Rey Akdogan. Subtractions.

About

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Friday, March 31st, of Rey Akdogan’s Subtractions, her forth one-person exhibition at the gallery. The show will be held at our 36 Orchard Street location.

Rey Akdogan’s Subtractions comprises a new body of work that inhabits and elaborates the peripheral visual zones of recent magazine advertising. Continuing with her acute attention to the details that structure spatial experience, the series directs us to a more diffuse sense of space, the constructed ambiences found in commercial marketing. The interventions deployed throughout the works in the exhibition imply not just acts of removal and compression, but even more so the resultant object as a subtraction, a remainder charged with the sensual intimations of cultural residues. The impulse to dig into the image to uncover some obscured element becomes transformational, even alchemical.

Akdogan engages the materiality of print with a variety of substances modifying form, texture, and pliability, while also subverting the intended subject and objective of the image. Displacing the hierarchy of figure over ground renders the primary economy of meaning inoperative while drawing out physical and conceptual latencies, connotative atmospheres and dispersed possibilities. Through a range of alterations (coating, tinting, cutting, folding, abrading, covering, reinforcing), Akdogan reconfigures an image’s border and disorients standardized recognition templates, counterposing the advertisement’s subliminal seduction of the distracted consumer with an alternative form of distraction that gives rise to emergent moods saturating the field of commodity circulation, akin to immanent but formerly unrealized visual tenses. Curling at the edges or alight with glossy vibrancy, Subtractions exhibits a suite of actions in the production of visual counterspace, tonal space-making unfolding as though through an imperceptible animacy or combustion.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition by Minerva Projects, Akdogan’s Plant Light Curtain, a limited edition artist book, will be included in the show.

Rey Akdogan (b. 1974, Heilbronn, Germany) completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004 after receiving her MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 2001. Recent solo exhibitions dedicated to her work include Lost Record, Commercial Street, Los Angeles (2022), Subtractions, Galerie Anke Schmidt, Cologne (2021), Rey Akdogan, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2017), Faction, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2017), Rey Akdogan, Radio Athènes, Athens (2016), Crash Rail, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2015), Rey Akdogan, Hannah Hoffman (2014), night curtain, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2012), off set, MoMA PS1, New York (2012), and Silent Partner, Andrew Roth Gallery, New York (2012). She was included in the XIV Bienal de Cuenca in 2018, as well as in group shows at Dia:Beacon, Real Fine Arts, Venetia Kapernekas Gallery, Simone Subal Gallery, Elisabeth Ivers Gallery (all in New York), Galerie Anke Schmidt (Cologne), Galerie Max Mayer (Düsseldorf), FraenkelLAB (San Francisco), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), Galerie Tatjana Pieters (Ghent), and Rodeo Gallery (Istanbul), among others. #46, a book of the artist’s work, was published by PPP Editions in 2012.