James Siena

About

The artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 20 October at 525 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 26 November 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring an essay by Professor Robert Hobbs.

James Siena is celebrated for his inimitable process of creating intricate abstractions that have situated him firmly within the trajectory of contemporary American art. His practice is driven by self-imposed, often cryptic sets of rules that he—and various critics—have termed visual algorithms. Siena preemptively determines his marks and actions and repeats them procedurally as his works result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly colored, freehand compositions.

His oeuvre often references diagrams, complex puzzles, labyrinths, and mapping. Siena’s inward meditations actively engage traditions of pattern and mark-making in an ongoing exploration of scale, materiality, and interaction of color. Maneuvering across a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, lithography, etching and woodcuts, his work has placed him firmly within the canon of contemporary American art.

In the new larger works of the past few years, the process of emergence appears in the form of phased grids, whose cascade effects underpin the logic of the completed paintings. These works, like visual machines, elide conventional abstract strategies, and activate in the mind of the active viewer the ever-shifting nature of perception.