Dot Dot Dot

Similar techniques allowed minimalist and post-minimalist and process- based artists to return to dots as a main organizing and structural principal that avoids the analytical use of color. The artists in this exhibition do not comply with a total composition of dots, but use dots in different ways. They co-exist here in an open-ended way—to connect the optical impetuses that use both persuasive structural insistence on dots as well as the potential of circular shapes’ manifold color constellations. • • • Terry Winters’s (b. 1949 ) monoprints Ghost # 9 , 2018 and Ghost # 5 , 2018 (cat. nos. 12, 13 ) invite the viewer to distribute attention between the dotted structure and the central ghostly shape. The artist’s process reveals that all his paintings originated from a drawing, or a composite of drawings. The drawings themselves incorporate and modify found imagery, and absorb the possibilities attained by science, especially when it comes to seeing. In this manner Winters can be connected to modern painting’s interest in the act of seeing, which dates back to Georges Seurat and his knowledge of optics. As noted by critics, Winters’s wavy lines are not elegant continuous lines, they are unexpected ones that capture the immediacy of the action of painting. The composition, as in this image, had to rely on the dialogue between the pattern of dots and the more multifaceted form, in a sort of parody of traditional balance. • • • Barry Le Va ( 1941 – 2021 ), a pioneer of Post-Minimalism and Process Art, created a unique body of work in a manner that pointed to a gradually strengthening inclination to express a sense of impermanence and chaos. In his powerful drawing in ink and pigment on paper (cat. no. 15 ) Bunker Coagulation , 1996 , the artist relies on the structure of dots to congregate within the black figurative shape, in order to denote the process of coagulation.