catalogue this world is flat

8/3/2019 Catalogue This World is Flat

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This World is Flat


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Palden WeinrebThis World is Flat


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This World is Flat , Palden Weinrebs rst solo show, inaugurates what promises to be another year o exciting exhibitions or the gallery, one that willtake us rom New York, where Palden was born, to Cambodia, Pakistan, New

Zealand, Iran and urther, continuing a journey into the world o contemporaryAsian art which is ull o surprises.

I would like to think that Palden somehow personi es what this gallery is about:he is a quiet, thought ul, dedicated artist, totally committed to walking the lineregardless o what might be considered ashionable. His delicate, contemplativeworks speak with a clear and considered voice; they do not shout, but demand

rom the viewer the same patient and meditative outlook that are essentialto his creative process, revealing themselves over time.

The rst time I met Palden was in Tibet during a journey that he had taken to

re-connect with his maternal roots, though he had already contributed a workto Lhasa Express , a gallery group show staged in 2006. Since then, Ihav e wit ne sse d a remarkable development in his practice, displaying a greater mastery o his technique and a wider and more ambitious vision evident in thework produced or this show. He has been pushing the boundaries, challenging himsel , exploring alternative ways o looking at this world.

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Preface

Fabio Rossi London, February 2010


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On the eve o 2010, pro essional prognosticators imag ining the year anddecade ahead heralded the expansion o digital media and locally producedgoods, while warning against constant partial attention as electronic devices

are increasingly incorporated into daily li e. Pundits orecasted the extinction o paper-printed materials ( rom bank statements to books), and bemoaned thedeclining availability o time and space or con centration and privacy. Concurrently,in a quiet, modest-sized studio in Long Island City, Queens, 27-year-old PaldenWeinreb was nishing a new body o drawings and mixed-media works that evince these cultural shi ts while remaining rooted in the artists practice o

nely executed, handmade line-drawings.

Trend predictors such as the British uturist Richard Watson and the Americancorporate-consultant Faith Popcorn aspire to be a step ahead o mass culture,cutting-edge science and new techno logy, eeding the mainstream and com mercial

enterprises that need innovation in order to compete and survive. This approachcontrasts with young artists like Weinreb, who, as a small-scale, individualproducer creates objects that are primarily refective rather than instrumental.

Though Weinreb employs computer so tware to plan his drawings, the urgencyto be groundbreaking or a leader in visual innovationJames Camerons $230million 3-D lm Avatar was released in mid-December in the USis not a visualartists sole prerogative.

Instead, Weinreb locates his art-making practice in speci c reaction to thesophisticated advertising and media that saturate public li e. He recounts howduring his studies at Skidmore College, he ound drawing to be an activity that

could drown out the world and the bombardment o commercial imagery, aswell as a way to ocus his own attention. His student works were comprised o repetitive orms created as he recited a mantra. These drawings, rooted in ameditative process, led to more re ned, post-university series, many o whichwere done in graphite on white and o -white paper and eatured dense patterns

Palden Weinreb: Expanding the Process

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o lines that described larger geometric shapes. Passing Rise (2008), or example, which was shown at New Yorks Dinter Fine Art in M arch 2008, consistso three parallelograms made up o thin slanted lines drawn with graphite.

Emerging rom the le t-hand corner o each shape is a blank rectangular area(successively larger in each o the three rom le t to right) capped by a roundededge, rom which the angled, descending lines are diverted to the lower right corner, as i they were re racted rays o light. As is characteristic o Weinrebsworks, Passing Rise is an object to be looked at patiently and repeatedly, asit is primarily concerned with the subtle construction o optical space by thegradation or absence o lines and the ormal play o repeating shapes. Just asWeinrebs mantra drawings were the work o deep concentration or the artist,his abstractions require, and reward, viewers attentive absorption.

