Gretchen Albrecht, John Nixon, John Reynolds, James Ross
Built

Built is a group exhibition that actively draws on the notion of constructed painting. All four artists legitimately and historically declare their work as painting, with some works from the 1980’s, and they continue to explore the potential of its contemporary condition. These artworks variously represent painting, operate as painting and embrace the agency of painting, while also registering their explicit qualities as ‘built’ objects.
 
They tease out the question of painting’s identity through a dissembling of the medium to its constitutive parts: pigment, surface, support. At times, the works turn away from the conventional flat, two-dimensional plane and the constraint of four linear edges, taking the form of exuberant relief assemblages or architectural structures. Several works are made from building materials such as MDF and stained or unprimed wood, used as alternatives to canvas. Surfaces and supports have been cleaved apart and re-joined, with paint and armature reconfigured to suggest new relationships. Together, these paintings suggest a constant state of entanglement or negotiation, working both with and against the materiality of painting.