areas of influence to expand the established narrative traditionally used to answer the question, “Where does abstraction come from?”

Comprised of an accomplished and diverse group of artists, this exhibition explores the intrinsic, rigorous, hybrid, and systematic qualities these artists pursue within their individual practices. The viewer is thus encouraged to consider a more expansive view of abstraction that includes, but is not limited to, personal and shared histories, cultural specificity, modes of identify, and of course, process.

cart, horse, cart was inspired by an exhibition Michael Goodson curated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2018, titled Inherent Structure. That exhibition, which featured 60 multigenerational artists from Sam Gilliam, to Laura Owens, to Angel Otero, reinterpreted abstraction’s historical associations with chance, gesture, and aesthetic purity, sparking a dialogue between Stothart and Goodson. This presentation is the outcome of that exchange, intending to illustrate how contemporary practices emerge not only from formal conventions of painting, but also from empirical conditions unique to each artist and their process. The title of the exhibition alludes to the non-linear and often intuitive nature of creating a work of art, particularly relevant as it speaks to the process, form, content, and installation associated with abstraction.

While artists like Angel Otero, Tomashi Jackson, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung push against the confines of the shape of the standard canvas and stretcher bar to create paintings that activate the space they occupy, others such as Sarah Cain, Beverly Fishman, and Donald Moffett explore materiality as a way to deal with the rigorous content of each work. Together, the artists featured in cart, horse, cart explore the myriad styles and underlying systems artists continue to consider by reexamining the complex foundations and assumptions embedded in abstraction.