Installation first floor: Ron Gorchov, Ruth Root, Gwenaël Kerlidou
All images Courtesy of The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation
Building Models: The Shape of Painting
Curated by Saul Ostrow
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation
by Ian Cofre
New York, November 11, 2025
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Two intertwined, yet equally important events, both titled Building Models: The Shape of Painting by Saul Ostrow, are on view at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation (87 Eldridge Street, New York) until January 17, 2026. The first event is the 10-person group exhibition Ostrow curated, an object lesson against quadrangular tyranny, featuring Ron Gorchov, Gwenaël Kerlidou, Russell Maltz, Joe Overstreet, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Harvey Quaytman, Ruth Root, David Row, Ted Stamm, and Li Trincere. On its own, the show presents a tight selection of mostly American makers recognized for their commitments to abstraction and to hand-built and custom stretchers. The second event, discussed at the end of this review, is the curator’s essay under the umbrella of this exhibition.
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As a matter of fact…
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The curator puts Painting’s facticity on full frontal view by designating ten categories of shaped painting, helpful for classifying the different strategies. Through each bound and delimited specimen, we are confronted with the proposition that there are sufficient and necessary qualities for the individual contexts to become content, but without presenting a formula, which preserves open-ended interpretation. The exhibition does not purport to be encyclopedic 1, however, and couldn't be, given the size of each work and generous space dedicated to each one in groups of five across the Foundation's two softly lit floors. It's how painters prefer to be shown and it maximizes the dialogue with the architectural features like the high ceilings that dominate the former synagogue and home/studio for painters Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof.
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Shaping the Field: Ron Gorchov
Collage: Ruth Root
Parts to the Whole: Gwenaël Kerlidou
Literal and Intuitive: Joanna Pousette-Dart
​Optical Logic: Li Trincere
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There is a decidedly uptown polish to the first floor where the first five works hang at eye level. The first encounter is with Ron Gorchov’s Spice of Life II (2017), a large, rectangular expanse whose edges and corners appear warped. By literally shaping the field of vision, from afar, the light hits the darkly stained ground obliquely and the concavity one can see from the edge is lost. As you approach the work, the stretcher’s depth becomes apparent, enveloping the viewer as the two densely rendered vertical calligraphic, red strokes increase in intensity. The second piece, Ruth Root’s Untitled (2025), is collaged from an upper quadrant of printed fabric covered in diagrammatic and photographic geometries, which hangs adjacent to and above an asymmetrical plexiglass sheet. The soft support with its frantic 80s-style designs meets a hard substrate accentuated with white enamel and pixelated diagonals in contrasting neon red, purple, blue, and black spray paint, quivering lines that evoke a digital cloud storm.
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​Next, for Gwenaël Kerlidou, the raw, unpainted, and tinted canvas fragments that constitute Pinwheel (2024-25), from his Opus Incertum Series, are anchored by the bright red spray paint applied directly to the wall. It brings them into an unending circuit of curves and “arrows” that exists within and without excisions, which are created by spaces between the twenty small canvas parts. The work emphasizes the relationship to the wall, intervening like volumetric graffiti, while retaining a Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse playfulness. What follows is Joanna Pousette-Dart’s 3 Part Variation #2 (3 reds) (2015-16), a carefully balanced inverted stack rendered in warm tones that simultaneously evokes the light of a changing landscape and 60s/70s design aesthetic. The bulbous forms—like shaped bowls, rocks, or canoes—are structured by the dichotomy of nature-culture and a cascade of pigmented crescents that overflow and intuitively draw the eye from one canvas to the next. Finally, Li Trincere’s Red Checkmark (2011) has a high-gloss enamel finish flecked with glitter that rests uncomfortably within the larger equilateral triangle. Upon closer inspection, the wine-dark shape creates a reflective effect and contrasting depth to create an optical interplay with the cool, flat ground.
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1 High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 (Multiple venues, 2006-08), the traveling museum exhibition curated by Katy Siegel with artist David Reed’s support comes closer.
Installation second floor: Joe Overstreet, Harvey Quaytman
As a fact of the matter…
With rougher details like painted gray floors and exposed brick walls, the second floor features the distinctly downtown feel of an industrial loft. Common to Soho in the era when many of the artists in the exhibition came up, influenced by the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists, they were drawn to, settled, and some still live in these types of spaces. The works feel more primordial and experimental, so it seems apt that the second grouping of five works all hang lower.
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Support and Surface: Joe Overstreet
Structure as Image: Harvey Quaytman
Making Itself: Russell Maltz
Architectural: Ted Stamm
Fractured Form: David Row
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Joe Overstreet’s Untitled (1982) is structured by an armature of wrapped dowels that extend the blue-hued surface and emphasize geometries such as the abbreviated rectangle, parallelograms, and adjacent triangles. The hybrid form echoes a map or flattened globe through its accumulation of paint collaged onto the work, one of the few in the exhibition that draws attention to paint as liquid (Gorchov is another, although through his signature thin drip technique). Harvey Quaytman’s Paleologue (1969) is the earliest piece in the exhibition, and tips ever so slightly into representation with its quality of bruised or sickly skin juxtaposed with a shadow form with a graphite-like finish. The shape echoes elementary language, like an Arabic alef at once embodied and mechanized, handwritten and typed. It oscillates between those qualities like a repeated phoneme or phrase, as in Steve Reich’s 1966 sound work Come Out, that slips from tongue to razor.
Russell Maltz, S.P./ACCU-FLO (2013)
Harvey Quaytman, Paleologue (1969)
Markedly lower to the ground, gravity activates S.P./ACCU-FLO (2013) by Russell Maltz, rotating and spreading the multiple plywood sheet elements around a single anchor. As the work most closely related to sculpture, an artist who accompanied this writer on a visit to the Shape of Painting called it “classic Home Depot abstraction.” What separates the work from off-the-shelf abstraction, and other Maltz works that are more ambiguous, is his use of fluorescent orange paint to create pictorial unity across the floating accumulation, which through repetition and variation, makes itself into a painting. For the restless eye, it consequently foregrounds the psychedelic wood patterns and makes the support indistinguishable from the surface. Ted Stamm’s 57YB-001 (Zephyr) (1982) creates an immediate dialogue with Maltz's acrylic and raw wood, like worlds colliding when an architect and contractor meet for the first time. Stamm’s work is also low to the ground, framing raw canvas with a thick monochromatic line that follows all but one edge of the support. What remains is a slightly imperfect, irregular negative space that is all corners and sharp angles, a reassertion of the hand in design and human fallibility.
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David Row’s Phantom (2022) has a silver face that looks manufactured or lasercut, an illusion of exactitude betrayed by the reality of subtle scuffs, flaws, seams, and creases on the surface that start to reveal how it is constructed. The neon ground is not one substrate, rather it is a combination of layers and reflected geometries, part of a fractured underlying grid, that are integrated by and into the metallic surface.
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With only ten examples, the current show tees up endless debates about who is in it and who isn't (Why not more Continental artists?); whether the categories are complete and descriptive enough (Where is all the Deconstruction?); and, when do the boundaries between mediums get fuzzy (Can this still be considered a painting?). The answers to those questions and others are partially visible in a small vitrine at the gallery entrance that evidences some of the curator's yellowing folders and notes featuring categories and lists of art and artists, writing, and catalogues from several previous exhibitions. Something more is at stake.
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Context is Everything
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD (Oct. 30, 1975). NY Daily News Archive, via New York Times.
Frank Stella haunts every missing and irregular corner in the exhibit, as one of the first stateside artists to propel the shaped canvas; Kenneth Noland is another. Were we to believe the Modernist narrative, Stella's formal innovations in the early 60s implied the beginning of the end, the future for painting was foreclosed. The curator concludes his essay, however, acknowledging this major, yet intentional exclusion by name, stating that Stella's work is the “default reference.”
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Around the same time as Stella’s well-worn statements were recorded in the late 60s 2, Ostrow began his career as an artist, and by 1985 started curating independently, abandoning his art practice in the mid-90s. If you were to make your own canon and argue for artists to be included, when does that critical work become a practice? The Shape of Painting represents the 16th exhibition of an ambitious 40-year project to index the models and strategies of abstract painting in the second half of the 20th century. Ostrow’s delineated period begins in 1951 with Abstract Expressionism and ends in 1975, the year of Artforum’s infamous provocation, the proverbial death of painting 3, which precipitated a self-conscious identity crisis among painters, even though the entire issue of the magazine was dedicated to painting.
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That was exactly 50 years ago, and it was the same year that New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a transitional moment, and the space between 1975-79 saw an experimental flourishing in art, music, and every other aspect of culture in what now seems like an exceptional moment in the City’s history. What replaced it is a different sort of institution built on the market that, as Ostrow has consistently and persistently shown since he began curating in 1985, may obscure a paradigmatic shift in the medium.
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An Alternative Art History
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In retrospect, it seems true that 1975 marked the death of a kind of Painting, that is, the proscription of capital ‘P’ Painting. If aesthetics had reached a Modernist dead-end, where could we go from there? In his catalog essay, Ostrow succinctly traces a broader historical and transnational genealogy of forms “from mediums of illusion into sites of embodied encounter” long before shaped canvases entered the American discourse and became institutionalized 4. Engaging art history critically, the essay supports and directs a view towards greatly expanding the Western canon naming the connections to Constructivism, forgotten American artists, such as Abraham Joel Tobias (1899-1956), Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974), and Carl Pickhardt (1908-2004), the Madí movement (specifically Rhod Rothfuss (1920-1969)), as well as other Concrete artists operating across Europe and Latin America who broke the frame and shed the suspension of disbelief.
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What Ostrow proposes is not just an exhibition, then, but a dissatisfaction with the status quo, the conventionalism that continues to restrain painting’s movement away from illusionism even today. Movement is the key word, because the spatial qualities of these exemplary shaped canvasses show that painting and its morphologies are much more dynamic, purposeful, and longstanding than what mainstream art history has led us to believe. The end of prescriptions made way for lower-case ‘p’ painting, rich with possibilities, and Building Models: The Shape of Painting gives us past and current strategies for real change.
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2 Frank Stella quoted from Questions to Stella and Judd, Interview by Bruce Glaser, Ed. by Lucy R. Lippard, ARTNews, September 1966:
My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he’s doing. He is making a thing. All that should be for granted. If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any conclusion . . . What you see is what you see.
3 It’s telling that in the writer DaMonica Boone’s precipitating survey, she never uses the phrase “death of painting.” It is, rather, some of the 23 respondents (one of whom was Pat Passlof, with one of the more impassioned and poetic replies), who interpreted the implication as an epitaph. See Painters Reply…, Artforum, September 1975, VOL. 14, NO. 1, p.26
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4 Catalogue Essay, Building Models: The Shape of Painting, p. 7
Installation second floor Russell Maltz, Ted Stamm, David Row