Escape Attempts

Inaugurating its new Hollywood location, Shulamit Nazarian presents Escape Attempts, a group exhibition of seven international artists working in dialogue with the legacy of minimal art. Carmen Argote, Susan Hefuna, Cindy Hinant, Alex McQuilkin, Sarah Meyohas, Virginia Overton, and Naama Tsabar present work that both acknowledges and subverts the practice of their predominately male forebears including Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, and Larry Bell.

The artists in Escape Attempts employ the formal elements associated with Minimalism. Reduced color palettes and the repetition of simple geometric forms, as well as industrial materials that have a symbiotic relationship to architecture, create new mash-ups that mix formal rigor with sensuality, subjectivity, personal narrative, and contemporary sexual politics.

Escape Attempts pays homage to a 1972 essay by writer, curator, and activist Lucy Lippard. Her essay points to the particular climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s in which artists grappled with central issues of civil rights, gender politics, and anti-war movements—battles that are still questioned and debated today. Like the artists in Lippard’s essay who defied the hegemony of their Abstract Expressionist predecessors, the artists in this exhibition look both to the past and the future, engaging a vocabulary of cultural references unique to this era.