In works completed over the past two years, Weinreb has developed an

increasingly complex language o abstraction, one that refects a conceptiono visual space that is ound in digital or virtual media. His large graphite-on-paper Cast Diffusion (2008, page 37 ) reprises several o the visual moti s

romPassing Rise . A central column o vertical lines spaced at subtly varying intervals resembles a tubular orm. About hal way down this tube are blankrectangular shapes ascending rom the bottom o the drawing and capped byrounded tops like those in Passing Rise . As the descending vertical lines o thetrunk intersect with the se rounded edges, they are re racted at an oblique angle,creating cylindrical-looking o shoots rom the central column that evoke rootsor supporting struts. The drawing has a distinctive three-dimensional space,created by the decreasing density o vertical lines toward the center o the

main column and the supporting struts, giving the illusion o a rounded orm.With its elemental but succinct conception o orm that activates our instinctualunderstanding o how to read perspectival space, Cast Diffusion brings to mindthe 3-D graphics ound in the CAD so tware used by architects and designe rs, or the 3-D modeling program Maya avoured by computer and video-game creators.

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This evocation o virtual reality in Weinrebs drawings sets his graphic worksapart rom the abstractionists o the 1970s such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt and Nasreen Mohamediall o whose works retained a sense o the human

hand rather than a reliance on the industrial production methods advocated byDonald Judd, Tony Smith and other arch-Minimalists. The conception o spacein Martin, LeWitt and Mohamedis work is strictly two- or three-dimensional,as these artists explored the dynamics o the picture plane, illustrating howshapes, colours and textures illustrate the dual material and optical propertieso the image sur ace. In Weinrebs drawings there is evidence o an expandedconsciousness o space, one that is neither purely illusory nor materialist, but which encompasses a virtual or simulated reality.

As Weinreb creates increasingly com plex depictions o space in his recent pieces,he has also moved away rom working simply with graphite on paper. In the our-

and-a-hal - oot-high triptychOblivion (#,1 #,2 #3) (2009, page 31 ), the threevertical panels are each made up o non-concentric rings o increasingly largecircles. Each circle is described by radiating bands o graphite lines o varying densitiesthe result o drawing by handand separ ated by thin unmarked areas.Covered in layers o encaustic wax, the panels are surprisingly tactile, adding aphysical dimension to the comple x spatial play in the trio. An even more complex graphite and encaustic work is Planar (2009, page 17 ), a three-dimensional-looking orm consisting o three rings o vertically descending lines that appearsto hover in the middle o the paper like a chandelier. The inner ring has thelongest lines and the outer ring ha s the shortest marks; togethe r, the three ringsoverlapping textures collapse a coherent sense o space.

Its about walking the line between the digitally designed and the artist-executed elements, Weinreb explained as he demonstrated the elaborateprocess o trans erring his designs rom laptop screen to studio wall, observing that that the hand-drawn lines and thickly applied encaustic provide an element

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o spontaneity in what are otherwise precisely prepared works. His move beyondpaper and graphite are urther evidenced in Astral Redux (2009, page 43 ), inwhich lines radiating rom a central circ le, broken by thin, non-concentric bands ,

are laser-cut slits in a thin sheet o wood through which LED light brightly shines.At the time o my visit to Weinrebs studio, he was also working on con guring the mechanics or an even more complex multimedia lightbox involving a backlit scrim covered with a line-pattern that moves up and down behind a drawing laser-cut into wood.

Even as Weinreb enlarges his practice to include new materials, it remainsgrounded in the potential o drawing. Curator Laura Hoptman, writing in theintroduction to the catalogue o Drawing Now: Eight Propositions held at theMuseum o Moder n Art, New York, in 2002, observes that or much o the 1960 sand 1970s, drawing was revered as an activity that could be practiced in

per ormance or installation works, as land art, or captured on videoan attitudeencapsulated by Richard Serras 1977 comment that drawing is a verb.Hoptman, who entitled her essay Drawing as a Noun contrasts process-baseddrawings with those eatured in her exhibition that were nished, autonomousartworks. Existing somewhere between these two poles, Weinrebs works areperhaps more like gerundsverbs concretized into nounsin which the action o their making is coextensive with their pre-conceived design.

For Weinreb, digital technology, whether it is Adobe Illustrator or a laser-cutter,o ers new potential materials and orms. Artists shouldnt be a raid o it, heremarked as he mulled over possible uture ideas, including making drawings

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on standing sheets o bent Plexiglas, while acknowledging that his ambitionsmay exceed his current studio capabilities and budget. This open attitude totechnology allows Weinreb to augment and elaborate an artistic practice that

at its core is concerned with expanding upon classical and modern ideas about the representation o space, both physical and cognitive, in the artwork.

