NEW YORK, NY.- Hionas Gallery is announces the solo exhibition from David Rhodes, entitled Between the Days, comprising three new large-scale abstract paintings, including one diptych, composed of fractured forms cast in interlocking angles that evoke distinctive yet ambiguous qualities. The show runs from June 2 - 25, 2016.
Rhodes’ approach to painting is as much constructive as spontaneous, wherein moments of both precision and improvisation may occur. With this latest body of work, the contrast between painted space and lines of exposed canvas is lessoned, yielding a gestalt of rhythms and unified forms that seem to instantaneously accumulate throughout the painting. And while those familiar with Rhodes’ work will recognize a continuity in the resulting compositions, applying lines over and within an illusionistic pictorial space, for these newest paintings the artist has stopped most lines short of coinciding directly with one another. This allows a greater measure of spatial depth to take hold. Exposed canvas lines tend toward relationships that no longer define a form, but rather exist independently.
The deft balance of line, plane, volume and space, while exacting to an astounding degree, is countered by elements of the artist’s touch, which reveal themselves in unexpected, arrhythmic variations. The geometry at hand acknowledges a sense of temporality, in both a consistent and contradictory way, approximating the complexities of time as experienced from day to day.
Rhodes’ title for the exhibition is a reference to process, both in life and in painting. Each vertical shift that deviates from a line’s trajectory, each abrupt stop, jagged edge or soft exit that a form takes bears its own trace or mark over time. Rhodes has introduced a diptych, the two parts of the painting separated by a vertical space, extending the single painting contemplation of time and its inconsistencies. “Between the Days” points to both the ruptures and redux of memory, with its expansive rhythms and unanticipated flux.
David Rhodes (b.1955) is originally from Manchester, UK. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the U.S., with solo exhibitions at Some Walls, Oakland, CA; Galerie Katharina Krohn, Basel; Centrum Berlin, Berlin; Palacete dos Viscondes de Balsemão, Oporto, Portugal; and Habitat, Kings Road, London, as well as dozens of group exhibitions worldwide, most notably with Lion and Lamb, London; JiM Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunsthaus, Tosterglope, Germany; ParisCONCRET, Paris; Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, New York; and Pierogi, Brooklyn, among others. Rhodes is also a prolific writer, publishing reviews for Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artcritical, as well catalog texts about the work of Ernst Wilhelm Nay for Michael Werner Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Nathan Peter for PSM Galerie, Berlin; Henri Matisse for Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Mary Heilmann for Museum Ludwig. Previous shows with Hionas Gallery include the solo exhibition Schwarzwälde (2013); the group exhibitions Drifter (curator) (2013), Almost Delancey (2014), and #TBT (2015).
