Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of work by Jim Condron, Chris Esposito, Glenn Goldberg, Jim Lee, and Don Voisine. Curated by Esposito, the exhibition, Favorite Thing, is on view from June 8 to July 9, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 9, 2023, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The gallery is located on 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY, (across from the Morgan Ave. L train stop).

Favorite Thing connects five New York artists who approach objects through painting and sculptural awareness. “Structure and materiality are overtly implied associations as well as references to iconography,” Esposito said. “These play a more crucial role to the work than picture making or illusion.”

“Each of the artists has developed their own unique language within the realm of individual work and process,” Esposito continued. “There is a particularity about a materials usage as well as perhaps a peculiar choice of materials.

The collection and repurposing of found materials and discarded objects into high art aligns the works in Favorite Thing with Arte Povera and Dada movements, questioning what we deem to be of value. The graphic lines and bold hues in both the 2D and 3D works, however, add an ample dose of both Color Field painting and post-painterly abstraction. The cumulative effect of the works on display is a challenge to rethink traditional notions of art and aesthetics and to what we ascribe significance.

An assemblage by Jim Condron, The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat, reflects how his work expresses both absurdity and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants, and paint. Somehow, the amorphously cut wooden “canvas,” cozily swathed in red-and-black striped knit, seems the ideal backdrop for both a gold golf ball and a miniature stairway to nowhere — the precise geometry of the latter anchoring the sculpture in both form and function. Adding to the humor and intrigue, Condron titles each piece with a textual fragment from a story that adds to the work’s rhetoric, rather than name or define it. 

In Jim Lee’s Untitled (A History of Bayview), bubblegum pink acrylic, applied on subtly iridescent nylon, is punctuated with two small square voids into which synthetic hair peeps out. Found next to the old Bayview women’s correctional facility on the West Side Highway, Lee brought it back to his studio and his 10-year-old daughter taught him how to braid it.

“From 12 feet away, the viewer sees two dark spots, but from 12 inches away the careful viewer will discover that the marks are not made of paint or charcoal or any other typical art material — but made of braided hair,” Lee says.

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​The nylon panel, some edges raw and some folded, is stapled onto an unfinished wood frame. The aesthetic effect is greater than the sum of its parts, owing to Lee’s ability to transform common art supplies and low-brow materials into sophisticated art.

“Process is important,” Esposito said of the works in Favorite Thing. “The work may look spontaneously put together in terms of construction but a meticulous attention to details and relationships of forms and objects is key.”

Vise by Don Voisine is a striking example of the power of his overlapping geometric forms, with graphic swaths of black oil paint applied to wood panels, as in this piece, or on Styrofoam, as in other works on view. The tomato red vertical edges and narrow olive columns vibrate and push against each other, suggesting a squeeze that has shifted the intersecting black bands off their axis. “Years ago, I began working with imagery derived from floor plans of places I lived in or worked in,” Voisine has said. “Over time the paintings became more and more geometrically structured and less about a specific place.”

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Glenn Goldberg has five pieces in Favorite Thing, all of which he considers objects. He believes in their spirit and energy, delivered through ubiquitous subjects such as the cabin, tower, stick, guy and the drawing. Goldberg is aware of materiality, structure, reference, and varying degrees of naming. He says he “views the objects as messengers that deliver a variety of energies from that which is alive.”

With Aggregate Composition, Esposito continues his exploration into the interior spaces of our lived environment, creating geometric abstractions of the layers of wood, concrete, and paint that could be found just beneath the surface if we clawed our way through the walls. “The work I create translates observations into physical embodiments stripped of their cultural trappings,” Esposito said. “Employing an anti-aesthetic process of selecting specific found materials, these are then either constructed or deconstructed to create a juxtaposition of culture.” 

For these five artists, structure and form is their language. The works in Favorite Thing economically convey larger meaning through their abstract minimalism — even if that meaning is that perhaps there is none.

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To view a pdf of the press release and the exhibition checklist, click here.

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For more information, please contact Gallery Director Ellen Sturm Niz at amosenogallery@gmail.com.