MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the group exhibition Some Artists, highlighting several generations of artists whose works investigate and visualize artists, greater art historical moments, and related aesthetic research primarily through charts, maps, and diagrams.  The exhibition will feature new and historical paintings, drawings, and prints by seven artists: David Diao, Mary Beth Edelson, Alfred Jensen, George Maciunas, Loren Munk, Ward Shelley, and John Zinsser. 

Works included in Some Artists examine and subjectively reimagine subjects, such as Alfred Barr’s landmark chart Cubism and Abstract Art illustrating the development of Modern Art (Ward Shelley); the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman’s unfinished paintings (David Diao); the growth of Fluxus and the expanded performing arts movement between 1959-1966 (George Maciunas); artists and galleries in the Post-War Los Angeles and San Francisco art scenes (Loren Munk); the emergence of the Feminist art movement in the early 1970s (Mary Beth Edelson); seminal NYC galleries and their affiliated artists spanning the 1960s-2000s (John Zinsser); and color systems as they relate to energy flow (Alfred Jensen).

David Diao (b. 1943, Chengdu, China; lives New York, NY) immigrated to the United States in 1955. He has been exhibiting since 1967 and had his first solo exhibitions at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1969 and 1970. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ontario Art Gallery, and Vancouver Art Gallery, among others. Diao was recently included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York.

Mary Beth Edelson (b. 1933 East Chicago, IN; lives New York, NY) is a pioneer of the Feminist Art movement in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. Her performances, paintings, and collages have relentlessly explored the role of women in society and challenged dominant patriarchal values.  For her landmark work Some Living Women Artists/Last Supper (1972), Edelson collaged the heads of prominent women artists over the figures of the Christ and his disciples. With Georgia O’Keeffe as Christ flanked by Nancy Graves as John the Baptist, the work became one of the most iconic images of the Feminist Art movement. In addition to her studio work, Edelson has been involved in a multitude of Feminist-related endeavors, such as the organization of the first National Conference for Women in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC in 1972. She was also a founding member of the Feminist publications Heresies and Chrysalis. In 1993, Edelson received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from DePauw University, and in 2000 was the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. (source: Clara Database of Women Artists)

Alfred Jensen (b. 1903 Guatemala City, Guatemala; d. 1981 Livingston, NJ) studied painting at the San Diego Fine Arts School and in Munich under Hans Hofmann. After moving to the United States in 1934, his patron Saidie Alder May encouraged him to pursue his interested in color theory and pattern. Jensen's intricately organized diagrams reflect his distinctive conceptual approach, begun in the late 1950s when he started to refine his wide-ranging studies of systems and philosophies—from theories of color and light, mathematics, and the Mayan calendar, to scientific formulations—into multicolored checkerboards. He used mathematical systems to construct two-dimensional grid paintings and demonstrate color theories, but the work itself is metaphorical, referencing Pre-Colombian and Asian cultures, textiles, and divination. Jensen is represented by Pace Gallery in New York. (source: Pace Gallery)

George Maciunas (b. 1931 Kaunas, Lithuania; d. 1978 Boston, MA) was the founder and central coordinator of Fluxus from 1962 until his untimely death in 1978. Fluxus was a global collective of artists, musicians, and designers bound by their intermedia sensibility and experimental enlightenment.  Maciunas studied architecture, art history, graphic design, and musicology at the Cooper Union School of Art, Carnegie Institute of Technology Pittsburgh, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in succession over eleven years (1949-1960). Despite the diversity of his education and artworks, Maciunas’ oeuvre is unified by a lucid diagrammatic aesthetic demonstrating a constructive interaction between data modeling and enlightenment. His engagement with functionality and chronology seen in his genealogies, atlases, and charts can be described as an art of organization, which delved into the intuitive connections between a schema and its processes. (source: George Maciunas Foundation)

Loren Munk (b. 1951 Salt Lake City, UT; lives Brooklyn, NY) is known for his paintings that combine urban imagery with exhaustive historic research, complex systems of thinking, and painterly finesse. Since his New York debut in 1981, Munk has overseen an international career that includes exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as Brazil, France, and Germany.  His solo exhibition at the gallery, Becoming Modern in America, took place in December 2010-January 2011.  Most recently, Munk has been producing a series of paintings that tackle the subject of art itself through an historical and diagrammatic lens.  In addition to his studio work, Munk is also a writer and curator. In his role as the chronicler of the New York art scene, Munk is known by his alias, James Kalm. Through his famed online video program, The Kalm Report, Munk tours artist's studios, gallery exhibits, and art world events throughout New York City. Munk is represented by Freight + Volume, New York. (source: Freight + Volume)

Ward Shelley (b. 1950 Auburn, NY; lives CT) has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally for more than two decades. His work attempts to understand the world, to organize a mass of interrelated facts onto a single page so that the scope of their relations and connections can be seen in an interesting and revealing way. He is the recipient of awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Rema Hort Mann Foundation, among others. Shelley's work is included in museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.  Shelley is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

John Zinsser (b.1961, New York, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his work internationally since the late 1980s, including solo and group exhibitions throughout United States, Europe and Asia. Most recently he was the subject of solo exhibitions at Peter Blake Gallery (Laguna Beach, CA), Philip Slein Gallery (St. Louis, MO), and Graham Gallery (New York, NY). Zinsser co-organized and was included in our recent survey exhibition Julian Pretto Gallery at the gallery in September-October 2013.  His work can be found in museum and private collections internationally, including Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT), Richard Brown Baker Collection, Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and Sammlung Goetz, (Munich), as well as in numerous corporate collections.  In addition to his artistic work, Zinsser is a writer, curator, and lecturer. He co-founded the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1988. He has written extensively for such publications as Art in America, ARTS, Flash Art, ArtNet, and Tema Celeste, among others.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank the following galleries and individuals for their assistance with this exhibition: Phong Bui, Freight + Volume, Kat Griefen, Chris Martin, Pace Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, and Postmasters Gallery.

ABOUT MINUS SPACE

Now celebrating its 11th year, MINUS SPACE specializes in reductive art on the international level. The gallery presents museum-quality solo and group exhibitions by pioneering emerging, established, and deceased artists at its Brooklyn gallery, as well as at other collaborating venues on the national and international levels.