THE (grand) GESTURE

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present THE (grand) GESTURE, a group exhibition of works by Trisha Brown, Keltie Ferris, and Arturo Herrera.

THE (grand) GESTURE considers how ideas of movement and action may be formally expressed and conceptually embodied. Trisha Brown, Keltie Ferris, and Arturo Herrera each offer unique interpretations of physicality and performance, often working through the lens of Abstract Expressionism or in response to its legacies.

Trisha Brown created works on paper in parallel with her well-known dance career. Brown’s drawings meld the ephemeral gestures of performance, central to her groundbreaking choreography, with a postminimal visual quality that suggests the condition of an action in process. Her large-scale works trace the motions of Brown’s body as she turns, twists, stands, and glides across the paper’s surface with charcoal grasped between her hands and feet. The resulting field of lines and marks evokes the continuous, all-over nature of Brown’s movements and the ghost of a dynamic presence.

Keltie Ferris’s abstractions thrum with a vibrant sense of color and tactility. In his paintings, layers of medium are built up and removed with a variety of tools, including hand-held spray guns, palette knives, and occasionally three-dimensional forms. Gesture is invoked as something both immediate and calculated, fomenting a tension between the initiation of an action and its potential outcome. In this way, Ferris’s works can be seen as both a source of energy and an image of its transformation, released as a kinetic interplay of looping swirls, drags of paint, and geometric fragments.

Arturo Herrera’s diverse body of work draws upon Modernist strategies of fragmentation and repetition to explore the mutability of images and how they are perceived. Working largely through collage, his abstractions often play with the ambiguity between what is revealed and what is concealed, and how such visual information or associations are transmitted to the viewer. Dance and choreography have been a significant influence on Herrera’s practice: he describes choreography as “unifying,” defined by certain steps and interactions with space in a way that parallels the composite elements of a collage. His earlier works often feature stylized drips, swishes, and other gestural flourishes, while his more recent compositions continue to use gesture as structure in a more open and painterly way.