Wook & Lattuada is pleased to announce The New Grid, a solo exhibition of five grid-based digital paintings by Justin Rhee.
In The New Grid, Rhee uses a drawn-out generative art-making technique that hybridizes Adobe Flash’s scripting language, actionscript, an inherent “random” function therein, and the post-minimalist concept of the grid. Interestingly enough, this code-based mode of art-making empowers Rhee with the ability to produce over a thousand unique works in a single day — something unheard of in history of the visual arts.
For each piece in The New Grid, Rhee has painstakingly positioned each square by hand to achieve perfectly symmetrical, pixel-precise compositions (removing all traces of hierarchy and inflection) to produce structures that not only emphasize the grid’s anti-referential character, but- more importantly- its hostility to narrative, its imperviousness to language, and its unfaltering capacity to produce silence.
It can be argued that in such silence artists like Mondrian, Albers, Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin heard what they thought to be the beginning, the origins of Art. This dialogue about an “originary naivete” is what The New Grid carefully attempts to color, question, and forward.
The show, which opens this Friday with a cocktail reception for the artist from 6 to 8 PM, will stay up until July 31. For more information, please contact the gallery at nyc@wooklattuada.com.
