March 26 – May 2, 1987
Artists Space
Abstraction in Process
In 1987, Roberta Smith curated the exhibition Abstraction in Process, a concept that allegedly emerged from a conversation with Artists Space Director Linda Shearer about a new generation of artists working with abstraction. Smith, who had already made a name for herself as a prominent critic in New York but rarely delved into curating, chose four artists - Fontaine Dunn, Robert Hall, Benje LaRico, and Stephen Spretnjak - as examples of the disparate operations and motivations taking place within this new category.
In fact, Smith's essay makes very little attempt to draw the four practices together conceptually. Instead, she provides nuanced analyses of the particular logic behind each, letting their formal resemblances - as abstract wall-works on wood - serve to bind them. Though none of the participants mounted work that was entirely abstract or entirely process-based, the exhibition’s title hints at Smith's positioning of the genre between contemporary Neo-Expressionist painting and Process Art of the 1960s and 70s: four painters navigating the divide between intuition and empiricism, pictorialism and surface.
Robert Hall lives and works in New York; Abstraction in Process is his first exhibition.
Artists Space activities are made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency; New York State Council on the Arts; Institute of Museum Services; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Art Matters, Inc., Cowles Family Charitable Trust, Foundatio for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., Jerome Foundation, Leonhardt Foundation, Betty Parsons Foundation, The Reed Foundation, Inc., Mark Rothko Foundation; the American Express Company, Consolidated Edison, Equitable Real Estate Group Inc., EXXON, General Atlantic Corporation, R. H. Macy Company, Mobil Foundation, Inc., Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York and Philip Morris, as well as numerous Friends.
