By Max Estenger’s own estimation, Blue, 2020, stands at the origin of the new works gathered in these pages. Exhibited in two successive presentations—at Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, in January and February 2023 and at Pazo Fine Art, Kensington, from April to June of the same year—the paintings range in dimensions and formats, including strongly horizontal and vertical constructions as well as perfect squares. All deploy the same basic vocabulary of differing panel-types and vinyl emulsion paint, and many, like Blue, make unabashed reference to the artist’s longtime touchstones in postwar American art, from Barnett Newman’s zip compositions and the revealed supports of color field painting to Donald Judd’s objects and stack pieces with stainless steel and Carmen Herrera’s vibrant geometry. Yet they equally affirm a distinctive sensibility grounded in Estenger’s unwavering commitment to the continued possibilities of abstraction. Estenger first outlined the fundaments of this practice over thirty years ago, on the occasion of the exhibition After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial. Held at the Tomoko Liguori Gallery in New York in the fall of 1991, in the wake of an acclaimed Ad Reinhardt retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,1 the group show was Estenger’s first exhibition in the city. Then aged twenty-seven, he had completed his MFA at the University of California Installation view, Max Estenger at Steffany Martz Gallery, NYC. Photograph by Jason Mandella. San Diego and moved east just three years prior. The youngest participant in a remarkable intergenerational lineup that included Robert Ryman, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Alan Uglow, and Karin Sander, among other artists working in a highly reduced, non-representational vein, he also served (alongside writer Meg O’Rourke) as one of two authors of the accompanying catalogue, penning the eponymous essay.2
1. 2.
Ad Reinhardt, The Museum of Modern Art, June 1 – September 2, 1991. Opening nearly a quarter-century after Reinhardt’s death, the full-career survey was the painter’s first in a major museum. Max Estenger, “After Reinhardt.” After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial (New York, 1991): 3-8. All quotes in the next two paragraphs are from this source.
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