Adler Beatty is pleased to present Brian Thoreen: Minor Acts of Control in association with Galeria Mascota.
In Minor Acts of Control, Brian Thoreen exhibits a series of new works through which he explores the contradiction between minimalism’s promise of order and the truth: that materials misbehave. Thoreen douses plain sheets of manila paper glued to canvas, mapped out on the floor, with a mixture of wood glue and leaves them to cure under their own internal constraints. After accruing layers of carpenter’s glue, the surfaces of the paintings shrink and pucker to form a skin. Epidermal in appearance, they remain the product of manmade intervention. The compositions borrow their proportions from book pages and text blocks. Not merely a literary reference, but an acknowledgment that much of modernism was drafted on paper before it was built in the world. A study on objecthood and a celebration of the physical, these forms want to be disciplined, while the materials are not quite convinced.
Opposite these wall-works, capturing their reflections, Thoreen situates bronze sculptures referred to as “paperweights.” Each unique, the “paperweights” rest on stacks of the same manila paper they are asked to control. Their forms allude to the physical or biomorphic: two spheres both repel and attract one another like magnets, a spike juts mysteriously upward into open space, and petrified, glossy papers curl at their edges as if about to flutter away. These bronzes — made of a material typically so solid and purposeful — lose their identity, drifting between sculpture, functional design, and anachronistic office equipment. Imagining the analog 20th century not as nostalgia but as a physics experiment, these forms explore gravity, pressure, and the quiet authority of mass. Some shapes flirt with science fiction — vortices, wormholes — but ultimately settle closer to the mundane effort of keeping papers from slipping off a desk.
In conversation with Thoreen’s sculptures, works by Charlotte vander Borght, Marie Hazard, and Machteld Rullens aid the investigation of utilitarian materials: fiberglass, cardboard, and tire rubber. Confined by the manufactured forms of the materials yet expanding on their original function, these artists reinterpret the functionality of the base material, much like how these objects transform through routine use. In her sculptures, vander Borght replicates the erosion of painted surfaces of fiberglass subway benches from fictitious interaction, revealing patterns that feel at once deliberate and organic. Rullens redefines the lifespan and character of cardboard by reconfiguring it into glossy, geometric compositions. Tires are worn by their contact with the road and, in turn, leave traces through their environment. Hazard reweaves shreds of rubber to form fringed textile hangings. These quotidian objects respond to their environment, their continuity altered by the intervention of the artist’s hand.