Thierry Goldberg Projects is pleased to present “No Greater Solitude,” a two-person show about the reclusive nature of abstraction and memory, with drawings and installation by Jonathan Hartshorn and paintings by Joyce Kim. Perilous and murky, the works struggle with remembrance, personal and historical, in bleak retrospect.

Jonathan Hartshorn’s installations consist of small grotesque drawings and gory collages of paint. Hung in what appears to be a random dissonance, is Hartshorn’s careful reinterpretation of personal memories and fiction. His improvised hanging of individual pieces represents the desultory nature of retelling and remembering trauma. In what he likens to the “currency of memory,” a multitude of tellings generates a multitude of truths and Hartshorn’s performative relationship with his installation process is a mutable extension of those very stories.

Joyce Kim reflects on the entropy of utopian ideals as she reframes Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film, Le Samouraï. The title of the exhibition is a quote from Melville’s fictitious “Bushido,” The Book of the Samouraï. Recalling select scenes from the film, Kim develops her own voice and memories in relation to the Modernist history of painting. Obscuring and defacing surface in storms of gray with collaged pieces of paint and blackened acrylic foil, she alludes to a decaying and shattered ‘60s notion of modernism as a symbolic stage. The paintings convey the sublimely silent and desolate spaces in the film while nodding to the history and promise of abstraction.

Joyce Kim lives and works in New York. She received an M.A. from New York University and has had solo exhibitions at Artists’ Space, New York; The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium; Livingroom D Lyx, Malmo, Sweden; and Priska Juschka Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; The St. Etienne Museum of Art, St. Etienne, France; Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York; Thrust Projects, New York; Gasser & Grunert Gallery, New York; Southfirst, Brooklyn; Peres Project, Los Angeles; and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. She is a recipient of The Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and The John Anson Kitteredge Fund award, and is currently an artist in residence at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation.

Jonathan Hartshorn lives and works in New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico. He holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico. His work has been shown at P.S.1 MoMA, LIC, NY (solo); Feature, New York (solo); Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (solo); Galerie Bertrad & Gruner, Geneva, Switzerland; and John Sommers Gallery, Albuquerque, NM. An article about his guerilla performance in the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth floor bathroom, was recently published in The New York Times.