FOG Design+Art 2022: Tauba Auerbach, Liam Everett, Koak, Shinpei Kusanagi, Trevor Paglen, Kikuo Saito, Sara VanDerBeek

Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics, Koak imbues her figures with a sense of agency and inner life to challenge patriarchal views of the feminine. Rendered in a variety of materials including oils, pastels and graphite, the artist’s subjects engage in an array of everyday activities. However, her compositions lend even the most mundane tasks or psychologically charged scenes a sense of pure self-possession. 

 

In her looping, thickly lined portraits, Koak examines the joyous, performative, and vulnerable sides of femininity. The artist utilizes a variety of materials, including acrylic, ink, chalk, graphite, and oil, to render her figures spare, bright, and wide-eyed.

Kikuo Saito entered New York’s Color Field and Abstract Expressionist circles after relocating from Tokyo in 1966. Serving as studio assistant for painters Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, he was deeply invested in the relationship between theater and painting. From the movement of paint across his canvases to the interplay between surface and background, Saito explored the ways painting, like theater, can distill gesture and sensation.

 

Ginger Night is situated well within Saito’s experimentation with Color Field painting, for its broad applications of color are opened up to reveal intimate, gestural mark-making. Here Saito considered the potential of acrylic painting and theatre, constructing a portal in which paint dashes lyrically atop the canvas.

Working across a range of disciplines, Tauba Auerbach’s oeuvre examines the structure of geometry, gesture, logic, and communication within visual culture. The artist is driven by not only what these established disciplines are, but how they can be broken down to interrogate the limits of perception and space. 

 

To produce the distinctive optical effect evident in Crease I, Auerbach experiments with the arrangement of the work’s dots, leaving the impression of sculptural form despite the painting's two-dimensional configuration. Through a presentation of illusional dimensionality, Auerbach embraces spatial flux, visual ambiguity, and, ultimately, instability. 

Shinpei Kusanagi stains untreated canvases with layers of translucent color then incorporates improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, markings that materialize from rapid motions as well as pooling stillness. His atmospheric washes of color leave the paintings devoid of specific detail, conjuring expansive memories of time and place rather than precise representations. The artist once wrote on memory: “it is all fatally destined to be washed away.”