The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery of the New York-based artist Greg Bogin.

In his consistently painterly practice, Greg Bogin explores the central historical developments in painting since the emergence of abstraction, juxtaposing them with the specific visuality of contemporary culture. His work oscillates between conceptual rigour and a playful, sensual curiosity about the visible.

Essential to Bogin’s work is his rejection of common rectangular forms as pictorial grounds and his confident handling of colour. His organically rounded, cut out or geometrically shaped canvases overcome the two-dimensionality of traditional paintings and acquire a sculptural quality. His work, in combination with brilliant, sometimes fluorescent colours, refers to the visual rhetoric of a world of vernacular culture. Striking, memorable and immediately effective, a visual vocabulary develops that is characteristically borrowed from the everyday world and yet possesses an undisputed sublimity. 

The three-dimensionality of Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziales , the minimalism of the Shaped Canvases by Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly can be seen as initial points in the artistic development for Bogin’s work. A profound engagement with the visual aesthetics of consumer and pop culture contrasts with this treatment of art historical tropes. Bogin’s work takes on its precise presence from the apparent dichotomy between the rigorous reduction of Minimalism and the seductive superficiality of Pop Art. 

Greg Bogin has employed a variety of techniques and media in his paintings, including high-quality car paint, with which he creates hallucinatory colour gradients and signal-like forms. An underlying irony persists, prompting reflection on the superficiality and profundity of contemporary visual languages. The vibrant, fluorescent hues and the geometric forms of the shaped canvases evoke the neon lights and signage that pervade the urban environment. The bold chromatic intensity conveys a sense of dynamic urbanity, verging on the nostalgic. In essence, the works represent a definitive marker of modernity after modernism. The works elicit a plethora of references and associations: elements reminiscent of 1960s retro science fiction, billboards, supermarket advertising signage, surfboards and the airbrush designs on the bonnets of American muscle cars are evoked through the painterly surfaces of Bogin’s works, collectively forming a comprehensive representation of Western pop culture. The artist’s vibrant abstract works inherit American Minimalism and present themselves as radiantly luminous meta-signs of an unconditional contemporaneity.

In his most recent works, the artist’s interest lies in exploring the conceptual possibilities of pristine geometric forms, which are subjected to either penetration or violation by holes, cut-outs and absent elements. This represents a challenge to the traditional notion of illusionism in painting. In excising portions of the painting, Bogin aims to engender a consciousness of the sculptural corporeality of the medium, thereby situating the work in an ambiguous space that oscillates between the categories of painting, relief, sculpture and object.

The exhibited works derive from a series of drawings created by the artist in Nevada during the winter of 2023. Excursions to the arid terrain of the state parks of Red Rock and Valley of Fire had a profound impact on the artist, who observed, “What particularly captured my attention were the cavernous formations carved into the rock by the relentless forces of wind and weather. I perceived the negative space created by these erosions to be as tangible and present as the surrounding rock formations, almost as if they were gateways or portals into another world.”

Greg Bogin, born in 1965 in New York, where he lives and works, is a seminal figure in the field of contemporary American abstraction. His studies at The Cooper Union School of Art established the foundation for his pioneering investigation into the geometric and chromatic possibilities of painting. He has been exhibiting internationally since the early 1990s, including at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; the Museum für konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich; Neues Museum Nuremberg; and the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, to name but a few. His oeuvre is represented in major public and private collections.