Reading Color: Artforum 1965-2015

Gildar Gallery is pleased to present Reading Color: Artforum 1965 – 2015 a solo exhibition by the artist Andrew Jensdotter.  Already with an earnest following for his painting and drawing practice which explores the accumulation, erosion and condensation of material and content, this will be the artist’s debut solo exhibition at the gallery.

At a distance, each of the acrylic paintings in Andrew Jensdotter’s latest series recalls the frenetic mark making of an abstract expressionist composition — a flurry of paint splattered in a visually stunning array of both detail and scale. However, upon closer inspection what seems a flat plane of pigment becomes a craggy landscape consisting of innumerable layers of paint. The surprise of this material alchemy finds its parallel in the work’s content. Each of the non-representational surfaces evolves directly from visually compressing material printed in an issue of the magazine Artforum.

Selecting issues printed at intervals over the publication’s five decades in print, Jensdotter recreates and enlarges each page of a magazine in paint. Layer upon layer of representation is stacked upon the surface of a canvas formatted to Artforum’s recognizable square shape, until the entire publication has been processed through the artist’s hand. Completing this transfer from print to paint, Jensdotter slices through the hundreds of piled up images as an arborist might collect crosscut samples from a tree. In this case the knife reveals concentric rings of buried color. The optically vigorous abstract compositions that result from this unpredictable process form a vibrant palimpsest of the source publication. A periodical recognized for its tome-like properties is at once enhanced in scale and reduced to a shifting field of whirling color and texture. 

Launched in the early 1960’s during the years of late modernism and ascending in prominence alongside the rise of postmodern art, Artforum has grown to become the premiere tastemaking publication in the art world. This place of prominence has lead to the magazine’s use of language and format to also guide the valued critical and marketed discourse surrounding contemporary art, from the critic’s review to the artist statement to exhibition advertisements. Viewed as a whole, the series of paintings form a chronological array. Viewers walking through the exhibit will undoubtedly notice changes in the level of saturation of each painting. As the Jensdotter notes, this is no accident:

“It’s interesting to note that the paintings get significantly more colorful due not just to the progress in printing technology, but due to the increase in advertisements–which are by far the most colorful thing in the magazine. Artforum has quadrupled in size starting around the turn of the millennium largely because of more ads”.

While this outline of paintings traces the evolving palette and inferred successes of a particular niche publication it also asks the viewer to consider color as an index for an evolving language of taste amidst capital. As focus on the market of art continues to grow, how does this influence the weight of critical dialog? And as print media, like painting, is perpetually pronounced dead and revived, how might we articulate a persistent desire for something big, tangible and full of color?