PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Robert Sagerman: Never. Ever.

January 24 - March 1, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, January 24, 6 - 9 p.m.

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Robert Sagerman. The New-York based artist exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Germany and Atlanta, and has shown in gallery and museum exhibitions in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Chicago and Cleveland. Sagerman holds three master’s degrees - in painting, art history, and religious studies - and is currently working toward his doctorate degree in Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University.

The titles of Sagerman’s paintings derive from the number of applied daubs of paint that make up each work. His rigorous process involves the application of thousands of ‘marks’ of oil paint using dozens of colors he mixes and applies in thick, textural layers often resembling dense, three-dimensional materials like astroturf, mounds of confetti, candies, ribbon, textiles and so on. Sagerman laboriously builds the paintings mark by mark with a painstaking precision, resulting in a completely balanced array of colors to create a perfectly unified color-field. The final achievement is an energetic and fascinating work that radiates an imposing physical, spiritual and intellectual presence.

Sagerman keeps a journal for each work that documents the process (the color, number of marks, and time spent on each color). He then takes the data and translates it into a digital document, that cycles through the copious notations on each painting. These artifacts allow the viewer insight into the labor involved in each project, and the means used to go beyond traditional approaches to painting.

Sagerman has titled the upcoming show "Never. Ever." as a response to his own meditation on the paradoxes he perceives in his studio practice. Conceiving of his abstract field painting work as a metaphysical representation of an invisible, sublime reality, Sagerman also wrestles with a contradictory, post-modern view of a reality with no static or objective center to attain. The artist reconciles his process - a laborious, meditative, even devotional effort to pictorialize the ineffable - with a post-modern view of non-objective reality, forever in flux, by the idea that his studio practice "may ever be grasped from moment to moment in a way that is also always shifting. In this way my studio practice, far from being an ultimately unconsummated endeavor, is, perhaps, in a continual and ever-changing state of arrival at its original goal."

Sagerman describes his practice in a recent statement:

My understanding of my own work has continued to develop over time, and it is that shift in perception that has led to the changes that gradually make their way into the work itself. I have come to sense three distinct ways in which my work functions, all of which hang in a kind of balance, reinforcing one another. First, there are the evocations that give the work its emotional weight, whether these involve landscape associations or naturalistic ones, relating to textures or to processes of growth. Second, there is that aspect that points not to the outside world but inwards, towards my own self. My fixation upon process - both in terms of my laborious method (apparent in the physical work itself) and my practice of numerical documentation - has helped me to concentrate on this meditative phase of the work, and has also served to highlight it for others. Lastly, there is an aspect of my work that points neither to the outside world nor to my own inner one but, as it seems to me, beyond either. It is with this final aspect that I time and again find the solutions to the conundrums that, for me at least, my work raises: There is a sense in which each painted work resonates as its own self, as a kind of a being that partakes - paradoxically, given the sheer weight of each work’s material substance - of a transcendent immateriality. So it is that painting for me is neither simply a reformulated and abstracted mode of landscape painting nor an exercise in tautological self-absorption. I return often to the feeling that my work for me is a calling into being of independent entities which partake of their own meaningful existence.

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