MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Russell Maltz: The Ball Park Series, 1977-2012. This is the New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York in over a decade.  The exhibition presents the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s ongoing Ball Park Series spanning the past 25 years.

Since the late 1970s, Russell Maltz has produced sculptures, installations, and wall works informed by the aesthetics of baseball fields and stadiums.  Executed with a broad array of off-the-shelf, unrefined construction materials, including sheets of plywood and glass, metal wall studs, 2x4s, sawhorses, enamel paints, and more, his Ball Park Series works can be characterized by their consistent use of the colors green and white, which directly reference the vibrant green Astroturf of the field and stark white chalk lines demarcating the boundaries of the game of play.

Baseball fields are in essence heavily choreographed performance sites enacted by teams of players strategically positioned in relation to geometric elements on the field.  Similarly, Maltz’s installations are immersive environments that are carefully composed, although informal in appearance. Geometric in composition, high-keyed in color, and matter-of-fact in execution, individual works are commonly subsumed into larger configurations, often overlapping and obscuring each other.

For his installation at the gallery, Maltz will spread bundles of painted wall studs across the floor, lean oversized sheets of plywood against the walls, and suspend translucent panes of glass in layered reliefs from the walls.  With the intent of using “layering as a kind of continuum”, the installation will merge the space between two, three, and four dimensions and will do away with any separation between object and space, artwork and the viewer.

In a similar spirit, Maltz often realizes large-scale – though unmonumental in nature – interventions in public spaces outside of traditional art gallery and museum contexts.  This has included public parks, traffic circles, and active construction sites throughout the United States and Europe.

The exhibition Russell Maltz: The Ball Park Series, 1977-2012 will coincide with the start of the 2012 Major League Baseball season on March 28, 2012.

Russell Maltz (b. 1952, Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and Mexico.  His 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), 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.

SUPPORT

MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individuals.  We thank you!

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