HG MastersBerlin, January 2010

HG Masters is an artist and writer based in Berlinand an editor-at-large or ArtAsiaPaci c Magazine

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Plates


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previous page:

Genesis

2008graphite and encaustic on paper and panel board61 x 45 cm (24 x 18 in)

this page:

Planar Decay



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Planar Decay (detail)



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Bow

2008graphite and silverpoint on paper 65 x 47 cm (22.5 x 18.5 in)


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Voided Tinder

2008graphite on paper 61 x 45 cm (24 x 18 in)


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previous page:

Emanations

2009graphite and encaustic on paper 86 x 122 cm (34 x 48 in)

this page:

Untitled (Cross)

2008graphite and encaustic on paper and panel board34 x 45 cm (13.5 x 18 in)


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Untitled (Slit)

2008graphite and encaustic on paper and panel board45 x 34 cm (18 x 13.5 in)


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Oblivion (#1)

2009graphite and encaustic on paper each panel 140 x 81 cm (55 x 32 in)


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Oblivion (#1, #2, #3)

2009graphite and encaustic on paper each panel 140 x 81 cm (55 x 32 in)


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Cast Diffusion


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Cast Diffusion

2008graphite on paper 104 x 140 cm (41 x 55 in)


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Untitled (Hull series 1 of 6)


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( )

2010lithograph with encaustic on paper and panel board40 x 30 cm (16 x 12 in)


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this page:


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Untitled (Hull series 2 of 6)

2010lithograph with encaustic on paper and panel board40 x 30 cm (16 x 12 in)

ollowing pages:

Untitled (Hull series 4, 5, 6 of 6)

2010lithographs with encaustic on paper and panel boardeach panel 40 x 30 cm (16 x 12 in)


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Astral Redux

2009


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2009graphite on wood, LEDs56 x 43 cm (22 x 17 in)


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Astral Redux (detail)

2009


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graphite on wood, LEDs56 x 43 cm (22 x 17 in)

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li d k i N Y k Ci

Palden Weinreb


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lives and works in New York City

Education 2000 - 2004 Skidmore College

Selected Exhibitions2010 This World is Flat , Rossi & Rossi, London2008 New Works by Palden Weinreb and Tenzing Rigdol , Dinter Fine Art, New York SH Contemporary 08 , Rossi & Rossi, Shanghai2007 Past and Present , Rossi & Rossi at Christopher Farr, Los Angeles Consciousness and Form , Rossi & Rossi, London Written on the Wind: the Flag Project , Rubin Museum o Art, New York Tibetan Encounters , Rossi & Rossi at Heidi Neuho gallery, New York2006 Lhasa Express , Rossi & Rossi, London2005 The Print Show, Gallery 402, New York2004 Thesis Exhibition, Francis Young Tang Museum, New York

PublicationsTibetan Contemporary Art: Beyond the Cultural Mask ,ArtAsiaPaci c, No. 57, 2008The Flag Project: Contemporary Artists Celebrate the Opening of a New Museum ,Rubin Museum o Art, New York, 2007Palden Weinreb: Abstract Sacred Space ,Catamaran No. 7, Fall 2007

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rst published as part o the exhibition:

Palden Weinreb


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Rossi & Rossi Ltd. 2010 Text copyright the authors, Images courtesy o the artist

All rights reserved. No part o this publication may be transmitted in any orm or byany means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any storage or retrieval system, without prior permission rom the copyright holders and publishers.

ISBN 978 1 906576 14 1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record or this book is available rom the British Library

Cover Image:

Oblivion (#3)

2009graphite and encaustic on paper and panel board

140 x 81 cm (55 x 32 in)

RossiRossi +44 20 7734 6487tf

16 Cl ff rd street

nf @r r .c m

L nd n W1s 3RG

+44 207734 8051

www.r r .c m

This World is Flat Palden Weinreb

12 February - 18 March 2010

My thanks go to H.G. Masters who has contributed a most eloquent essay which

captures the spirit o Paldens work, and also to my mother and my wi e who haveguided me as they always do.

Fabio Rossi

Coordination : Martin Clist Design: Ruth HfichPhotography : Simon Chantasirivisal (New York), Matt Pia (London)

Assistance : Mauro Ribero and Arianna Bongioanni

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