Teo Gonzalez, 'Two Hills'

Two Hills

Teo Gonzalez

Two Hills

By Teo Gonzalez

February 29 –

March 30, 2024

Two Hills

Spanierman Modern is very pleased to announce the first exhibition in more than 7 years of paintings by the Spanish-born Post-Minimalist artist Teo Gonzalez.

Post-Minimalism, a term coined by the art historian and critic Robert PincusWitten, refers to a general reaction by artists in America, beginning in the late 1960s, against Minimalism and its insistence on closed, geometric forms. Minimalist art of the 1960s and 70s sought to make art that eschewed metaphor, political, and social meaning. Purely self-referential, Minimalism aimed to reduce art to a purely aesthetic experience where material and form replaced content. The work pointed only to its own making, materiality, and visual matter.

Abstract Expressionism, the movement against which Minimalists were reacting, was practiced by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, and was concerned with emotion and the gesture. Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin, by contrast, sought to remove the hand of the artist and presented objects that used industrial and synthetic materials and the seriality of shapes.

González calls up these two art historical movements. True to Minimalism, his paintings are self-referential. Certainly, when observing his works, the viewer is forced first to consider the process of its production and is overwhelmed by its visual field. However, in the tradition of gestural painting, González’ hand is present in the work. The irregularities seem almost primordial and intuitive, and they enliven and free the painting’s surface.

“As for how I see art making, I think the qualities of one's work depend on a number of factors other than our own intentions, and I also think that walking the line where styles separate is a way to open roads into unexplored territories.”

Teo found and developed his signature style at the end of 1990. For more than thirty years, he has relied on the grid as the foundation for all of his work, building layers of carefully plotted individual cells filled with drops of color. The

result is a topography of undulating patterns and glistening surfaces. His work is bright, colorful, intense, abstract, and precise. In his paintings, one can also see a link to movements such as Op Art, Pointillism, and Abstraction among others.

González’ surface is a testament to his process: a methodical, perhaps painstaking, creation of concentric “stains” repeating themselves across the canvas. The painting becomes its meaning - a treatise on disciplined repetition and the nature of the paint itself. However, despite González’ refusal to ascribe a message to his work, viewers may find a reference to nature in the painting’s undulating membranes and perhaps even to the human body where moving nuclei follow arterial pathways. In his own words:

Current public collections:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Achenbach Foundation Fine Art Museum, San Francisco, CA

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM

The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL

IAACC Museo Pablo Serrano, Zaragoza, Spain

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul, Turkey

Museo de Dibujo de Larrés, Sabiñánigo, Spain

Museo de Grabado Contemporaneo de Fuentetodos, Zaragoza, Spain

University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA

Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME

Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville TN

Gabarrón Foundation, New York, NY

The Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, NY

Sala Robayera, Miengo, Spain

Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM

Thoma Foundation, Santa Fe, NM

Fifth Floor Foundation, Werner Kramarsky, New York, NY

Circa XX, Madrid, Spain

Dallas Price, Santa Monica, CA

Fundación JAPS, Mexico City, Mexico

The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH

The Neiman Marcus Collection, Garden City, NY

Gary Lee & Partners, Chicago, IL

H. R. H. Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Koro Corporation, Bucheon City, So. Korea

Liquidity, Okanagan Falls, BC, Canada

Rosewood Sand Hill, Menlo Park, CA

Stags Leap, Napa, CA

Arch: Horizon - Double Hill 6, 2017, Acrylic on canvas. 14 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso.

Untitled #674, 2015, Acrylic on canvas over board, 72 x 60 inches, Signed, titled, and dated on the verso.

One

Hill 2, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso.

Pink Panther, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Red Hill, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

One Hill 1, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 1, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 3, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 48 1/2 x 36 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 4, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 5, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 6, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

One

Hill 1, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 2, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Two Hills 7, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Cypress Hill, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 14 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Arch Horizon - Hill 8, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, Signed, titled, dated on the verso

Teo Gonzalez

Teo Gonzalez was born in Quinto, a small town in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1964. Teo had always been drawn to photography, design, and whatever other twodimensional types of artistic expression there might be, but it was not until he was twenty years old that it became evident to him that he was a painter.

At the end of 1990, he developed his signature style -- works consisting of thousands of drops of water arranged into a grid pattern, inside which a small amount of ink or enamel was dropped and left to dry. He moved to Southern California the following year. Within a month, he produced 3036 Gotas de Tint — his first piece to ever enter a museum’s permanent collection, when it was acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He had his first show at a professional art gallery in San Francisco in 1996 and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in art from California State University in 1997. Two years later, he moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he currently lives and works. Although the use of the pictorial field and exploration of color in his work draws comparisons to Abstract Expressionists such as Rothko and Pollock, his grids and working process recall Minimalists such as Agnes Martin and Sol Lewitt. For more than twenty-five years, he has relied on the grid to serve as the foundation for his work, building layers of carefully plotted cells. The result is a topography of undulating patterns and glistening surfaces.

To make an appointment, please contact the gallery at info@spaniermanmodern.com, or via telephone at 212-249-0619.

Please visit our website at www.spaniermanmodern.com to explore more of our collection.

Our gallery is located at 958 Madison Ave., 2nd floor, New York, NY, 10021.

Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10-6.