Alter Minimal – Lexicon Series Vol. 1

April 14 – May 20, 2012

Opening reception: Saturday, April 14, 6 – 9 pm

Location: 1717 Troutman Street, #220, Ridgewood NY, 11385

Directions: L Train to Jefferson St. / B57 to Cypress Ave & Flushing Ave

Parallel Art Space, formerly Camel Art Space, is proud to present it’s inaugural exhibition, Alter Minimal – Lexicon Series Vol. 1, which will run from April 14th through May 20th, 2012 at it’s new location 1717 Troutman Street #220 in Ridgewood, NY. This group show is the first in the Lexicon series; a series which explores the notion that artist’s, while retaining unique and personal vantage points with regard to their craft, often employ overlapping formal styles and/or aesthetic concerns. As the title Alter Minimal suggests, we are examining works from artists, Clinton King, Lance Lankford, Gary Petersen, Suzanne Stroebe, and Andrew Zarou, who engage, to varying degrees, the multiple facets of a minimalist approach. A grand opening will take place on April 14th, 2012 from 6 – 9pm. Regular gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 1 – 6pm. For more information please  contact: parallelartspace[at]gmail.com

Alter Minimal – Lexicon Series Vol. 1 brings together the work of five artists, working in a variety of visual media, who are all variously engaged with the aesthetic forms and preoccupations of the minimal and post-minimal movements, toward the realization of their own artistic ends. Minimalism as an art movement is now generally understood to have emerged from (and as a reaction to) Abstract Expressionism. Moving away from expression as ultimate end goal, Minimalist artists pursued integrity in their work by attempting to free its’ constitution of any non-essential elements, a visual quest for the reductive prime. Post-minimal artists carried this movement further by liberating Minimalist structure from requisite right angles and obligatory line, creating space for a more feral, yet still

pared down, essential form. The artists of Alter Minimal move freely throughout these concerns, utilizing vocabulary and sign as they see fit. From the gestural economy of Clinton King’s paintings, to the poetic, humanist sculptural extensions of artists Lance Lankford and Suzanne Stroebe to the syncopated, angular and sometimes humorous compositions of Gary Petersen and Andrew Zarou; these artists accomplish much with a concerted little.

Additional images and exhibition checklist are available.

Special Events:

Alter Minimal: Worth A Thousand Words will take place at Parallel Art Space on Saturday, May 12th, 2012 from 4-5pm and will be a primarily visual presentation, in projected image format, of additional works from the artists including images of their inspirations, Minimalist mentors and the like. Several of the artists will be on hand to answer questions about their work. This event is organized in conjunction with Actually, It’s Ridgewood; a multiple site art event, organized by the Queens Museum of Art as a part of their Queens International 2012: Three Points Make a Triangle exhibition. Light refreshments will be served.

Taking his cues from poetry, philosophy and history, Lance Lankford creates work in

a Post-Minimalist, loosely Formalist, vein that is entirely his own. Like the objects he

assembles, the artist’s methodology seems to inhabit a sort of in-between space; between

thoughtful reflection and exacting weights and measures, between wistful remembrances

and precision of execution. His process is balanced between the tangentially related

concerns of excess and absence as well as the undying parley between materiality and

meaning. Where Lankford’s Minimalist forebears used economy and repetition to

assert the legitimacy of the object unto itself, this artist’s industry seems to extend that

legitimacy outward, to encompass a more universal whole.

Lankford received his BA from The University of South Carolina in 1997 and his MFA

from Parsons the New School for Design in 2008. Lance Lankford has exhibited at

Camel Art Space, The Invisible Dog Art Center and Eye Level BQE in Brooklyn. He

currently lives and works in New York City.

Lance Lankford, Exercise, 2010, 2 x 20 3/4 x 18 1/4 inches, Wood, Canvas, Plaster, Metal, Glass and Plastic

Suzanne Stroebe, Joseph’s Cordial,  2010,  dimensions variable, wood, plaster, cordial glass, spoon, pigment

Gary Petersen, Step Up, 2010, 20" x 16",  Acrylic & Oil on masonite panel

Andrew Zarou, Content Drilldown (2), 2011, 17" x 14", paper collage on spray-painted paper

Clinton King, Forums, 2011, printed paper, 36" x 36" 

Gary Petersen’s syncopated, abstract paintings use elemental pictorial strategies to

maximum effect. Through layered overlap, skewed perspectival angles and eclectic

color choices, Petersen employs the tools of pictorial illusion to affirm the flatness of the

picture plane whilst simultaneously achieving compositions that skate around, backwards

and forwards within the image. The dynamism within the frame asserts, in Minimalist

fashion, the objectness of this art but his work also turns Minimalist right angles on their

ear, hinting at cast shadows, edges that recede into nothing and a musicality that is all his

own.

