February 13 – March 21, 1992
The four individual installations by painters Jared Fitzgerald and Nickzad Nodjoumi and sculptors Gilda Pervin and Rendall Shaw are sponsored by The Mark Rothko Foundation as part of an ongoing series of exhibitions which highlight the work of artists who have been working for twenty years or more.
Both Fitzgerald and Nodjoumi have evolved in their paintings a personal symbology which combines mythologies that are religious, political, historic, and fantastic. Fitzgerald's psychological landscapes are peopled with a strange cast of giants, baseball players and other mythical figures. Nodjoumi addresses political concerns as they overlap with personal history, and employs art historical references to structure the lushly painted panels. Shaw and Pervin are obsessive makers of sculptural objects and landscapes. Pervin scavenges and recombines urban detritus to create poetic assemblage which critiques the gallery architecture by assimilation with its physical structure. Her freestanding objects are contained moments which embody daily life and its activity. Shaw is concerned with pain and the poetic or associative nature of everyday objects. He creates formal arrangements that are rooted in Minimalism, but groups loaded and often dangerous objects such as nails, razor blades, barbed wire and broken glass to address the tenuousness of everyday existence.
The Mark Rothko Foundations sponsored exhibitions are devised by a committee of Artists Space board and staff members and are selected from the Artists File. Since 1983, The Mark Rothko Foundation has sponsored this series of Artists Space exhibitions highlighting the work of mature artists. Past exhibition in this series have included Mowry Baden, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Shirley Jaffe, Ted Kurahara, Lee Mullican, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Carol Haerer and Ed Clarke.