143 Reade Street – New York 10013

Lucien Terras is pleased to present an exhibition of works by New York based artists Graham Durward, Heather Guertin and Zak Kitnick. While each of their practices remain very distinct from one another, there’s a serial use of form and content from all three artists that echoes throughout the works.

Scottish-born artist Graham Durward presents a new series of sculptural panels that emerge from the representational but materialize as abstract. Here, Durward, who sources elements of his work from found imagery and art history, makes reference to The Shroud of Turin by focusing on the abstract markings along the its edges. The elongated shape and protruding form of the two-paneled construction suggest the wrapping of the body, a quality inherent to the miraculous signification of the shroud believed to capture the image of Christ. Whereas, the gestural abstraction of the mark making and the narrow vertical split between the two panels point towards modern art history and the painters Durward admires, such as Barnett Newman and Blinky Palermo. This new body of work complements another aspect of the artist’s practice, which is currently on view in a solo show at 33 Orchard Street through June 15th. Durward’s paintings have an unusual solemnity while remaining very experimental in their execution.

Heather Guertin’s work balances between representation of the figure and presentation of the process of painting. In some instances, the contours of a figure surface more seemingly, while in others, the viewer is presented with an indication of a face reduced to simplified circular forms. The viewer follows the artist’s decision-making as her hand traces these shapes and she decides to suspend the figurative completion of what could become a portrait. The results of this disciplined exercise of control are very airy and insouciant compositions that capture the frames of an ongoing morphosis. Guertin’s portraits don’t seem to occupy any specific time or space, and the artist’s repeated iteration of an anonymous profile all lend itself to the transitory nature of her figures.

Zak Kitnick constructs his pieces from industrial steel shelving units that are preempted from the production line before they can be painted. Diverting from the actual stocking of goods the steel panels were intended to carry, the functional purpose of the shelf is redirected as a metallic canvas for printed representations of produce, a stocking of images. The innocuous culinary and floral imagery – both familiar and exotic – combined with the brutalist materiality of the steel suggest that social forces govern the mediation of images in a similar way as the capitalist manufacturing of goods. With all his work, as seen in his recent solo room at PS1 MoMA, Kitnick expands the discourse of image appropriation into a larger inquiry about the exchange value of image representation.