Kim - Locke - Rich
on view: April 26th - May 28th
opening reception: May 3rd, from 6 - 8 pm
LaMontagne Gallery is pleased to present the work of three outstanding artists: Byron Kim, Steve Locke and Matt Rich:
Byron Kim is an artist born in LaJolla, Calfornia who is based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of Yale University where he was a member Manuscript Society. Kim’s breakthrough project was Synechdoche, a grid of 400 monochrome paintings that explored racial identity, which was exhibited at the 1993 Whitney Bienial. He also collaborated with Glenn Ligon on Black & White series. Kim has since evolved in his monochromatic painting project , made photographic assemblages and painted numerous landscapes. In this show, Byron Kim features paintings from a series that adopts, as its starting point, the black-on-black aesthetic of New Mexican artist Maria Martinez (1887-1980). Using a near-monochromatic palette, his images skirt the edge of representation and explore the intersection of craft and modernism.
Steve Locke is a Boston-based raised in Detroit, Michigan. He is a Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Locke received an M.F.A. in 2001 from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Bachelors Degrees from Boston University and MassArt. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and, most recently, for the City of Boston. Locke is a recipient of grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and The Art Matters Foundation. His solo exhibitions include there is no one left to blame, curated by Helen Molesworth for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, The School of Love with Samsøñ, Family Pictures with Gallery Kayafas, and #Killers at YOURS MINE & OURS in New York. He has had solo projects with the Boston Public Library, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Mendes Wood in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at VOLTA 5 in Basel, Switzerland and P.S. Satellites-A Project of Prospect IV in New Orleans. His work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Art in America, Art New England, JUXTAPOZ, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker.
From his Auction Block Series, Steve Locke's paintings use the language of mapping and surveying, quoting the motif of the grid from Western Modernism. By doing so, Locke refutes the assumption that Modernism is/was a form that can be separated from its content; he equates the basic Modernist form with the slave auction block.
Matt Rich is a Boston-born artist who currently is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of San Diego. He holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from Brown University. Rich also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His solo projects have been exhibited in East Hampton, Chicago, Boston, and San Diego. He has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. His work has been featured in Artforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, and The Boston Globe. Rich is a recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Terra Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In this exhibition, Matt Rich's abstract, cut-canvas paintings take the symbol of the ampersand as a departure point. Joining together a variety of materials and surfaces into shaped, non-rectangular canvases, the works' articulations of space and color underline dualities present in abstraction.
Byron Kim - Steve Locke - Matt Rich
Minimal &
Political &
Less &
Maximal &
Colorful &
More &
Something In Between