“New New New Abstraction”

Curated by Jenny Sharaf

Maya Hayuk, Alicia McCarthy, Claire Colette, Desirée Holman, Bridget Klappert and Alia Penner

Toomey Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco

Bridget Klappert – Untitled Blue, 2013, 19 x 24 inches, paper.
Courtesy of Toomey Tourell.

As the saying goes, everything old is new again. “New New New Abstraction,” a group show at Toomey Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco curated by Jenny Sharaf, presents a view of the current landscape where abstraction has regained momentum during its “contemporary art moment.” Less gestural than the gonzo style of the New Casualists in New York, and denser than the airy works and easy breezy experimentalism found in the paintings in “The Optimists,” just downstairs at Stephen Wirtz Gallery (now closed), Sharaf’s presentation of the abstract is of the precise and minimalist variety.

Claire Collette – Left: ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down 16.75 x 12.
Courtesy of Toomey Tourell.

The works of Bridget Klappert, an LA artist receiving her first formal exhibition in this show, and Claire Colette, account for the most rigid of these. Colette’s familiar graphite on paper drawings achieved through repetitive mark making, micro and macro wavelengths of pencil lines, and Klappert’s hand cut designs, make the most minimalist statement, the controlled hand of both the artists achieving something deliberate and obscured. Alternatively, Desirée Holman’s gouaches of hazy aura glow have the Rothkoesque quality of the transcendental-abstract.

Alia Penner – Door, 2010, oil, 36 x 78 inches.
Courtesy of Toomey Tourell.

Maya Hayuk – Trails #1, 2013, acrylic on panel, 24 x 36 inches.
Courtesy of Toomey Tourell.

The grid is picked up again by Alia Penner, Maya Hayuk, and Alicia McCarthy, whose paintings of door and window like portals and wavy planes anchor the abstract qualities of time and space, perhaps multiple dimensions, at the center of the show. Abstraction, in Sharaf’s presentation, seems to appeal directly to the physical. McCarthy, a Mission School painter, and Hayuk, known for her murals, both point to the role street art has played in bringing abstract elements and form back to the center of the dialogue when contemporary art for so long has seemed wedded to pure conceptualism.

“New New New Abstraction” is on view through March 15, 2014.

For more information visit Toomey Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco.

By:  Kathryn McKinney