Press Release (PDF)

Exhibition Checklist (PDF)

Video Tour of Exhibition (YouTube)

Sharon Brant’s Online Artist Talk (YouTube)
Thursday, January 25, 7-8pm EST

Sharon Brant at MINUS SPACE 2024 (YouTube)
by Art Talks, February 2024

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Sharon Brant: Change and Recurrence. This is the Beacon, New York-based artist’s third solo show at the gallery and it will present a selection of recent abstract paintings.

For more than five decades, artist Sharon Brant has produced conceptually and aesthetically rigorous hard-edged paintings, works on paper, drawings, and reliefs. In the works on view in her new exhibition Change and Recurrence, Brant continues to mine, question, challenge, and further her enduring investigation into the reductive elements of color, shape, and line, and their inexhaustible arrangement on a two-dimensional surface.

Brant’s new paintings concisely present two primary visual elements – a dominant, smoothly-painted field of a single color (e.g., pink, blue, orange, or black) which is topped by a dynamic, often impastoed set of concentric lines forming the shape of hovering energy. Her works pair passive and active, gestural and reductive, vibrant and subdued, dominant and recessive, and textured and flat elements in animated opposition.

About her ongoing studio practice, Brant reflects, “Many times I wonder what a painting is; it mystifies me. Usually, I have to silence all other voices in my head when entering the studio. It's when I have been painting for a while that I hear another voice, not mine, that speaks to me about the painting. Then I know I'm in the emotional space of the painting — a pause from the outside world that is the source of it all."

The artist will give a free, online public talk via Zoom on Thursday, January 25, 7-8pm EST. Register here.

She will also lead an in-person exhibition walk-through on Saturday, March 2, 3pm. Masks are suggested for the health of all guests.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sharon Brant (b. 1944) has exhibited her work internationally for the past five decades, including in Europe, Australasia, Mexico, and the United States. She has previously mounted two well-received solo exhibitions here at the gallery — Plenty (2018) and Sideswiped (2012). She was also included in our recent group exhibitions Twenty (2023), Untitled (Summer) (2019), Subvert City (2018), Brant / Brennan / Zinsser (2016), MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca: Panorama de 31 artistas internacionales at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca Alcalá in Oaxaca, Mexico (2012), and MINUS SPACE at MoMA PS1 (2008-2009). Brant has also exhibited her work at museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rochester Museum, Everson Museum of Art, and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among many others.

Brant studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri from 1962-1965 and moved permanently to New York City in 1966. Her work was included several years later in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Painting Annual in 1972. She exhibited regularly with OK Harris (solo exhibitions 1970, 1972), A.I.R. Gallery (solo exhibitions 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996), and Elizabeth Moore Fine Art (solo exhibitions 2007, 2011).

In 1968, Brant was one of the founding members, along with Jon Bauch, Bruce Brown, Olga Ephron, Claire Frank, Bob Harris, Arthur Hughes, Ray Kelly, Robert Resnick, Arleen Schloss, and Gary Smith, of MUSEUM, A Project of Living Artists, an artist-run exhibition and meeting space located at 729 Broadway in New York City. MUSEUM was intended as a politically-progressive community center for artists with the goal of supporting “a more alive connection between art and society, without the dissipation of force and quality occurring so frequently in the current art establishment.” MUSEUM’s membership grew to more than 300 individuals before it closed in 1971.

Brant was a member of A.I.R. Gallery from 1989-1996, the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States founded in 1972. She has been a member of American Abstract Artists since 2004. In 2012, Brant was awarded a grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ARTnews, Art International, Arts Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, among many other publications.

ABOUT MINUS SPACE
Founded in 2003, MINUS SPACE presents the past, present, and future of reductive art on the international level. We launched our redesigned and reconceived website during the pandemic to make learning about and collecting new art accessible, enriching, and rewarding.

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