Exhibition
Reception: September 11, 6 - 8 p.m.
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Jordan Tinker. Tinker is a graduate from Cooper Union (B.F.A.,1990), and this solo exhibition at the gallery marks his debut in New York.
This debut exhibition, unlike other exhibitions that present work by young emerging artists to announce a newly discovered talent, offers the scholar of contemporary art revealing insights on how a younger generation grapples with tradition.
As a precocious teenager, Tinker, was Kenneth Noland's assistant when he was only 16 years old. His association with Noland and Greenberg generation artists however, was destined to evolve into a love/hate relationship to formalist abstract painting. Gradually, Tinker's development led him towards a desire to shatter the grandiose ideas that this historical movement espoused. Tinker's innate attraction for simplicity and an non-structured approach led him out of the trap of his formalist training.
The works in this exhibition are very small canvases made as found shapes, torn parts, and discarded material. In many of these tiny paintings, Tinker buries words in gesso so that speech bleeds faintly through the top layers of paint, hushing language into an intimate silence. It is this transformation of matter, sound, and ideas into something eloquent that Tinker substitutes for pure formalism.
For Tinker, "Truth emerges after everything is tossed upside down, torn apart, discarded, left out for sanitation to pick up, and whatever is left behind, those tiny forgotten remnants - that for me is beauty."