Museum 52 is delighted to announce the first solo show for New York based artist Anthony Titus. Titus’s work explores geometric abstraction through a self-developed language of collage, faceted planes, and line.

The body of work featured in the exhibition begins with his interest in the cult television show The Joy of Painting. Within the show the presenter, Bob Ross, would methodically take the viewer through a step-by-step process of painting a landscape. The systematically layered elements of the painting respond to the thirty-minute time frame of the broadcast.

Titus is interested in Ross’s idea that an artwork can be produced within a specific amount of time. He is also interested in the separation between the viewer and the presenter by the television as a representation of the abstract process.

For the exhibition Titus has produced a series of multimedia wall and floor based pieces. Having completed two of the paintings according to The Joy of Painting’s instructions, he begins to deconstruct the images using a computer, creating an initial vocabulary of form and line. His sculpture Empty Field 1 presents a mixture of surfaces including gloss, enamelled steel panels and screen-printed steel sheets. The sculptural works explore the layered process adopted in the Joy of Painting. The initial language of form created through the deconstruction process is freely explored to create faceted black sculptures that incorporate dual-tone screen prints.

Also included in the show are a series of paintings that examine the systematic method by which the paintings were made on the television show. Titus begins the paintings with a collaged image printed from similar source material to the screen prints. This is combined with a geometric network of lines and planes. Titus chooses a series of colors to complete the space of the painting. Having mapped out all the possibilities for this one pattern with the chosen colors, a smaller number of paintings have been made to represent the wealth of possibility for his self-designed system.

Within the paintings, Titus pays particular attention to the surface, leaving parts of the canvas bare while other parts are painted multiple times. The attention to surface emphasises the depth within the painting and is enhanced by the presence of the collaged image. Juxtaposing a limited number of lines, planes, colors and reproduced images of the landscape, he establishes a space where abstraction and landscape both echo and challenge one another.

Titus’s work explores rigorous geometric abstraction as an analogue to nature. Titus examines them in relation to one another, not only juxtaposing the two, but seeing nature as a source of abstraction.