Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II

Catalogue essay by Molly Warnock

April 22 – June 15, 2023

MAX ESTENGER’S ABSTRACTION

by Molly Warnock

It’s the color that catches the eye. Disposed in two upright bands—one wide, one narrow—the deep blue runs the full height of the over-life-size painting. Uniformly matte and homogeneously applied, the vinyl emulsion medium appears, from a distance, to open onto impersonal depth, the intense ultramarine hue at once expanding and receding in perception. Particularly in the larger of the two color blocks, the effect brings to mind certain monochromes by Yves Klein, conceived by their author as portals to the immaterial.

The painting nonetheless holds that illusion firmly in check. Decisive in this respect are the two nonpainted stripes that appear toward the right, dividing the blue zones, and along the left lateral edge, inviting inspection of the work’s unframed, fully exposed profile. In each Max Estenger, Blue, 2020. Photograph by Jason Mandella. © Max Estenger case, one sees clearly that the support has been built up from five distinct, vertically stacked panels: Three are composed of stretched canvas on wood; a fourth, the second from the top, comprises transparent vinyl atop a wooden stretcher; and a fifth, the second from the bottom, has been fabricated from stainless steel on wood. Running perpendicular to the nonpainted bands, and interrupting the blue field from within, the horizontal joins between these panels introduce another order of drawing, one generated in depth by the material enchainment of the component parts. And indeed, we now see, the color itself has a decidedly literal heft, as revealed in cross-section by the extraordinarily precise edges—produced by masking—where the paint layer abuts a nonpainted area of canvas, steel, or clear vinyl. Viewed from the front, the selectively revealed stretcher mediates between this chromatically striking surface and the workmanlike physicality of the whole, carrying the eye into and through the painting to the wall behind it.

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Installation view, Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II. Photograph by Vivian Doering.

By Max Estenger’s own estimation, Blue, 2020, stands at the origin of the new works gathered in these pages. Exhibited in two successive presentations—at Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, in January and February 2023 and at Pazo Fine Art, Kensington, from April to June of the same year—the paintings range in dimensions and formats, including strongly horizontal and vertical constructions as well as perfect squares. All deploy the same basic vocabulary of differing panel-types and vinyl emulsion paint, and many, like Blue, make unabashed reference to the artist’s longtime touchstones in postwar American art, from Barnett Newman’s zip compositions and the revealed supports of color field painting to Donald Judd’s objects and stack pieces with stainless steel and Carmen Herrera’s vibrant geometry. Yet they equally affirm a distinctive sensibility grounded in Estenger’s unwavering commitment to the continued possibilities of abstraction.

Estenger first outlined the fundaments of this practice over thirty years ago, on the occasion of the exhibition After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial. Held at the Tomoko Liguori Gallery in New York in the fall of 1991, in the wake of an acclaimed Ad Reinhardt retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,1 the group show was Estenger’s first exhibition in the city. Then aged twenty-seven, he had completed his MFA at the University of California Installation view, Max Estenger at Steffany Martz Gallery, NYC. Photograph by Jason Mandella.

San Diego and moved east just three years prior. The youngest participant in a remarkable intergenerational lineup that included Robert Ryman, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Alan Uglow, and Karin Sander, among other artists working in a highly reduced, non-representational vein, he also served (alongside writer Meg O’Rourke) as one of two authors of the accompanying catalogue, penning the eponymous essay.2

1.

2.

Ad Reinhardt, The Museum of Modern Art, June 1 – September 2, 1991. Opening nearly a quarter-century after Reinhardt’s death, the full-career survey was the painter’s first in a major museum.

Max Estenger, “After Reinhardt.” After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial (New York, 1991): 3-8. All quotes in the next two paragraphs are from this source.

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At the crux of that account are the Black Paintings Reinhardt painted between 1953 and his death in 1967. Estenger corrects Reinhardt’s oft-repeated assertion that his austere compositions are ultimate statements, declaring them the end of “a tradition in painting”—but not, significantly, the end of painting.

