NEW YORK, NY.- Almine Rech Tribeca is presenting a two-person exhibition by artists Erik Lindman and Augustus Thompson, on view from September 18 to October 25, 2025.
What is the juncture or intersection between memory and matter; where do these two points meet and interact? In his monumental text Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire), 1896, French philosopher Henri Bergson proposed that “matter” could be seen as “an aggregate of images,” as an interconnected field embodying the collision of time, motion and pure perception. “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images,’” he writes. “And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the thing and the representation.”
In this two-person exhibition Slabs and Boards, American artists Erik Lindman and Augustus Thompson present a compelling exchange; a space “half-way or in-between,” surface and image; memory and thing, painting and sculpture, and ruin and object. Through distinct vocabularies, they examine the process of transference from memory to surface while questioning the agency and construction of representation.
New York-based artist Erik Lindman is known for his paintings that reawaken found materials such as steel and fabric into a powerful spatial assemblage as a hybrid object, reframing image, painting, and sculpture into a different kind of materiality. Central to his preoccupation of liberating the found object or “mimetic indexical tropes” from traditional representation, Lindman’s sculptural compositions reveal a new pictorial, optical, and perceptual logic. In this new body of work, for the first time the artist investigates the discourse of ceramics to create wall-based reliefs made from clay. “While they are made of ceramic,” the artist explains, “they do not engage with the language of ceramics; rather they hang on the wall much like paintings.”
Titled Thoracis (2025), Latin for “of the chest,” these new slab reliefs or clay bodies are evocative of botanical or bodily structures while also reminiscent of ancient Steles or cuneiforms. Through an additive process, a powerful semblance between solid and transparent, material and immaterial, is illuminated. And by entrapping space as image into a spatial materiality, these clay bodies invite a new mediation between figure, pattern, and structure. The finish is reminiscent of marble, while the haptic texture of clay is visible through a semitransparent matte white glaze. Recalling the rawness of early classical Greek reliefs, these structures illuminate a continuous visual enfolding, linking light into shadow and figuration into abstraction.
Remnants of the oxidation firing process are also visible, producing a chromatic cadence embedded in the form; that motion traces from green to blue to white hues. Lindman’s ability to rethink the process of how images or memory become transmitted into a material, thing or object, provides a new reading of Bergson’s concept of matter as an “aggregate of images,” while also questions whether matter, in this instance clay, transmits a type of pre-history. “My interest in forms bleeding into images became apparent when I began making freestanding sculptures ten years ago as a way to put stress on my new paintings,” he explains. “This current work takes this pressure to a new level, where the terms painting and sculpture, even photography and printmaking become obfuscated.”
Lindman’s embrace of material resistance and understanding of structural activation gestures towards Argentine-Italian Lucio Fontana’s formal and spatial interventions. While Fontana slashed time as motion to reconstruct a new kind of Spatialism—cultivating his well-known cuts or holes into canvas—these orifices opened a threshold beyond the material dimension. Reconceiving Fontana’s spatial possibilities in these works, Lindman has carved small apertures or holes into the wet clay marking negative and positive space, while producing a void or infinite openness beyond acute observation. This carnal tension provides a vibrational rigidity within this work.
The use of the Modern grid format in the monumental multipart work, The Bell, 2025, also reaffirms Lindman’s ability to redefine the relationship between temporality and spatiality; as well as order and control. “The grids are impressions of industrial material, like floor mats,” the artist explains. “They are additively worked, wet in to wet. I slam and stretch an entire 40-pound bag of clay myself into the textured surface on the floor and then heave it onto the flat slab surface, working horizontally.”
Under particular light conditions, the impressions or surfaces reflect into each other, becoming strange topographies. Radiating a transparent presence and mystical light of darkness, these clay forms embody an inherent allegorical nature. The physical presence of “the grid’s mythic power,” as described by art historian Rosalind Krauss in her essay “Grids,” 1979, “is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”
New Mexico-based artist Augustus Thompson’s new works, which reform wooden doors or boards into new sculptural assemblages, also occupy a register somewhere between sculpture and painting, as well as reference the grid format—with interconnecting cross-bars and lines symmetrical in nature. Conceptually rendering a phenomenological experience into a visual gateway or transitional state from the material to the metaphysical world, these wooden planks yield a continuous infinite fold. While the horizontal and vertical lines intersect as opponents in friction. Celebrated for his spatial installations which incorporate collage, painting, printmaking, performance, and sound, in these new works, for example Return to river (2025), another type of resonance or musical score is signaled, perhaps where the woodgrain transmits a wave or energetic field recorded from the tree.
Sourced from the artists’ rural environment, the natural material, patterns, and textures mysteriously reveal a type of geo-memory or skin trace from over thirty years of weathering. Thompson’s technique of assemblage structurally renders the discourses of 1960s Minimalism’s formal qualities—balance between space, geometry and repetition—as well as Arte Povera’s emphasis on sourcing unconventional and rudimentary reclaimed materials.
The door plank or intersecting cross-bars are suggestive of the movement between opening and closing and between interiority and exteriority. Echoing German philosopher Georg Simmel’s concept of the door as a social form, Thompson marks a sense of concealment or demarcation through an interplay of parallel intersecting spatial elements. In his essay “Bridge and Door,” Simmel writes: “The door, like the bridge is not just a tool for movement, its form embodies a social dynamic, solidifying the idea of interaction and relationality. The door represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act.”
Collectively, Lindman and Thompson activate materials as transpositions of energy, leaving traces of Bergson’s idea of an interconnected open-spatial-field of interlacing temporalities. Within this exhibition, the tension between seemingly opposite materials—clay and wood—counterbalances a harmonious meeting of “form” and “impression.” Calling attention to the connection between matter and memory, these works, whether seen as ancient cuneiforms or as records of time, become refractive images as a metaphysical act of recollection through the transmission of matter as memory.
— Melissa Bianca Amore, art critic, philosopher, curator.
