MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce the exhibition Sharon Brant: Sideswiped. This is the Beacon, New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new paintings and works on paper.

For the past four decades, Sharon Brant has produced conceptually and aesthetically rigorous hard-edged paintings and drawings that commonly blur the lines between media – paintings are frequently drawn with graphite or pastel, extend outward from the wall into sculptural relief, or are mounted into complex, layered works on paper.

For her exhibition Sideswiped, Brant investigates new territory that shifts away from the ruled, geometric forms of her previous work. Her new paintings and works on paper present a single, animated rectangle, often thicker on the top and bottom and narrower on the sides, which sits slightly off-center at the bottom edge of the canvas or paper support. Rendered primarily in cadmium red light, as well as other hues and values of red on a white ground, Brant’s new work employs a remarkably narrow palette to explore an elemental form through a wide array of cumulative marks and subtle gestures. Her new work continues to distill and evidence her exhaustive understanding of materials and a masterful resourcefulness with each. On view are works made of oil, oil stick, alkyd, acrylic, pastel, ink, and crayon on canvas, watercolor paper, and newsprint.

In his catalog essay, artist, writer, and curator Stephen Westfall observes “Brant has delighted over the years in stretching the rectangle and opening its interior so that it undermines the authority of monumental Minimalism. Her new paintings go farther, they turn the rectangle and square into cyphers of the human figure and they do so not by constructing a geometric mask, but by loosening up the line so that form bends and sways a bit like a sentient being reacting to its environment.”

A fully-illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition with texts by Stephen Westfall, Patrick Mangan, and Matthew Deleget.

Sharon Brant has exhibited her work internationally for the past four decades, including in Europe, Australasia, Mexico, and the United States. Her museum exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, Rochester Museum, Everson Museum of Art (all New York), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), and Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oaxaca (Mexico). In 1966, Brant moved permanently to New York City and her work was included several years later in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Painting Annual in 1972. She exhibited regularly with OK Harris between 1969-1972 (solo exhibitions 1970, 1972), A.I.R. Gallery between 1988-1994 (solo exhibitions 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996), and Margaret Thatcher Projects between 1999-2003.

In 1968, Brant was one of eight founding members, along with Arthur Hughes, Gary Smith, and Robert Resnick, of MUSEUM, A Project of Living Artists, an artist-run exhibition and meeting space located at 729 Broadway in New York City. MUSEUM was intended as a politically-progressive community center for artists with the goal of supporting “a more alive connection between art and society, without the dissipation of force and quality occurring so frequently in the current art establishment.” MUSEUM’s membership grew to more than 300 individuals before it closed in 1971. Brant was also a member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States, from 1989-1996. She is currently a member of American Abstract Artists.

Earlier this year, Brant was awarded a grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, ARTnews, Art International, Arts Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri from 1962-1965.