Rather, they close what Estenger terms the “behind the frame tradition” of illusionistic images held at a reserve from real space. Yet the essay suggests that this terminus had proved a springboard of another sort, enabling the emergence of a new tendency—Estenger calls it “critical abstract painting”—that fully embraced literalness.

Ad Reinhardt, Black Paintings, 1960s. Photograph by Suzanne deChillo. © The New York Times

Two considerations were of particular importance: “the painting support and the relationship of that support to the wall.” Critical abstract painting did not seek to absorb the beholder in an encompassing visual field, as the outsize formats of abstract expressionist or color field painting had so often appeared to do. But neither did it assent to the widespread assumption that minimalism had rendered the medium obsolete. Rather, it sought a new

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“objectness” for painting, often deploying unconventional industrial materials for the substrate and in many cases laying bare the banal hardware used to affix the artwork to the wall.

(Ryman, unsurprisingly, is credited as the innovator of the latter tendency.) Calling attention to the material processes of the painting’s manufacture and display, critical abstract painting underscored that object’s emplacement in real space and time.

Included in After Reinhardt was a painting from Estenger’s first major body of work in New York, the SeeThrough Paintings, which he produced between 1990 and 1992. Now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Red See-Through Painting, 1991, is an emblematic instance. A life-size (sixty-by-sixty-inch) square, the rigorously symmetrical structure suggests two horizontal halves of a single chassis, each covered by a tautly stretched thickness of clear vinyl, prised apart to make space for two small, block-like canvases painted in the title color and pushed to the lateral peripheries. Miniature monochromes, the twinned red surfaces nod to a dominant tendency in reductive abstraction. Far from appearing as stand-alone gestures at the end of painting, however, these monochromes are but parts in a more complex whole. Bookending the horizontal void at the heart of the painting, they dramatize the act of “seeing through” to the wall on which the work depends. That act is both restaged and complicated by the upper and lower registers, where the shiny vinyl simultaneously reveals the underlying stretcher and reflects the ambient light—a double operation evident in a photograph showing Red See-Through Painting at an oblique angle, struck by the shifting illumination through a nearby window.

Max Estenger, Red See-Though Painting, 1991. Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Photograph by David Horii

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Acknowledging the continued fecundity of this early group for Estenger’s current work, the installation at Pazo Fine Art included Blue See-Through Painting, 1992, a slightly later and even larger iteration measuring eighty inches square. And indeed, each of the recent paintings also contains at least one panel composed of a transparent vinylcovered wooden stretcher. (By contrast, a handful of works notably lack stainless steel panels, suggesting the latter remain a more discretionary element.) One might nonetheless observe two key changes. First, the stretchers have shrunken and narrowed, becoming predominantly linear elements.

Second, none of the stretchers is fully revealed. On the contrary, as in Blue, 2020, the overlying vinyl is always at least partly obscured by paint. Where the See-Through Paintings promise transparency, the new work offers a more complicated visual weave of overlying and undergirding elements.

This plays out differently from one construction to the next, but certain effects recur. In those paintings with narrow bands of raw canvas—Blue and its direct descendants—the revealed bars of the stretcher consistently run perpendicular to, and visibly beneath, the nonpainted bands that expose them, yielding the impression of intersecting and overlapping axes in different spatial planes. Yellow, 2022, evinces a particular twist: There, Estenger has “completed” the nonpainted band bisecting the painted field by introducing an additional wooden segment into the inset stretcher.

The vertical band appears now over (in the

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Installation view, Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II. Photograph by Vivian Doering.

case of the raw canvas), now under (in the case of the wooden segment)—either atop or beneath the horizontal bounds of the stretcher running the width of the work but revealed only at its center.

