The Beautiful Room is Empty, June 29 – August 31, 2025
Steven Stewart, Guest Curator
Opening: Sunday, June 29, 2025
A yawn is just a silent shout, and Minimalism has always yearned to yell into the void with a quiet voice, a revolutionary formal language that’s like a vampire; it cannot be killed and will never die. This reductive dialect came to the fore on the heels of Abstract Expressionism in a desperate attempt to separate itself from the inward looking artist.
RecRoom’s inaugural exhibition will be presented in tandem with a show at Freight+Volume gallery in New York City featuring the same artists in a larger iteration. These exhibitions will bring into dialogue artists working in the Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles, New York, and North Carolina.
The Beautiful Room is Empty explores the politics of aesthetics, and how deep meaning can be found in near absence. Frank Stella was exhausted from his work being accused of cold intellectualism, as if his lack of brushwork was somehow evidence of apathy or insincerity, when in fact he simply found a different kind of struggle. Stella's stripes are the paths of brushstrokes on canvas–they lead only into painting. He was simply trying to discover the right words to say the best things. This exhibition strives to emphasize, with panache, this literal approach to art-making and the materials that facilitate it.
The works on view swerve playfully amongst the personal, the subversive, and the political. Minimalism as an “ism” is a declaration, and remains so. It's not a fad, but an ethos, a way of making concrete sense of a convoluted world in the way art always has. Moreover, the intention here is to emphasize the way art can interface with a beautiful room: how art, design, architecture, and domesticity can integrate in an exciting, human way. It is imperfectly perfect, a grid laid over a society that is at best a mess, if not mostly interesting. Derek Franklin takes on cast concrete; Jessica Sanders fondles wax; Michael Rey introduces ceramic paintings; Peter Gronquist flirts with photography; Math Bass deploys a playful reductive visual language; Terry Haggerty tests the limits of his self-imposed constraints; Sylvan Lionni continues his indefatigable pursuit of challenging his super heroes; and Jim Lee does the same. It’s a congregation of weirdos doing unexpected things in an unexpected gallery. Everything leads back to the grid. Please join us as we take on the matrix with fashionable eyewear.
Steven Stewart, May 2025
Guest Curator