Teo Gonzalez 'Two Hills'

Two Hills, an exhibition of recent paintings by Teo Gonzalez
February 29- March 30, 2024

Spanierman Modern is very pleased to announce the first exhibition in more than 7 years of paintings by the Spanish born Post-Minimalist artist Teo Gonzalez.  

Post-Minimalism, a term coined by the art historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten, refers to a general reaction by artists in America, beginning in the late 1960s, against Minimalism and its insistence on closed, geometric forms.  Minimalist art of the 1960s and 70s sought to make art that eschewed metaphor, political, and social meaning. Purely self-referential, Minimalism aimed to reduce art to a purely aesthetic experience where material and form replaced content. The work pointed only to its own making, materiality, and visual matter.

Abstract Expressionism, the movement against which Minimalists were reacting, was practiced by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, and was concerned with emotion and the gesture. Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin, by contrast, sought to remove the hand of the artist and presented objects that used industrial and synthetic materials and the seriality of shapes. 

González calls up these two art historical movements. True to Minimalism, his paintings are self-referential. Certainly, when observing his works, the viewer is forced first to consider the process of its production and is overwhelmed by its visual field. However, in the tradition of gestural painting, González’ hand is present in the work. The irregularities seem almost primordial and intuitive, and they enliven and free the painting’s surface.  

In his own words:
“As for how I see art making, I think the qualities of one's work depend on a number of factors other than our own intentions, and I also think that walking the line where styles separate is a way to open roads into unexplored territories.”

Teo found and developed his signature style at the end of the 1990. For more than thirty years, he has relied on the grid for the foundation for all of his work, building layers of carefully plotted individual cells filled with drops of color. The result is a topography of undulating patterns and glistening surfaces. His work is bright, colorful, intense, abstract, and precise. In his paintings, one can also see a link to movements such as Op Art, Pointillism, Abstraction among others. 
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González’ surface is a testament to his process: a methodical, perhaps painstaking, creation of concentric “stains” repeating themselves across the canvas. The painting becomes its meaning - a treatise on disciplined repetition and the nature of paint itself. However, despite González’ refusal to ascribe a message to his work, viewers may find a reference to nature in the painting’s undulating membranes and perhaps even to the human body where moving nuclei follow arterial pathways.

Current public collections:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Achenbach Foundation Fine Art Museum, San Francisco, CA
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL
IAACC Museo Pablo Serrano, Zaragoza, Spain
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
Museo de Dibujo de Larrés, Sabiñánigo, Spain
Museo de Grabado Contemporaneo de Fuentetodos, Zaragoza, Spain
University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA
Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
Vanderbilt Univiersity Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville TN
Gabarrón Foundation, New York, NY
The Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, NY
Sala Robayera, Miengo, Spain
Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM
Thoma Foundation, Santa Fe, NM
Fifth Floor Foundation, Werner Kramarsky, New York, NY
Circa XX, Madrid, Spain
Dallas Price, Santa Monica, CA
Fundación JAPS, Mexico City, Mexico
The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH
The Neiman Marcus Collection, Garden City, NY
Gary Lee & Partners, Chicago, IL
H. R. H. Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud, Jedda, Saudy Arabia
Koro Corporation, Bucheon City, So. Korea
Liquidity, Okanagan Falls, BC, Canada
Rosewood Sand Hill, Menlo Park, CA
Stags Leap, Napa, CA