Max Estenger, Black, 2023. Photograph by Jason Mandella. © Max Estenger

Then there is the tendency of the stainless steel panels to alternately recede or advance in perception relative both to the painted color and the nonpainted canvas. Consider Black, 2023. In the painting’s lower right, an exposed band of steel registers, paradoxically, as crossing atop the raw canvas immediately above and below it (and, of course, literally flush with it), only to pass beneath the vertical black bands to either side, both in appearance and in fact. Surfacing and submerging anew, the steel band suggests a grid braided in three dimensions. In the painting’s upper half, meanwhile, a revealed length of the stretcher subtending the second panel traverses the same band of exposed canvas; two evenly spaced additional wooden segments set up another play of fully material horizontal and vertical axes just below the surface of that stripe in real space. (And this is to say nothing of the shadow drawing thrown by those elements on the wall behind: a fugitive third lattice.) Together Max Estenger, Yellow, 2022. Photograph by Jason Mandella. © Max Estenger

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these carefully calibrated effects invest Black with a sculptural thickness previously denied painting by the high modernist emphasis on sheer opticality—even as they retain and in fact exploit a degree of painterly illusionism inherent in the visual push-pull of contrasting colors and surface textures.

Estenger has always insisted that transparency, in his work, is not a strictly formal quality but carries ethical and political connotations, as well. This idea has a long and complex history in modernism, particularly in architecture. What is perhaps most notable about Estenger’s recent paintings is their explicit acknowledgment of an inevitable opacity or reserve bound in the density and resistance of things. In retrospect, this was always already implicit in the See-Through Paintings, both in the obdurate, block-like monochromes and in the occasional glare that rendered visual access to the painting’s upper and lower armatures less than absolute. Estenger’s new works embrace that finitude as the very grounds of painting’s continued vitality.

Molly Warnock, May 2023

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PLATES

Blue, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, steel and clear vinyl (five joined panels) 77 1/4 x 43 in (196.2 x 109.2 cm)

Gray, 2022 Vinyl emulsion on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 77 1/4 x 43 in (196.2 x 109.2 cm)

Yellow, 2022 Vinyl emulsion on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 77 1/4 x 43 in (196.2 x 109.2 cm)

Green, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas and clear vinyl (five joined panels) 55 x 55 in (139.7 x 139.7 cm)

Black, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 70 x 70 in (177.8 x 177.8 cm)

Blue, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (three joined panels) 70 x 110 in (177.8 x 279.4 cm)

Red, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas and clear vinyl (five joined panels) 89 x 110 in (226.1 x 279.4 cm)

Yellow & Black, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 90 x 120 in (228.6 x 304.8 cm)

Blue, 2022 Vinyl emulsion on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 40 x 20 in (101.6 x 50.8 cm)

White, 2022 Vinyl emulsion on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 40 x 20 in (101.6 x 50.8 cm)

Blue & White, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (three joined panels) 14 1/8 x 30 in (35.9 x 76.2 cm)

Red and White, 2022 Oil and acrylic on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (three joined panels) 16 1/4 x 24 in (41.3 x 61 cm)

Orange, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (three joined panels) 36 1/8 x 48 in (91.8 x 121.9 cm)

Pink and White, 2023 Vinyl emulsion paint on canvas, clear vinyl and stainless steel (five joined panels) 36 1/4 x 24 in (92.1 x 61 cm)

INSTALLATION VIEWS

THE ARTIST

MAX ESTENGER b. 1963, Los Angeles, California

Max Estenger received his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. He has been living and working in New York City since 1988.

For the past three decades, Max Estenger has been developing new possibilities for abstraction.

Utilizing a rigorous formal language as the driving force, his painted objects are involved in conversation with art history and the ongoing dialogue with the various parameters of abstract painting—formal, material and ideological.

Estenger’s work brings together a visual clarity, integrity and moral dimension with a toughminded tenacity fusing a serious study of direct experience with aesthetic gratification.

Estenger’s mines disparate materials—raw canvas, stainless steel, clear vinyl and wood panels—to create multi-paneled works. The resulting interplay of surface, structure and color refine certain aspects of his practice while celebrating paint and color as never before in his work.

