ART CITIES:Shanghai-Josh Sperling

Josh Sperling has been spending lockdown with his family at home in Ithaca, New York, where he also works. He is known for his shaped canvases painted with saturated colors, which live in a space between sculpture and painting. Sperling’s distinct visual vocabulary has made him a rising talent to watch these past few years.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Perrotin Gallery Archive

Josh Sperling draws on the language of minimalist painting from the 1960s and 1970s, working primarily with shaped canvases. He crafts intricate plywood supports over which canvas is stretched and painted in an extending series of signature palettes. In their three-dimensionality, his works blur the lines between painting and sculpture, image and object. Mining a wide range of sources, from design to art history, Sperling has crafted a unique visual vocabulary remarkable for its expressive quality and irrepressible energy. While Sperling’s shaped canvases and bright colors may call to mind the work of Frank Stella, the technical intricacy of construction at play in these pieces also recalls the combination and finesse found within landmark architecture and design, the high-minded modernist Mies van der Rohe meets the self-consciously collaged and vernacular-leaning forms of Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group*. “Paradise” Sperling’s largest exhibition to date, introduces numerous innovations to his honed repertoire. Sperling here announces both formal and technical developments that signal a bold and exciting direction. New to this exhibition—the addition of stylistic treatments and, in some occurrences, the stark removal of all color, a gesture that reveals the shaped forms in their natural states. On display throughout the exhibition is a range of Sperling’s recurrent forms” “Squiggles”, “Composites” and “Double Bubbles”. The series “Squiggles”, as the name denotes are canvases that resemble large scale doodles but constructed with a beguiling sense of complexity. From large looping cursives to a series of gestural undulations in multiple colors. “Composites” mark the meeting point of many of Sperling’s forms. Here, clusters of shaped canvases nestle in and over each other, jostling for position and calling our attention from all directions. Sperling treats each panel with a different color or textural application, resulting in a riot of divergent forms. In “Fried Paradise” or “Muh-Chaz-Ih-Me-Oh”, Sperling unveils a brand new texture to several canvases within the mix that is reminiscent of industrially treated “hammered enamel” forms. This painted effect magically transforms each pliable canvas into a seemingly hardened fabricated material. Additionally and throughout the show, Sperling also introduces a new visually expressive motif that channels the aesthetic spirit of the midcentury American Abstract Expressionist movement. Elsewhere in the show are distinct formations of “Double Bubbles” small dumb-bell shaped tiered canvases arranged to form larger geometric structures. In certain instances, these double bubbles appear in strict square grids that recall minimal art, and in others Sperling debuts new circular mandala-like arrangements. Throughout these forms on display, Sperling experiments with minimal tones, gradients, and also the entire removal of color. Without tones, the viewer is left to examine the formalist puzzle-like ingenuity of the component constructions without interruption.

* In the early 80s, Italian designer and architect Ettore Sottsass founded Memphis, a group of artists and designers who became known for their bright and bold furniture design. Although many people ridiculed their work, the Memphis group were groundbreaking. Their use of clashing colours, haphazard arrangements and brightly coloured plastic laminate was previously unseen. At the time, objects were usually designed to be functional, not decorative. Memphis changed this with a more creative approach to design, where they poked fun at every day objects by designing them in a way that was unusual.

Photo: Josh Sperling, Sex on a Hammock, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, acrylic on panel, hammered enamel on panel, 154 × 227.3 cm, © Josh Sperling, Courtesy the artist and Perrotin Gallery

Info: Perrotin Gallery, 3/F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, Duration: 10/11/2020-16/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com