Robert Moreland

Fourteen Paintings

January 5th – February 5th, 2017

OPENING: Thursday, January 5th, 2017 from 6-9pm

The Hole is proud to announce the first solo show in New York by Robert Moreland entitled “Fourteen Paintings”. These three-dimensional canvas-wrapped hinged-panel wall pieces push the constraints of the title, however, and mash up minimal painting with sculpted object.

With thirteen paintings on the walls and one very large painting folding across the floor, Moreland explores line, color and form with a fresh approach. Instead of experimenting with shaped canvasses or geometric painting to imply volume, he takes the canvas into three dimension to see how line and color are disrupted by actual volume. Instead of contemplating in what ways the painting can be a physical object, we instead have to think harder about how this physical object can still be a painting.

Like the originators of “painting objects” from the 60s sought to do, Moreland wants to make works in the generative space between painting and sculpture. As with sculpture these wall works can appear very different from different angles; one work is a perfect red rectangle from the front, but from either side a jagged broken red polygon. Light plays across the different angled surfaces as well, changing the tone of the painted colors; one black piece is hit by light on the varied surfaces so as to make many different shades of grey, which when viewed from afar looks like a tonal geometric painting.

The artist begins with a maquette, making small folded and painted card-stock paper models of potential paintings. The final objects are exquisitely well-made; he uses tacks instead of staples, driven into perfectly sanded panels gift-wrapped crisply with raw textiles, and hinged with leather. They are “artisanal” paintings you could say, or even “heritage” objects, like an old-fashioned wood and ribbon Jacob’s Ladder toy. Some fold like the bellows on an articulated bus, others seem to collapse like a futon or door partition; here architectural, there origami. It gives them a sense of collapsibility and expandability: they suggest seamless motion, softly springing into place or silently unpacking down into a flat surface again.

Robert Moreland lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Hailing from south Louisiana, Robert unofficially studied painting and sculpture at Louisiana State University. Moreland is a 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant Nominee and his work is a part of the Frederick R. Weisman Collection. He has been exhibited at the Louisiana State Museum, LA, the Shaw Center for the Arts, LA, and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. After several years of living and working in New Orleans, Robert ventured west to Los Angeles and now spends his days in his studio in Chinatown. His most recent exhibition is a group show “Painting/Object” at Library Street Collective, LA.

Email raymond@theholenyc.com for more information.