Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary 2025

Booth B5

PALM BEACH COUNTY

CONVENTION CENTER

650 Okeechobee Blvd

West Palm Beach, FL 33401

 

VIP PREVIEW

Thursday, March 20, 2025

5pm – 9pm

 

GENERAL ADMISSION

Friday, March 21, 2025

11am – 7pm

Saturday, March 22, 2025

11am – 7pm

Sunday, March 23, 2025

11am – 6pm

 

Interwoven Dimensions: The Convergence of Form, Materiality, and Narrative in Contemporary Art

At its most potent, contemporary art functions as both an aesthetic investigation and an ontological inquiry; one that negotiates the boundaries between materiality and meaning, between the tangible and the metaphysical. In this tension lies the core of artistic practice: the act of constructing, deconstructing, and recontextualizing form to articulate new modes of perception. Sponder Gallery’s presentation at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary exemplifies this dialectic, assembling a diverse group of artists whose practices explore the fluid interplay between abstraction and figuration, between formalist purity and conceptual rigor.

Through a synthesis of gesture, structure, and medium, these works collectively interrogate the aesthetic, social, and philosophical conditions of contemporary visual culture. From the gestural, Abstract Expressionist dynamism of Dan Christensen’s Red Riser (1991) to the spatial complexity of Max-Steven Grossman’s photographic bookscape compositions, the exhibition resists monolithic interpretations of contemporary practice, instead embracing an expanded field of artistic production that acknowledges historical legacies while challenging their limitations.

One of the defining features of this curatorial selection is its engagement with process and materiality as vehicles for expression. Gabriele Evertz’s There Will Be Singing (2017) and Doug Argue’s Untitled (2024) operate within distinct yet complementary systems of abstraction: while Evertz's chromatic linear structures adhere to a systematic logic of optical interaction, Argue’s layered arrangements of fish forms evoke an aleatory complexity reminiscent of linguistic patterning. These works, alongside Holton Rower’s poured compositions (1 AP 22 C, 2024), position painting as a space of both control and contingency, where chance and precision become inextricably linked.

This tension extends into the sculptural realm, where the materialist ethos of Boaz Vaadia (Avdon, Hattush) and Lynn Chadwick (Sitting Elektra II (575), 1968) foregrounds the intersection of mass and void, permanence and ephemerality. Vaadia’s use of bluestone and bronze recalls ancient sculptural traditions, embedding within his works a sense of geological time, while Chadwick’s sharp-edged figuration speaks to the postwar existentialist anxieties that shaped his era. Similarly, Gino Miles’s Hopeful translates the language of weight and gravity into an ethereal balance of polished bronze, evoking both classical sculpture and contemporary minimalism.

Metis Atash’s Punk Buddha series (Bloom and Beyond, She Who Dreams, Soul Sync, 2025) introduces a radical juxtaposition of tradition and consumerist aesthetics. By embedding spiritual iconography within the dazzling, high-gloss surfaces of Swarovski crystals, Atash interrogates the commodification of sacred imagery, highlighting the tensions between authenticity and spectacle, between the meditative and the ornamental.

While abstraction serves as a dominant aesthetic mode within the exhibition, the presence of representational works adds another layer of conceptual depth, particularly in their engagement with socio/political discourse. Tigran Tsitoghdzyan’s DS Mirror for Ukraine (2023) transforms portraiture into a site of haunting transparency, his hyper focused portrait seemingly dissolves into the spectral layers of history and conflict. The work operates as both a mirror and a void, implicating the viewer in its meditation on war, displacement, and the fragility of national identity.

Similarly, Patrick Tagoe Turkson’s 515 Maakomamu (2024), constructed from found flip-flops, transcends its material origins to become an artifact of migration, labor, and environmental crisis. The detritus of global industry is reconfigured into an aesthetic object, transforming discarded footwear into a layered narrative of human movement and resilience.

Alex Katz’s Large Black Hat (Ada) (2012) distills representation into its most minimalistic visual form, continuing the artist’s decades-long project of rendering presence as an act of flat, iconic immediacy. Katz’s unwavering attention to Ada—his wife and perpetual muse—speaks to a broader inquiry into the reproducibility of the human visage, a theme echoed in Isabelle van Zeijl’s Rise (2023), which blends photographic manipulation with self-mythologizing performance. Both artists, in their own way, deconstruct the portrait as a stable signifier, revealing it instead as an evolving interplay between subjectivity and surface.

Scarlett Kanistanaux’s Radiant Joy furthers this dialogue, positioning the meditative monk moniker as an emblem of resilience and transformation. The work’s sculptural presence, with its meticulous attention to anatomical human form, resists passive observation, demanding instead an intimate engagement with materiality and emotion in a universal passivity. 

Beyond the dialectic of abstraction and representation, the exhibition also engages with the conceptual intersections of structure and spontaneity. Harold Garde’s Black Line Figures (2001) presents a melancholic interplay of drawn figures submerged within a dark expanse, their fragmented forms evoking themes of erasure and persistence. Conversely, James Austin Murray’s Curious Sound (2021) renders darkness as a luminous force, its undulating black surface capturing the kinetic energy of raw cosmic matter.

Donald Martiny’s Milyan (2018) operates within a similar vein, embodying movement through sculptural brushstrokes that oscillate between painting and relief. His work, alongside the sculptural interventions of Rob Lorenson (XOXOX (White), 2025) and Jane Manus (Happy Hour, 2019), situates itself within a lineage of post-minimalist experimentation, where the rigor of geometric form is tempered by an inherent sense of play with a core belief in aluminum and its visual weight of form and permanence. 

The exhibition’s structural inquiries extend into the realm of digital aesthetics with Max-Steven Grossman’s photographic bookscapes, which blur the boundaries between physical space and illusory depth. By transforming shelves of books into vast, hyperreal compositions, Grossman collapses the distance between knowledge and image, between the archival and the ephemeral.

Taken as a whole, with a significant roster of modern and contemporary artists, the works presented by Sponder Gallery at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary resist any singular, totalizing narrative. Instead, they operate as a constellation of artistic approaches that reflect the multiplicity of a contemporary experience. Whether through the gestural immediacy of abstract painting, the sculptural reconfiguration of material histories, or the representational inquiries into identity and perception, the exhibition articulates a vision of contemporary art that is as diverse as it is conceptually rigorous.

In this synthesis of form and meaning, of process and reflection, the exhibition offers not merely a survey of contemporary aesthetics but a deeper meditation on the evolving conditions of artistic practice. It is precisely in this simultaneity {between past and present, between the physical and the immaterial} that the exhibition finds its most profound resonance, embodying the very essence of interwoven dimensions.