Rental Gallery is pleased to present Abstracted, a group exhibition of paintings by Angela Heisch, Neil Raitt, and Joey Wolf. Moving through different variations of representation, the work of these three artists complicates traditional boundaries of figuration and abstraction.

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Coy and playful, the non-objective works of the New York-based Angela Heisch present minimalist systems of repeated forms. Spheres and quadrants provide a structuring motif the artist complicates through humorous dashes of anthropomorphism. Through slight variations in shade and hue, Heisch creates a tension between depth and surface—trapping the eye in a taut circuit throughout these tentative, idealized paintings.

Approaching the history of landscape painting through abstracting levels of repetition, the English, Los Angeles-based artist Neil Raitt presents a series of patterned compositions in which the populist style of Bob Ross is repeated ad nauseam. The result is hallucinatory and hypnotic. Raitt’s exacting brushwork obscures the once clear border between landscape and patterned fields of abstraction.  

Joey Wolf’s portraits of his friends and acquaintances call back to the history of salon painting. Rich and delicately textured, and monumental in scale, the paintings elevate contemporary culture to that of the European court. Wolf abstracts the subject matter of the present day, examining it through the lens of history. The result is something both distancing and magnifying.

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