This summer the museum is presenting a group exhibition with artists who work with “space” in their paintings. Through motifs, use of color, and processing of the canvas, these artists deal with the possibilities of abstraction, while exploring the ways in which different painting techniques and the materiality of paint creates depth and spatiality. This is apparent in the American artist Julia Rommel’s paintings. Rommel re-stretches developed paintings over differently sized stretcher bars, while laying down multiple blocks of color on top of one another. In this way she allows for painterly possibilities to emerge through letting the painting’s support determine the composition of the image. Some of the artists work with painting as installation—as in the large, unstretched canvases of the Argentine-Swiss painter Vivian Suter; or with painterly properties of sculpture—as in the American artist Robert Burnier’s wall-mounted reliefs of folded and painted forms. Other artists refer to architecture and architectural shapes, in paintings that suggest an interior world or a painterly scheme.  

A range of geographic and generational positions will be present, and while focused on our contemporary moment, works from the twentieth century will be included to suggest a longer historical interest in these strategies. 

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