Once the visual anthem of international modernism and the driver of post-World War II American art, abstraction had more downs than ups in the conceptually driven decades of the late-20th century.
But in the pluralistic art world of the 21st-century, which has seen a resurgence of more optical and less intellectual art, the form has made a comeback, with artists revitalizing it in exciting new ways.
Eight such painters are featured in “Peaking the Edge,” a visually explosive exhibition that Plus Gallery bills as an exploration of “hard-edged” painting, a term coined in 1958 by critic Jules Langsner.
Although it was not exclusively applied to abstraction, the appellation has generally been associated with that form, specifically to flat, unmodulated areas of color that are crisply and unambiguously demarcated. Noted exponents of hard-edged painting have included Frederick Hammersley, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella.
Many of the artists in this exhibition don’t exactly fit that definition, and those who do have put their distinctive and quite welcome contemporary twists on it. Another hallmark of 21st-century art, clearly evident here, is that the “rules” that used to apply to styles like hard-edged painting are ripe for revision or revocation altogether.
Among the most classically hard-edged painters in this mix is Sara Hughes, who also happens to be among the best known. Her psychedelic colors and angled polygons are rendered with the machinelike sharpness long associated with hard-edged painting.
But instead of the rigorously flat compositions of Kelly or Stella, Hughes has broken the rules by adding a decided illusion of three-dimensional depth, by jutting those polygons into her eye-grabbing compositions — “Data Crash 4” and “Data Crash 5” — so that they seem to overlap one another and hover in space.
Also offering a classic hard- edged look is Eric Tillinghast, except that his works are not paintings, at least not in a traditional sense. Instead, they consist of sections of painted steel overlaid on top of each other to form striped abstractions with a clean, manufactured appearance.
Jennifer Joseph is also represented with striped abstractions, but her brilliant, rainbow-colored takes — “Lumen 13” and “Lumen 14” — are quite different. These stripes have soft edges and surface textures — both traditional no-nos in this realm but nonetheless effective.
Even further from hard- edged painting are the two handsome geometric abstractions by Terri Roland, including a long, horizontal sectionalized acrylic on panel titled “Clay.” Here the brushwork is obvious, and the delineation of the X’s and V’s and the rectangular sections loosely defined.
Hard-edged painting clearly crosses over into geometric abstraction, which dates virtually to the beginnings of modernist art. Some of this history can be seen in Catherine Green’s two canvases, which offer distant echoes of Kasimir Malevich and other early abstractionists but are more closely related to Stuart Davis’ architectually inspired compositions.
Davis was a pivotal painter who bridged early-20th-century American abstraction with the later abstract-expressionists. Green even copies Davis’ penchant for making his name part of his compositions by boldly inscribing her name on the side of the canvases.
Besides exploring the multiple facets of today’s hard- edged painting in general, the show, curated by Plus Gallery owner Ivar Zeile and artist Tim Jag, also gives viewers a look at what’s happening in this realm in the Southwest.
Four of the artists are from Santa Fe, which has a long history of abstraction that includes Richard Diebenkorn, and another, Monica Goldsmith, resides in Durango, a part of Colorado often ignored by Denver galleries.
It sounds incongruous, but the rest of the show is devoted to artists from Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand. All eight fit cohesively together because the still-evolving international language of abstraction, at least in this geometric realm, neatly transcends regional boundaries.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“PEAKING THE EDGE.”
Art. Plus Gallery, 2501 Larimer St. This exhibition showcases eight artists from the United States and New Zealand who explore contemporary geometric abstraction. Through May 28. Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays. Free. 303-296-0927 or