Polarities such as hard/soft, opaque/transparent, painted/unpainted, matte/glossy, inside/outside, actual/virtual, etc. abound and become the content of the work.

Like ‘the simple expression of complex thought,’ as the minimalist Donald Judd once said, Estenger takes on not only the compounding history of minimalism and hard-edge abstraction, but also its serialization and ubiquitous past. This is cutting-edge painting for the 21st Century.

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Photograph by Joko Weyland ©Max Estenger

“I have always thought that abstraction was as epochal as Renaissance illusionism and if that tradition could last 500 years or so, abstraction could yield at least 200 years. We are in abstraction’s second century and I see no reason why interesting, fresh, and inventive work can’t still come from what started in 1912.”

– Max Estenger in conversation with Matthew Deleget 2017

His most recent exhibition was a group of new paintings at Norte Maar in 2017, which came after his mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson AZ in 2016 curated by Jocko Weyland.

Fully-illustrated catalogues were published on both occasions. His work was recently acquired and exhibited for the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2016.

ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS

2023

Max Estenger New Paintings Part 2, Pazo Fine Arts, Kensington , MD Max Estenger New Paintings, Steffany Martz, New York

2017

Max Estenger New Paintings, Norte Maar, Brooklyn, New York (cat)

2016

Max Estenger 1991-2016, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona (cat)

2014

Max Estenger: Digital, rumba, Santa Monica, California Max Estenger New Paintings, John Molloy Gallery, New York, New York (cat)

1998

Max Estenger Watching Forever, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, New York

1997

Max Estenger Headquarters, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, New York

1995

Max Estenger OSHA Paintings, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, New York

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2022

Framing The Stretcher, Mizuma & Kips, New York (curated by Gwenael Kerlidou) A Precedes B, David Richard Gallery, New York

2021

The Neo & The Geo: New Painting Forms 1986-1995, Pazo Fine Art, Kensington, MD. (curated

by Paul Corio) (cat)

2016

Learning to See Color, Vicki Myhren Gallery University of Denver, Colorado Ways and Means, Norte Maar @ 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York City (curated by Jason Andrew) Geometries, John Molloy Gallery, New York

2006

Minimalism, I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, California (curated by Mat Gleason)

2001

Anymore, Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut (curated by David Borawski)

2000

Latent, Limelight Gallery, New York (curated by Eduardo Casares) Goodbye, Farewell, So Long, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York

1998

Sofa Not Included, gallery: untitled, Dallas, Texas

1997

Chelsea, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York

1996

The Future Last Forever, Steffany Martz Gallery, New York

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1995

Other Rooms, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York Pleasant Pebble, The Work Space, New York (curated by Mary Jones)

1994

Group Show, American Fine Arts Co., New York Cuban Presences, Vista Gallery, New York (with Carmen Herrera) 20th Anniversary Exhibition Part III, Artists Space, New York We Destroy the Family, The Greene Street Project, 34.5 Greene Street, New York

1993

DIATRIBE, Tomoko Liguori Gallery, New York What To Say What Not To Say, Achim Kubinski Gallery, New York Art-Quake! Art After Post-Modernism and Other Natural Disasters, 450 Gallery, New York

1992

Behind Bars, Thread Waxing Space, New York (curated by Meg O’Rourke) (cat) Pushing Painting, Stark Gallery, New York

1991

After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial, Tomoko Liguori Gallery, New York (cat)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jenkins, Mark, “In The Galleries: Artists Illustrate the Evolving Principles of Geometric Principles,” The Washington Post, October 22, 2022, p. E5 (photo) Regan, Margaret, “Abstraction and Reality,” Tuscon Weekly, March 24, 2016 (photo) Weyland, Jocko, “Max Estenger: The Thing in Actuality,” in Max Estenger, exhibition catalogue (Tucson: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, 2016) 44 pp.