Gary Petersen is a native New Yorker. He holds a BS from Penn State University and

an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. He has a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for

the Arts in Manhattan and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. His work has been exhibited

widely in New York City and throughout the United States.

He has had solo exhibitions at Fusebox Gallery in D.C., Genovese/Sullivan in Boston and

Michael Steinberg in New York City. He has participated in group shows at McKenzie

Fine Art, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Plus Ultra (Winkleman) Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun,

Frederieke Taylor, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Janet Kurnatowski and

Lohin Geduld galleries in New York City, as well as at Geoffrey Young Gallery in

Massachusetts, Diverse Works in Texas and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Some

of his exhibitions include Eyeworld at Triple Candie, Mixtape at Jen Bekman Gallery,

Casish at Geoffrey Young Gallery and Color-Time-Space at Hofstra University.

His work has been reviewed in Art in America, the New York Sun, the New York Times,

the Boston Globe, and the Partisan Review.

In response to the patriarchal precedents of the Minimalist and Modernist canons,

Suzanne Stroebe includes knowing nods to a feminist presence through the inclusion

in her work of archetypal “feminine” shades of pink / pastel hues and through the use

of Post-Minimalist ephemeral materials that subvert the prototypically masculine and

traditionally Minimalist favored options of galvanized steel, iron and aluminum. Carl

Andre like wood blocks reduce and align and are faced with pastel paint samples from

the domestic interior while a drawing of what looks like an Anne Truitt or a Robert

Morris sculpture is executed on tissue paper so fragile that it puckers and pulls like

fabric. Cut through with humor, these works are nonetheless pointed in their intent

to deconstruct the traditionally masculine language of Minimalism, creating syntactic

possibilities aligned with the broader and more inclusive ideals of artistic expression.

Suzanne Stroebe was born in San Francisco and currently divides her time between New

York and Mill Valley, California. She received her BA in Fine Art from the University of

California, Santa Cruz in 2004 and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in

2009.

Stroebe’s performance and participatory works have been exhibited in venues including

Winkleman Gallery, the 2011 CAA Conference with the Women’s Caucus for Art, the

Pomona College Museum of Art, and NYFA Gallery. Stroebe’s individual work has been

exhibited in a variety of venues, including SOHO20 Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery,

Verge Art Fair, and Pulse Art Fair, all in New York, and Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art,

and LegalArt, both in Miami during Art Basel in 2011.

She was awarded the Ellen Hoffman Memorial Fellowship at SOHO20 Gallery in

Chelsea, where she will have a solo exhibition in early 2013. Her work has been written

about in The Huffington Post, Art Info, Art Critical, and Bitch Magazine.

The rise of Minimalist Art was fostered by a concurrent rise in a post-Greenberg

widespread receptivity and interest in critical art discourse. This in turn quickly gave rise

to the birth of the art magazine industry of that same period. By excising the artist names

from art magazine “Name Only” exhibition announcements, Clinton King at once neuters

the adverts of their ‘cult of personality’ prowess and through a literal reducing down,

elevates color, chance shape, and form to a level of consideration in keeping with the

Minimalist mindset. King’s paintings combine this heightened appreciation of color with

an intuitive working methodology. His use of magazine paper stock, painterly intuition

and chance undermine the proto-typical surety of Minimalist materiality whilst bringing

a sculptors concern for the negatives and positives of space from three-dimensions into

two.

Born in 1976 in Coshocton, Ohio, Clinton King received a Bachelors degree in Painting

from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio in 2001. He obtained a

Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in

2005. King has exhibited at Backyard Projects in New York City, the Columbus Museum

of Art and the Columbus Cultural Arts Center in Columbus, OH, Monique Meloche

in Chicago, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI as well as

various venues in Philadelphia, Tampa, Finland and Japan. King currently resides in

Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

With associations that reach back through Abstract Expressionist Barnett

Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” to two of Minimalism’s forebearers,

Piet Mondrian and Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, the work of artist

Andrew Zarou suggests historical affinities whilst remaining aligned with the mindsets

and Alter-Minimal priorities of the day. In his “Content Drilldown” series, Zarou pulls

from the ubiquitous and the disposable to create his work. Excising bar code symbols

from magazine subscription flyers, the artist reconfigures these banal objects onto all-

over paint compositions, creating dynamic, oscillating patterns that both assert flatness

and convey it’s opposite.

Andrew Zarou has exhibited institutions and galleries nationally including, the Brooklyn

Public Library (2008), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, NY (1999) and is

represented by RHV Fine Art in Brooklyn, NY, with an upcoming solo exhibition in

June 2012. He was an artist in residence at The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists

in Reykjavik, Iceland (2008) and at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna

Beach, Florida (2009) and in 2008 received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

He received his BA in studio art from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA in 1994 and

maintains his studio in Brooklyn, NY.

17-17 Troutman Street - # 220 - Ridgewood NY 11385  • parallelartspace[at]gmail.com