Joseph Montgomery: Five Sets Five Reps

Joseph Montgomery Five Sets Five Reps

On first view Joseph Montgomery’s relief-like paintings seem strangely familiar.They often bring to mind other compositions just out of mind’s reach, though they don’t reference any particular original.

Evoking works by a wide range of predecessors, including Paul Klee, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Kurt Schwitters—as well as movements such as Arte Povera, constructivism, and minimalism—Montgomery sorts, dissects, and builds upon existing compositions, examining how abstract images are constructed. He sees his works as “representations” of other images—paintings, sculptures, photographs, architecture, even small, everyday visual moments. This bank of images and fragments is the result of what Montgomery describes as a kind of artistic Darwinism at work, an evolutionary process by which certain images survive, adapt, and proliferate.

Five Sets Five Reps features over twenty new and existing paintings from three bodies of work made between 2007 and today. The earliest series includes small but dense, boldly three-dimensional

Image Ninety-Six, 2007-2010 Oil, cardboard, plastic, aluminum mesh, wax, steel wire and paper on panel and aluminum 12.5 x 9 x 2.5 inches (31.8 x 22.9 x 6.4 cm) Private collection.

assemblages—most not much larger than a sheet of office paper. The highly textured works often feature a subdued, earthy palette, punctuated with bursts of bright color. They are built with scraps of material that might easily have come from the studio floor: canvas, cardboard, cedar shims, clay, grout, paper, plaster, sheet metal, and wire.

In fact, the first of these works were made from earlier rejected paintings. Montgomery would veil or destroy works which he found too earnest or personal. These became

supports for subsequent collages which began with bits of Sculpey clay applied like layers of paint. Montgomery continues to cannibalize his own work, cutting up paintings and incorporating their material fragments into other pieces. Functioning like painterly gesture, these elements often curve up, out, and beyond the confines of the support. Many of these heavily layered works seem to leap out from the wall, offering surprising views when seen from different angles.

These assemblages led to a second group of more restrained works constructed from common wooden shims. Montgomery lays the shims vertically on their sides, arranging the elongated triangles as alternating wedges, then painting them in mostly monochrome white and black.

The effect is that of both flat canvas (when viewed straight on) and relief construction, with a clever interplay of light and dark bands. They give the illusion of drawn or painted lines, though Montgomery has purged traditional mark-making from his paintings.

This shim series in turn inspired a third body of work of larger cardboard reliefs which at first mimicked the shim’s triangular form. These wall pieces are made with cardboard which the artist has folded or reconstructed into protruding forms and troughs. Hung low to the ground, they have an almost figurative presence, a human scale. Montgomery covers these with a layer of white, black, grey, or brown paint, bringing to mind minimalist monochromes. In recent iterations, the artist has begun to add color, as well as an additional layer of texture by

Image One Hundred Fifty-Seven, 2012 Oil and enamel on plaster, polystyrene, cardboard, fiberglass, and resin 72 x 20.5 x 5 inches (182.9 x 52.1 x 12.7 cm) Private collection.

spraying them with the compound used to make popcorn ceilings, like those in his childhood bedroom.

All of Montgomery’s series have a strong tie to the world of building, both in their fabrication and material. Starting with the shims so common to hardware stores and construction sites, the works have a certain masculine, labor-identified character not unlike the work of Rodchenko and the constructivists or minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra who brought the aesthetics and materials of the railroad and the factory to the studio.

Montgomery also brings the outside world—and his carpentry and art-handling background—into his work. Other signs of the everyday—oatmeal from his kitchen or the remnants of signage from his local grocery store—are also incorporated into his images.

The jewel box-like assemblages have the intimacy of a devotional object, not unlike the Russian icons that inspired Malevich’s Suprematist geometries. Yet moved from the wall to a tabletop, these compact constructions could be confused with architectural models, studies for much larger projects. In a sense, all of Montgomery’s paintings are studies of other images. Each work generates or builds on the next. The title of the show hints at this process: Five Sets Five Reps references a weight lifting program which pushes bodybuilders past plateaus in development. Based on repetition and accumulation, it is an apt metaphor for Montgomery’s own working method. The titles of the paintings also help illuminate

Image One Hundred SIxty-Eight, 2012 Gouache and wax on cedar mounted to gypsum 32 x 16.25 x 2 inches (81.3 x 41.3 x 5.1 cm) Collection Adrienne & Peter Biberstein, Switzerland.

his process for the viewer. Numbered in the order they are completed—starting with Image One, the works reveal usually hidden moments of experimentation, frustration, and satisfaction in the studio.

Susan Cross Curator

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1979, Joseph Montgomery received his BA from Yale University in 2001 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2007. His work was recently featured in Painter, Painter at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Five Sets Five Reps is his first solo museum exhibition.

Montgomery lives and works in New York.

interior flap: Image One Hundred Forty-Seven, 2012 Canvas, clay, lacquer, oil, paper, pastel, resin, sponge, steel wire, and wax on plastic panel 12.75 x 10.125 x 5.25 inches (32.4 x 25.7 x 13.3 cm) All works courtesy the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York. photos: Elisabeth Bernstein

Joseph Montgomery: Five Sets Five Reps May 26, 2013 – April 6, 2014

This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, MA 01247 413.MoCA.111 massmoca.org