July 20, 2017
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This summer group show offers an inspiring reminder of how broad the creative field can be even within a narrow formal stricture. As the title promises, every one of the 22 wall-mounted works by mostly famous names is organized around horizontal lines. But otherwise they vary enormously. The works include Serge Poliakoff’s 1937 gouache “Bandes Colorées,” which runs through nine colored stripes from red to violet and back to yellow again, and Juan Uslé’s nine-foot-tall, overpoweringly handsome 2017 painting “Soñe Que Revelabas (Missouri),” which mostly consists of black-andverdigris-colored vertical strokes.
Matthew Wong’s oil “Last Summer in Santa Monica,” a browner take on Poliakoff’s rainbow, becomes a hazy summer sunset with the addition of a tiny white V for a gliding sea gull, while Hiroshi Sugimoto performs an opposite transformation with his nocturnal photo “Baltic Sea, Rügen,” which looks like a somber, two-tone study of the color black.
But what’s still more interesting is the way the context of all these other stripes opens up the show’s two Agnes Martins, especially her six-foot-square “Untitled #5,” which is hung next to a tall, rectangular Louise Fishman painting called “Bitter Herb.” Only after noticing the way Ms. Fishman’s six dark bands of color seem to roll constantly upward did I appreciate, for the first time, the genius of Martin’s square. Its own six creamy-gray bands, divided by narrower lines of darker gray, held my gaze, buoyant and bodiless, in place.