BLUM is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Taking the grids and unlikely landmarks of the late capitalist suburban landscape as his sources of inspiration, Garber-Maikovska paints abstract marks of oil on fluted polypropylene or canvas that recall the artist’s ongoing performance practice. These motion-based works that Garber-Maikovska stages and subsequently draws upon for his paintings behave as if the semiotics of an avant-garde visual language met the controlled aleatory inherent to the compositions of John Cage. Garber-Maikovska enacts somatically channeled movements within, and attuned to, spaces of hyper-consumption such as the parking lot of a Target. Similarly, the uniquely manufactured plastic apparatuses by which Garber-Maikovska applies, spreads, and rakes his pigments create lines that appear to pulse with the variable rhythm of a metro area.
Of this body of work and his process behind it, the artist says, “Wield the landscape as an instrument of play.” Garber-Maikovska does not keep a sketching practice, as many artists do while preparing to paint. Rather, as with the Situationists gathering information through a dérive or urban meander, Garber-Maikovska accrues inspiration for his paintings via his exploratory performances outside the studio. He then brings his findings back to be exuded onto his substrates.
The grid is fundamental to both city planning and to the history of painting. The sheets of fluted poly that Garber-Maikovska paints on have their own intrinsic grid; line after line runs parallel beside the other to create the structure of this material. The resulting imprint of this pattern can be detected in each of the artist’s paintings. Even when working on canvas, Garber-Maikovska will place a sheet of poly underneath and press his gestures upon the two. Issuing a measured finish that also emulates the cadenced pace of Garber-Maikovska’s somatic, time-based work, this texture is recurrent throughout the exhibition.
Another property of Garber-Maikovska’s fluted poly is its penchant for resisting paint. The observer sees this in the way that the artist’s hand slides across his surfaces, both dispersing and removing pigment as he goes. With uniquely manufactured tips of varying width affixed to his tubes of paint or with bars of color meticulously produced within his studio, each tool in Garber-Maikovska’s repertoire correlates to a particular kind of gesture in his visual vernacular. Just as the motions in his performances hinge on a form of regimented chance operations, so too do the individual marks within Garber-Maikovska’s compositions.
This exhibition coincides with the release of the artist's first comprehensive monograph Cushion of Air, published by Inventory Press. Documenting Garber-Maikovska’s abstract painting practice as well as his somatic performances within the Southern Californian consumerist landscape, the book will feature new essays by Cathleen Chaffee and Jan Tumlir, along with a conversation between the artist and Orit Gat.
Aaron Garber-Maikovska (b. 1978, Washington D.C.) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
Aaron Garber-Maikovska: Cushion of Air