Seth Kaufman | John Morris

PRESS RELEASE

 

Seth Kaufman | John Morris

3 February – 10 March 2000

Opening reception: Thursday, 3 February, 6 to 8 pm

 

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present the work of Los Angeles artist Seth Kaufman and New York artist John Morris. Although the artists will share the gallery space, the show is not collaborative. Kaufman will hang his delicate paint chip sculptures on the wall while Morris will display his intricate abstract drawings on a table running the length of the gallery.

Seth Kaufman creates low-relief sculptures made from paint chips collected off of decaying buildings. These obsessive works question the act of painting by using paint in the unconventional way of creating sculpture. The paint is peeled rather than brushed and then delicately glued together creating rich, textural compositions. Organic in form, the sculptures appear as star bursts on the gallery wall. Kaufman will also exhibit his paint and dirt pieces created through a casting process which includes mixing dirt, paint and weeds and pouring it into molds formed in the earth. When removed, the sculpture retains a naturalistic quality much like volcanic rock.

John Morris makes small-scale drawings using ink, graphite, ballpoint pen and wax crayon. Like Kaufman, Morris' work also has a sense of obsessiveness. The organic forms are painstakingly rendered using a series of repetitious marks made from thousands of overlapping circles, dots, lines and ellipses. The images recall cellular structures or musical compositions but also have a technological reference. Morris uses today's computer start-up companies and their ticker-tape symbol from the stock market as a source for titles, almost as if to draw a parallel between the abstract system behind the computer and his drawings when seen as a whole.