Tauba Auerbach Sarah Braman Peter Coffin Jess Fuller Jacob Kassay Olivier Mosset Sam Moyer Leif Ritchey Joshua Smith Ned Vena Dan Walsh Michael Williams

The Journal Gallery is pleased to present “One Dozen Paintings,” an exhibition of monochrome paintings by twelve contemporary artists.

The monochrome painting has been claimed as a one-liner, a socio-political statement, as emptiness and as satiation, a blank canvas, pure pigment, cacophony, silence. The works in “One Dozen Paintings,” update the monochrome, drawing from, expanding on and transforming earlier approaches. While Sam Moyer’s bleach-dripped fabric is action painting made from everyday household materials, Leif Ritchey recycles found objects, painting on discarded scraps of fabric. Olivier Mosset’s black square, made from industrial truck liner paint, recalls the manufactured aesthetic of minimalism, while Jess Fuller utilizes Laundromat washing machines to dye her black squares of shredded fabric.

Like eggs in an Easter basket, the works in “One Dozen Paintings” are a colorful collection of new approaches for a deceptively simple century-old tradition. If the monochrome killed illusionistic painting (though the green-on-green profile in Michael Williams’ monochrome might say otherwise), it gave birth to the representation of color as singular subject. And here, color takes many forms—impenetrably thick and textured, as in Ned Vena’s spray-on rubber over stencil, or subtly transformative, as Peter Coffin’s tinted windows, which paint the viewer in the glow of amber light.