MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the two-person exhibition Melissa Kretschmer / Russell Maltz: Plywood.  The exhibition will highlight new paintings, sculpture, and installation works made on or of the engineered construction material plywood.  Both Kretschmer and Maltz have employed the material in their respective work for decades and they possess an acute sensitivity to its unique characteristics.

Melissa Kretschmer’s new mixed media works merge painting, drawing, and sculpture.  She uses plywood both as a painting and drawing surface, as well as a key visual element unto itself.  Her new works for the exhibition consist of multiple pieces of plywood in various sizes, which she cuts into with a circular saw at varying depths revealing the textures and colors of the wooden veneers lying below the surface.  She assembles individual pieces of wood into shallow reliefs on the wall and then refines them with select materials, such as vellum, pencil, gesso, and gouache.  Kretschmer’s color palette is subtle, muted, and derived primarily from the materials themselves producing lush, transparent surfaces that appear to be in a continual state of flux.  Her works are at once both delicate and industrial.

Artist Russell Maltz works across a broad array of media, including painting, works on paper, photography, sculpture, and installation.  For his indoor and outdoor works, he uses commercial building materials, such as plywood, lumber, metal wall studs, cinder blocks, and PVC pipes, which he then carefully sites in response to the environment, arranges into seemingly casual configurations, and paints with commercial enamel in DayGlo yellow, fluorescent orange, silver, and other synthetic colors.  For this exhibition, Maltz will present a suite of new layered plywood works that will be suspended from the wall by metal pins, propped up and leaning against the wall, and arranged into a shifting stack on the floor.  His works eliminate the separation between object and space, artwork and the viewer.

MELISSA KRETSCHMER
Melissa Kretschmer (b. 1962, Santa Monica, CA; lives New York, NY) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past 25 years, including Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, and the United States. 

Kretschmer was included our recent Julian Pretto Gallery survey exhibition here at the gallery in 2013.  Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in venues such as Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany), Galerie Tschudi (Glarus and Zuoz, Switzerland), Galeria Alfonso Artiaco (Naples, Italy), Yvon Lambert (Paris, France), Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris, France), ACE (Los Angeles, CA), Julian Pretto (New York, NY), Stark Gallery (New York, NY), Tibor de Nagy (New York, NY), Galerie Gisèle Linder (Basel, Switzerland), Galerie Greta Meert (Brussels, Belgium), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Esbjerg, Denmark), Palazzo della Arti Napoli (Naples, Italy), Caledonian Hall, Royal Botanic Garden (Edinburgh, Scotland).

Her work is included in public and private collections worldwide, such as Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), FNAC (Paris, France), Alianz (Berlin, Germany), University of California (Los Angeles, CA), Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation (Los Angeles, CA), among many others.

RUSSELL MALTZ
Russell Maltz (b. 1952, Brooklyn, NY; lives New York, NY) has exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and Mexico.

Maltz mounted the solo exhibition The Ball Park Series, 1977-2012 here at the gallery in 2012.  That same year he also produced a major installation entitled Painted/Stacked Oaxaca at the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, part of our survey exhibition MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca in Mexico.  His other recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Michael Sturm (Stuttgart Germany), Galleri Weinberger (Copenhagen, Denmark), The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), Galerie Schlegl (Zurich, Switzerland), and the Ringling School of Art and Design (Sarasota, FL).

His work is included in many public and private collections worldwide, including The Brooklyn Museum (New York City), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Fogg Art Museum/Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA), Museum Moderner Kunst (Ottendorf, Germany), and the Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia).  His work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Village Voice, among many others.

ABOUT MINUS SPACE

Opened in 2003, MINUS SPACE specializes in contemporary reductive abstract art, and represents pioneering emerging and established artists and estates from the United States, Europe, South America, and Australasia.

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