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Press Release

James Graham and Sons presents Color Climax, a group invitational exhibition featuring exuberantly polychromed painting, sculpture, hybrid forms and painted installations executed by contemporary American artists.
Color Climax associates working with color as jouissance: bliss and communion with the other, desired object, but a pleasure close to death.
George Bataille's petit mort, or "little death" (his word for orgasm) applies.
As does the death of the author: the subject enfolded and sublimated by color's intensities. Color Climax reveals artists using color crucially, as if in the throes of sexual response, they tend to shed formalities.
In Norman Bluhm's painting, floral and labial forms underline the sensuality of his electric pastels and silky wet paint. Sarah Braman also utilizes sexual metaphor in her mix of colliding or intertwined wedges that interlock drippily painted and hard plastic elements. Combining industrial paint with artist colors, Richmond Burton's knotted braid motif nets a tesserae of geometric forms flanked by silver banks. James Hyde's photographed spring fever of blossoms support roughly ruffled Day-Glo stepped interior rectangle.
Judy Ledgerwood's painted foyer in porn hot pink is overlaid with her own paintings and decorative patterns. Liz Marcus' psychedelic rainbows disguise period silhouettes. Rebecca Morris's darkish triangle debunks pictorial order as green and black gestures hustle the picture plane. Cordy Ryman's painted relief combines painting and sculpture, here its ascending red & silver geometric trellis straddles a corner. Amy Sillman's rectangle of variegated pastel hues depicts a coitus of brushy slaps. A contemporary of Norman Bluhm, the late Kimber Smith, in his work, "Carnival'' opposes loose washes of hue with limned spurts directly from paint tubes. Dan Weiner imposes fluorescent color on antique ledger book. his raw color shocks the system, while John Zinsser's brush-headed swipes evokes the cold eroticism of Warhol. In all cases Color Climax, attempts to evoke the most illicit pleasures available from all pigmented sources.

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Selected Press

Time Out New York