Brant / Brennan / Zinsser

About

Sharon Brant has produced conceptually and aesthetically rigorous abstract paintings and drawings for more than four decades that commonly blur the lines between media. Her new paintings continue her recent shift away from the hard-edged geometry that ruled her earlier work and present a single, attenuated rectangle with irregular sides, which rests at the bottom edge of the canvas. Rendered primarily in various reds and blacks on white grounds, Brant’s paintings employ a remarkably narrow palette to investigate an animated, fundamental form through a wide array of cumulative marks and subtle gestures. The works allude at once to geometry, architecture, and landscape.

Michael Brennan’s new, petite-format paintings merge geometric and gestural painting. Although monochromatic upon first impression, they employ a subtle array of blacks, grays, and whites, which Brennan tints with discreet amounts of other hues. Color is a core concern for Brennan and his paintings reflect his deep interest in abstraction, monochrome painting, historical photography, and early film. His work possesses a sense of aesthetic economy and he commonly employs no more than two layers of paint in completed works. Painted with a palette knife during a single session in the studio, the paintings juxtapose a single, highly finessed field of color against a solid, white band commonly along the bottom or outside edges of the work.

John Zinsser’s new conceptual paintings are distinguished by their visual clarity and lush materiality. Seemingly spontaneous in appearance, the thickly impastoed surfaces of his paintings are produced strategically. Zinsser employs a broad vocabulary of marks and gestures achieved by brush, palette knife, block printing, and other methods. Merging a wide array of different materials, such as oil, enamel, and spray paint, his color sensibility is resolutely experimental and oscillates between close-value, nearly monochromatic works to luminous, retinally-charged paintings that appear to vibrate off their surfaces.