SPRING FOR ABSTRACTION

by Zach Hunley

It often is damp, dark, and cold here in Pittsburgh. At the time I was writing this review we had just received a tremendous amount of rain, the Point was underwater, and the temps remained stalled in the 30s and 40s. Nonetheless, the green is slowly returning and the city feels abuzz with renewed vitality—spring is imminent. The seasonal turn is one of transitions—for the land, for temperatures, for our perspectives, and for our senses. Abstract art is often, too, of transitions—for style, for medium, for interiority, and for purpose. Tucked away on the cozy second-floor gallery of Regent Square’s Concept Art Gallery, Spring For Abstraction supplies the color and energy to get us through to May.

Comprised of work by 15 artists, the show offers a diverse, sensorial feast with work in a variety of mediums from printmaking and drawing, to painting and ceramics. Skylights flood the gallery with brilliantly diffused natural light, making for an airy atmosphere that immediately pulled me through the space to the large oil on canvas work by Natalie Moffitt—Each Night The Last Night, 2022.

The piece is completely mesmerizing—its swirling pallet transitions effortlessly between dark blues and purples to warm pinks and greens. The term gesture often gets applied to abstract painting, and that may be the case here, but to my eye the work’s even surface resists that moniker; its undulating forms imbue a sense of rhythm that is somehow calm and dreamlike despite its contrasting elements. The group of diagonal bands in the mid-left of the work recall the slatted posts of a headboard. I have decided that the work depicts a couple tucked away in bed, comforted by each other’s embrace but surrounded by their confluence of energies at times at odds, but irrevocably intertwined.

Moffitt’s work is by no means representational, but Clayton Merrell’s gouache on paper series proves that abstraction can be healthily grounded in depictions of the real world, and that abstraction can be used to effectively elevate a scene beyond what is readily seen. Merrell uses rich color amid a painterly backdrop of landscape to craft a heavily atmospheric realm for his diverse arrays of abstract forms to occupy and disrupt.

Each scene included in this show is masterfully rendered, from the layered constellation of points and lines in Shifting Configuration to the starry swooping of Parabolic Ecliptic Sky, and from the searing geometric tower in Temperature Stack to the humid and hazy Sweeping Spectrum (the strongest of the bunch). Abstraction in Merrell’s work feels like a means of unlocking a view of an ever changing environment, emphasized by the fluid nature of our skies and atmosphere—the work collapses the gap between us and the outer reaches of our planet.

Zoë Welsh combines the mediums of newsprint and oil on canvas in Grasslands, a large, square format piece that uses gestural mark making to depict a slice of saturated and verdant earth, usurped and pushed to the periphery by a beautifully translucent teal square. As a result, the work becomes a window not into a view of landscape, but into the liminal realm of potentials we discover when looking inward. The literal is diffused and becomes open to mood and interpretation, and Welsh uses color and layering to craft a portal wherein our perceptions become interlaced with the subject.

Of the four sculptures included in the show, Seuil Chung’s We Belong Together, with its lovely, expressive glazes and animated forms, feels the most relevant. Trevor King’s monochromatic Moonrise Bowl and Double Bubble felt underwhelming in this context, though I appreciate the way in which they stand in contrast to the vibrancy of work on the walls—like the moodier days that get peppered in throughout the season. Despite a wide and at points disparate breadth in approach, Spring for Abstraction is unified by color, texture, and the spirit of the season in all its forms.

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Spring For Abstraction is on view at Concept Art Gallery through May 4th, open Tuesday-Saturday from 10-4. For more details visit conceptgallery.com

Zach Hunley (they/he) is a modern and contemporary art historian, arts writer, photographer, collector of things, and proud father to a senior guinea pig. With a keen observational eye, they use their writing as a means to refract their deep appreciation for formal aesthetics through a socially engaged lens. They hold an M.A. in Art History from West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV and currently work as Visitor Services Coordinator for Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller ICA.