MARY HEILMANN, JILL MOSER, STANLEY WHITNEY

Curated by Roger Boyce

If you build it, they will come!

In the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition of seasoned studio veterans, critic Nancy Princinthal starts out by comparing a painting to a house:

"Like a house, a painting must be built. But it is also, in equal measure, imaginary. If the three painters included in this exhibition, Mary Heilmann, Jill Moser, and Stanley Whitney, are masters of the obvious, they are also familiars of the unknown. That is to say, they employ simple building materials --oil or acrylic paint, prepared cloth, a limited number of simple, roughly geometric forms -- to construct images that are neither expectable nor readily explained."

Princenthal's essay draws a blue-print of sorts for each of the artists' painting styles. She concludes:

"The title Masters of the Obvious is in the Minimalist idiom: the young Frank Stella's "what you see is what you see" is a cognate. The importance of Minimalism to each of these artists is undeniable (if widely varied), but its invocation also helps clarify crucial differences with the later work. Fact and fiction were held at arm's length in the 1960's, and ambitious art partook only of the former. In the work exhibited here they consort promiscuously. The point is not so much that material truth is now a suspect category, and that every objective datum can be challenged - this is hardly cultural news - but that the fictive no longer provokes censure. Indeed, in our famously destabilized age, the imaginary hides everywhere in plain sight - and seldom more plainly than in this exhibition."

Masters of the Obvious Catalogues are available at Hampden Gallery.