spray paintings | michael venezia

spray paintings brings together Michael Venezia's iconic works on canvas and paper, created in New York between 1966 and 1973. At the center of the presentation is the large-scale spray painting Untitled (1969) that was last exhibited at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in 2009 - it is complemented by rare works on paper by the artist.

Venezia's spray paintings coincide with a time when conventional art practice was being radically transformed by Minimal Art. Venezia, along with fellow artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, and Sol LeWitt, was searching for painterly possibilities beyond Abstract Expressionism. To this end, they abandoned traditional categories such as painting and sculpture and reduced the work of art to its elementary material and physical aspects, such as material, color, and texture. The course of this new painting process and the resulting pictorial qualities repeatedly become an encounter with the unpredictable. The works from this period are characterized by their material autonomy and abstraction, underscoring Venezia's interest in the process-based nature of painting. Underlying the proportional relationship of the individual sprayed surfaces to each other and to the overall format is a conceptual systematicity that is reinforced by the mechanical transfer of paint using the spray gun as a tool, thus fundamentally challenging the personalized, painterly gesture.