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    Julian Hoeber: Relief From Pictures

    Julian Hoeber: Relief From Pictures

    January 15-February 26, 2022

    Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Julian Hoeber: Relief From Pictures, on view from January 15 to February 26, 2022 in the gallery’s second-floor space. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery presenting eight new wallworks along with a new sculpture. These works echo a persistent motif in Hoeber’s practice—stepped gradients that complicate spatial perception and bridge conceptual and expressive modes of painting and sculpture.

     

    The new wall-works, part of the artist’s Constructions series, were created in direct response to XCJS Door, 2021, which operates as a permanent installation and functioning door to Jessica Silverman’s second-floor gallery. This door was itself inspired by an earlier door Hoeber constructed for his first solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman in 2011, the most recent iteration being an approximate replica of the original. Hoeber traces these associations back and forth over the history of his relationship with the gallery and the different modes of his practice to produce a new body of work both experimental and responsive to its context. The relationship between the doors and the new, painted wood pieces in the Constructions series are exemplary of Hoeber’s practice, where a multitude of sources and references exist in excess of the contours of their appearance.

    While the artist has created works in the Constructions series before, only three previous iterations have been painted in a gradient. This series explores space by using color and fluid brushwork with architectural relief and depth, rejiggering numerous strategies from the artist’s twenty-year practice. Also on view will be a new sculpture, Curves From Straight Lines, which is inspired by a found, oval-shaped picture frame in the Tramp art style. Resembling a supple wooden chain, Curves From Straight Lines signals the possibility of making irrational forms from a series of minute rational parts, pointing to an essential aspect of Hoeber’s practice— the production of the ineffable through repetition of the mundane, structured and systematic.