In “Break Ground: Amrhein-Welish, Schur-Seligson,” ART 3 gallery in Brooklyn sets up figurative dialogues between contemporary artists who have found common ground in their work. The Bushwick gallery invites viewers to be interlocutors in these spirited conversations, which play out in similarities and differences among the various artworks.
The show includes artwork by Joe Amrhein, Marjorie Welish, Richard Schur, and Judith Seligson, each of whom explores structure, geometry, and dimensionality. While similarities resonate across all the works on view, ART 3 focuses on two specific pairings: Amrhein and Welish, who share ideas of lines and layering, and the canvases of Schur and Seligson, who similarly use color and shape to structure their compositions.
Amrhein incorporates words and lines of text into his work, which takes a number of different forms, including installation. Ruin (2011), for example, consists of a pile of wooden sticks painted with an assortment of multilingual, multicolored words. The overlapping sticks and their scattered arrangement suggest a broken grid—a layout subtly echoed by the disrupted grids in Welish’s suite of paintings.