Cubed, Group exhibition, THE HOLE NYC, 312 Bowery New York City, NY, September 10th – October 11th, 2020

The Hole is proud to present a group show of idiosyncratic geometric abstraction entitled Cubed. Building on our 2016 show Two on Two with Johnny Abrahams, Matt Mignanelli, Palma Blank and Russell Tyler, this exhibition was meant to be two on two on two, or 2 x 2 x 2, two cubed and eight artists. Unfortunately it has been so long since we have gotten to do a group show of this nature that there were 14 artists crucial to the exhibition. I suppose we should have added two more and changed the name to “Tesseract”.

Regardless of the enforced continuity in our thematic group exhibitions, Cubed sprang into 3D from our encounters around the art world in 2019 before it all went on pause. Andreas Angelidakis had an amazing installation at Art Basel’s Art Unlimited (and at The Breeder in Athens), Rebecca Ward had beautiful works with Ronchini Gallery at Art Brussels, Luke Murphy had a fantastic solo exhibition at Shane Cambell in Chicago, Jonny Niesche we saw at ALAC in LA and also Art Athina in Athens. Our gallery director Ray engaged with Kristine Moran after her solo booth at Armory with Daniel Faria along with artists Luke Diiorio, Irina Ojovan and Clinton King.

I seized a week of pandemic clouds parting to visit LA and see Lilah Rose, Jean Nagai and Robert Moreland in person—a luxury! But travel restrictions prevented Thomas Trum from coming to do a beautiful wall mural with this custom-built painting machine. We are super grateful that we will be able to welcome you to a socially-distanced opening for Cubed and be open with limited occupancy; unlike our last thematic group show Second Smile in April that not a single person got to come see.

The works in this exhibition will fill the entire gallery, one office and also our new expanded entrance gallery. Having demolished our little shop zone (which over the past nine years was bookstore, pajama shop, eyeglass store, Matcha cafe, and most recently heritage perfumery) we now have a big front zone and two front doors to welcome you. A special project for this area, Andreas Angelidakis created a tipped-over column to go with our newly exposed little corinthian guy. And festooning our new walls, works by Irina Ojovan shift hue and albedo across their small and subtle compositions.

The main long wall of the gallery features the single-line machine drawings of Dutch artist Thomas Trum, whose experimentation with drawing and painting machines leads to giant geometries. 3D wall works by Lilah Rose and Robert Moreland fill out this room with their undulating and folding protrusions from the picture plane. In the rear gallery the strands of light in Luke Murphy’s video cube mimic the bright electric lines of Clinton King, Palma Blank and Jean Nagai paintings. In our side office we have installed Ara Peterson’s 1997 video 12 Ball whose clacking soundtrack invigorates this very enigmatic animation work and likewise the whole exhibition.

Australian artist Jonny Niesche creates two infinite void paintings with layers of dyed and painted fabrics, while Luke Diiorio’s shaped canvas-over-panel painting goes in the other direction with its insistent objecthood. In the big back gallery, Rebecca Ward’s skeins of painted silks and de-threaded weaving works pair with Canadian Kristine Moran’s quasi-abstract compositions. The beautiful arcs of black across her line of canvasses starts to resolve into swim caps with the peek of round pink goggles, just as the hint of personal idiosyncrasy pervades this show to keep the preponderance of geometric abstraction light on its feet.