[Exhibition]
Beyond the Frame: Spatial Composition After Lucio Fontana

About This Event

In 1949, the Italian painter Lucio Fontana began taking a knife to his paintings, stabbing and slashing through the stretched canvas. Through this act of creative destruction, Fontana sought to free painting from the traditional limitation of its frame and symbolically opened it into the great beyond of universal space. In recognition of the fifty year anniversary of Fontana’s premier in the United States, Contemporary Wing is pleased to present BEYOND THE FRAME, opening Saturday, September 8th 2012, which will juxtapose Fontana’s canvases with the work of three emerging artists, recent MICA graduates, Micheal Cor, Toym Imao and Ali Miller, who also fashion objects that go over, behind and beyond the frame of traditional painting. The show will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog, with interpretive essays written by Mike Maizels, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Virginia and a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.

While Fontana opened painting to the transcendent space of the universe, Micheal Cor seeks to enlarge painting to embrace the discarded remains of industry and culture. Ali Miller’s paintings break loose of their frames as the psychic barriers between subject, object and fantasy begin to unravel and Toym Imao uses his canvases as artifacts waiting to receive the force of his exploding effigy-monuments. In the work of these artists, the threshold between painting and sculpture serves as a framework for investigating the relationship between material and place, idea and object, history and potential.

We are also extremely pleased to present a number of featured events in conjunction with the exhibition:

Beginning at 5:30pm, Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, an Adjunct Professor of Music Theory at George Washington University, will premier Spatial Composition, an original quartet written in response to the works in this exhibition. A CD recording of the piece will be bundled with the exhibition catalog for $10.

Artist Toym Imao will present the first pubic detonation of one of his signature effigies. Imao will be blowing up an effigy of the artist Damien Hirst, filled with rhinestones in homage to Hirst’s infamous diamond-encrusted sculpture: