Daydream
Perrotin New York

April 28 — June 11, 2022

Sperling’s largest solo exhibition, Daydream, builds on the key motifs of his oeuvre – monochromatic shaped canvases, site-specific installations, and composite collage paintings – with heightened complexity and ambition. Additionally, in Daydream, the artist debuts a new series of hard-edged concentric squares, continuing the artist’s explorations into color theory and design.

In Daydream, Sperling divided three floors into separate formal focuses. The first floor presents the monochromatic swirls and spirals that have defined Sperling’s practice for some time. Measuring over 57 feet across, the looping red ‘Dionysus’ anchors the first floor. The expansive room holds multiple monochrome works with forms that seem to defy the properties of canvas. Like mathematical knots that overlap and loop endlessly, the first room invites you to leave your preconceptions of painting at the door.

The second floor features a ‘squiggle room’ – similar arching forms laid out using the wall as negative space – as well as a new, harder-edged series he’s calling Concentric Squares. They are some of the most conceptually heavy works Sperling has made yet, interlocking bands that bubble and contract, like an undulating bicycle chain without end, and which expand outward from a central node – a classical, satisfying circle-in-the-square formation. Each piece, which can seem to incorporate a technicolor dreamcoat of hues, actually only features one, viridian green, say, or pyrrole orange, dialed up and down along the spectrum so they resemble a Josef Albers on psilocybin.

The third floor is dedicated to Sperling’s ‘composites,’ which assemble different visual motifs into frenzied compositions. This series is less geometric and more handbuilt, with a more gestural, hand-drawn quality than previous ones. These ‘collaged’ pieces layer many of his usual forms with more textured and less rigid edges and finishes – in compositions stretching nearly 22 feet long.

Spectrum
Perrotin Hong Kong

May 8 – June 12, 2021

In his debut exhibition in Hong Kong, Sperling installs a large, immersive ‘squiggle’ piece consisting of his physical ‘lines’ on the entirety of the three walls of one gallery room. The primary difference between this squiggle installation and the ones he has previously done in Shanghai (2020) and Paris (2019) is Sperling’s use of the spectrum to guide his color choices.

Never an artist to stand still, Sperling has the squiggles slowly shift in hue from red to violet, from orange to yellow, culminating in green and blue as the viewer looks around. By freeing the squiggles from the physical limitations of a painting, whatever its shape, and attaching them directly to the wall in carefully planned configurations, Sperling transforms the entire gallery space into an immersive experience. The tiered shapes add another element to the viewer’s experience as its interaction with the ambient light changes as one moves around the space.

In the second gallery room, different sized tondos made of ‘double bubbles’ and single circular forms hang on all the walls, covered in paint applied using abstract expressionist techniques where the hues can shift from form to form. In these two recent bodies of work, Sperling mixes the optical rigor we associate with Josef Albers’ series, Homage to the Square, with the playfulness of his linear and circular forms.

Paradise
Perrotin Shanghai

November 10, 2020 – January 16, 2021

For his sixth show with Perrotin gallery, and his first in China, Sperling draws on the language of minimalist painting from the 1960s and 1970s, working primarily with shaped canvases. He crafts intricate plywood supports over which canvas is stretched and painted in an extending series of signature palettes.

While Sperling’s shaped canvases and bright colors may call to mind the work of Frank Stella, the technical intricacy of construction at play in these pieces also recalls the combination and finesse found within landmark architecture and design – high-minded modernist Mies van der Rohe meets the self-consciously collaged and vernacular-leaning forms of Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group.

Paradise introduces numerous innovations to his honed repertoire. Sperling here announces both formal and technical developments that signal a bold and exciting direction. New to this exhibition – the addition of stylistic treatments and, in some occurrences, the stark removal of all color, a gesture that reveals the shaped forms in their natural states.

On display throughout the exhibition is a range of Sperling’s recurrent forms – ‘squiggles,’ ‘composites,’ and ‘double bubbles.’ Squiggles, as the name denotes are canvases that resemble large-scale doodles but constructed with a beguiling sense of complexity. From large looping cursives (where the canvas remarkably doubles back upon itself and weaves behind in three dimensions) to a series of gestural undulations in multiple colors.

Composites mark the meeting point of many of Sperling’s forms. Here, clusters of shaped canvases nestle in and over each other, jostling for position and calling our attention from all directions. Sperling treats each panel with a different color or textural application, resulting in a riot of divergent forms. He unveils a brand new texture to several canvases within the mix that is reminiscent of industrially treated ‘hammered enamel’ forms. This painted effect magically transforms each pliable canvas into a seemingly hardened fabricated material. Additionally and throughout the show, Sperling also introduces a new visually expressive motif that channels the aesthetic spirit of the mid-century American Abstract Expressionist movement.

Elsewhere in the show are distinct formations of Double Bubbles, small dumbbell shaped tiered canvases arranged to form larger geometric structures. In certain instances, these double bubbles appear in strict square grids that recall minimal art, and in others Sperling debuts new circular mandala-like arrangements. Throughout these forms on display, Sperling experiments with minimal tones, gradients, and also the entire removal of color. Without tones, the viewer is left to examine the formalist puzzle-like ingenuity of the component constructions without interruption – a striking advancement that’s impossibly bold and contemplative in equal measure.

The ABC to XYZ of Josh Sperling (Volume A)
Perrotin

The ABC to XYZ of Josh Sperling (Volume A) is the artist’s first catalogue raisonné. It provides a comprehensive record of paintings produced thus far by the prolific artist Josh Sperling, featuring an accompanying essay by Kyle Chayka.

Volume A charts the evolution of the artist’s practice, beginning with Sperling’s early experiments with form and material in 2013 through the solidification of his formal vocabulary in 2020. Bound in cotton canvas, the publication contains an exhaustive index of Sperling’s paintings, as well as never-before-seen archival images of the artist working in his studio in Ithaca, New York.

‘Color Me’ Coloring Book
Perrotin

Churros, marshmallows, or licorice rolls? Yes please, all at the same time, and spaghetti and ice-cream mountains topped off with cherries as well.. It all looks delicious! With his gourmet rainbows and cheery coils, artist Josh Sperling has put together a party buffet, where patterns fly through the air like streamers. You can’t see anything? I’m not surprised: the colors are missing!