McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the fall season, Line and Plane. This is the inaugural exhibition of the gallery at its new location, 55 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, and also commemorates the gallery’s first ten years of operation. Line and Plane will open on Wednesday evening, September 5th, with a reception for the artists from 6 to 8 p.m., and will run through Sunday, October 28, 2012.

The exhibition comprises paintings and drawings by Chris Gallagher, Halsey Hathaway, James Lecce, Emil Lukas, Maureen McQuillan, James Nelson, Rob de Oude, Paul Pagk, Gary Petersen, Richard Roth, Richard Schur, Lauren Seiden, Stephen Talasnik, Mario Trejo, Don Voisine, and Laura Watt.

In plane geometry, two intersecting planes generate a line, while two intersecting lines uniquely define a plane; each can be considered the creator of or the product of the other. This exhibition examines how artists use linearity and planarity as a dominant means of creating abstract imagery. Maureen McQuillan layers scores of single line drawings using marker on tissue paper bound with glue to create a simple linear composition with great spatial depth, while Chris Gallagher’s diagonal bands of color suggest infinite and expansive movement. Halsey Hathaway’s hard-edged, biomorphic, layered fields suggest dance-like movement with mirroring and echoing forms. Gary Petersen’s layered oblique fields of rich color are punctuated by rhythmic accents of irregular geometries. Rob de Oude overlays linear grids to create Op-like vibratory fields of great complexity, while Emil Lukas creates shimmering color fields by overlapping countless colored threads. Lauren Seiden’s intensely patterned linear drawings suggest tensile musculature while James Nelson’s minute mark-making in graphite coalesces into undulate fields of near microscopic focus. Mario Trejo, on the other hand, creates dense and explosive centrifugal compositions through energetic linear gesture. Laura Watt weaves overlapping nets of color to construct expansive abstractions suggestive of deep space, while James Lecce’s rhythmic concentric lines of rich color swoop and swirl into sinuous, pulsating compositions. Stephen Talasnik’s collaged painting references architecture and geometry with complex linear drawing set against planar color fields. Richard Schur’s paintings also reference natural and architectural rhythms but with more reductive means: varying rectangular fields of color play one against another and occasionally overlap. Paul Pagk’s monumental fields of a single intense color are articulated by simple and elegant linear geometries, while Don Voisine overlaps matte and glossy black planar forms on light fields; these torque and press against border bands of rich color which contain their energy. Richard Roth’s reductive sculptural paintings investigate dimensionality with colored geometric linear patterns that travel across the façade as well as the sides of his works.

Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; on Sundays the gallery opens at noon. Monday and Tuesday are by appointment.