Cohen, Joyce, “A Bed and An Easel Under One Roof,” New York Times, October 11, 2015 (photo) Turner, Douglas, “Studio Visit: Max Estenger,” The Architecture of Tomorrow, March 2, 2014, 4 pp. (photo) Rose Smith, Audrey, “Max Estenger: New Paintings at John Molloy,” Out of Order, March 2014 (photo) Weyland, Jocko, “Max Estenger Interviewed by Jocko Weyland,” in Max Estenger New Paintings, exhibition catalogue (New York: John Molloy Gallery, 2014), 28 pp.

Finch, Charlie, “The Return of Max Estenger,” artnet, March 20, 2008.

Brian-Picard, Claude & Antoine Perrot, La Couleur Importée (Readymade Color) (Paris: POSITIONS & MCA, 2002) pp. 69-72 (photo) Ferree, Joel, “Artist in Residence,” Time Out New York, May 4-11, 2000, pp. 18-19 (photo) Mitchell, Charles Dee, “Showing What’s Current, Two Galleries Can Electrify,” The Dallas Morning News, December 22, 1998, pp. 34, 37.

Morgan, Robert C., “Max Estenger: Watching Forever at Steffany Martz,” Review, Nov. 1, 1998.

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Fend, Peter, “Max Estenger at Steffany Martz,” artnet, May 21, 1997.

Moody, Tom, “New York Reviews,” Artforum, November 1997, p. 117 (photo) Drolet, Owen, “Flash Art Reviews,” Flash Art, October 1997, pp. 115-116 (photo) Crane, Darren, “Max Estenger: Emerging New York Art Star,” COAGULA #28, Summer 1997 pp. 38, 66.

Johnson, Richard, “Godless Art,” New York Post, April 28, 1997, p. 8.

“Critics Pick, OSHA Safety Colors,” Time Out New York Nov. 1-8, 1995, p. 26 (photo) Jacques, Alison, “DI A TRIBE,” Flash Art, March-April 1994, p. 63 (photo) Morgan, Robert, C., “The New Endgame,” in After the Deluge: Essays on Art in the 90s, (New York: Red Bass Publications, 1993), pp. 62-67 (photo) Crane, Darren, “Art Quake,” COVER, April 1993, p. 17 (photo) Estenger, Max, “Innovation After Post-Modernism,” Tema Celeste, Summer 1992, p. 21 (photo) Myers, Terry R., “After Reinhardt,” (review) Tema Celeste, January-March 1992, pp. 115-116.

Morgan, Robert, C., “The New Endgame,” Tema Celeste, January-March 1992, pp. 65-69 (photo) O’Rourke, Meg, “Behind Bars,” in Behind Bars, exhibition catalogue, (New York: Thread Waxing Space 1992), pp. 2-32 (photo) Faust, Gretchen, “New York in Review,” Arts Magazine, December 1991, pp. 84-85.

New York Galleries, Flash Art, November-December 1991, p. 153 (photo) Estenger, Max, “After Reinhardt,” in After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial, exhibition catalogue (New York: Tomoko Liguori Gallery, 1991), pp. 3-8.

Estenger, Max, “John Baldessari,” PCN, May-June 1991, pp. 69-70 Estenger, Max & Meg O’Rourke, “Alan Charlton,” Arts Magazine, April 1991, p. 74.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II 22 April - 15 June, 2023 Essay © 2023 Molly Warnock Designed by Jesús Balza Printed in Chicago, Illinois Photographs by Jason Mandella and Vivian Doering Cover: Blue, 2023 © Max Estenger We would like to thank Molly Warnock for the contribution of her insightful essay. We are especially grateful to Michael Abrams, Jesús Balza, Vivian Doering, Steffany Martz, Ariel Martinez, Jason Mandella, and Max Estenger for their unwavering support in the production of this exhibition.

Pazo Fine Art 4228 Howard Ave Kensington, Maryland 20895 info@pazofineart.com www.pazofineart.com © 2023 Pazo Fine Art All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any forms or by any means, electrical, mechanical, or otherwise, without firts seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made this seek permission to reproduce the images in this catalogue. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

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