Exhibition: May 31-July 16, 2004
Reception: Thursday, June 3, 6-9 p.m.

NEW YORK – Globe Institute Gallery is pleased to present Altamira, an exhibition of sculptures and collages by Sue Karnet. On view will be twelve sculptures and six collages executed between 2002 and 2004. All works are occupied primarily with abstract and geometric imagery through three- or two-dimensional surfaces. This is Globe Institute Gallery's first solo exhibition of sculpture.

The abstract sculptural pieces of Karnet draw upon a repertoire of the formal elements of Robert Morris, Elizabeth Murray, and Anish Kapoor. Disk-like in form and about a foot in diameter, these circular works not only usher a revision of the Minimalist legacy but present themselves as dialectical methods of color and sculpture defining and modifying each other through masses, volumes, geometric shapes, surfaces, imperfections and their receptions of light. A comment by Donald Judd regarding the place of color in the realm of sculpture is: “In a note of 1965 I wrote that form, which I don't like so much as a word, and color should be ‘intelligent' without being ordered.”¹

Broken Circle, plaster and paint, encircles an internal, negative space as it channels the void beyond the circumference of the sculptural entity. Pirate's Treasure is a disc in the center of which lies the letter ‘x' as a deep engraving. Surface and incision here grip light differently: while the exterior reflects light and reveals itself with a pure accessibility to vision, ‘x' subtracts accessibility from the sculpture, adding a pure void, a pure inaccessibility to first-hand vision. That void is enveloped by an inner skin—both materially and within the mind of the viewer. Altamira, a fully circular clay disc, contains three pictorial, circular, partial and congruent slices that meet each other tangentially, conjugating presence and absence, space and matter, eye and body, the optical and haptic.

The notable ink-on-paper works and collages of Sue Karnet articulate curvilinear and rectilinear shapes. While a few embrace luminosity and geometry as their optical subjects, others employ geometric elements in reference to vision and its organic self.

Regarding the purely formal and objective characteristics of this eloquent body of work, Karnet has stated:

In my work I am trying to reduce forms to their singularity and to discover their nature. I am also experimenting with the subsidiary meanings implied by adding idiosyncratic markings and/or "imperfections" to what I consider basic forms. In addition, each new location of my sculptures connotes something different. They are components seeking harmony with a new environment. Conversely, my collages depicting blocks in perspective are challenges to the canard of perspective. They are alter egos.

Sue Karnet received her B.F.A. with Honors from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1983, and her M.F.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1986. She has exhibited in New York at A.M. Sachs Gallery on 57th Street and The Bess Cutler Gallery in SoHo, and in Cairo, Egypt, where her teaching experience has had a decisive impact on her style.

Karnet's recent works have been exhibited at Williamsburg Art and Historical Center. The artist is currently based in New York and holds teaching positions at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.

This exhibition is curated by Raphy Sarkissian. For further information, please contact the gallery at 212.349.4330 extension 110 or the artist at suekarnet@earthlink.net.

Artist Link

¹See Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Artforum 32, no. 10 (summer 1994): 70-79, 110-14; and Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings: 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 181-89. See also Rosalind E. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 26. Laura Lisbon refers to these sources in “Donald Judd,” an essay in Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville, eds., As Painting: Division and Displacement (Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University; Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), pp. 119-122.