Cullen Washington Jr., Potential I, 2014, canvas, acrylic paint, charcoal dust, black chalkboard paint, paper, black copier toner, acrylic medium, tape, black ink, brown craft paper, cotton string, latex house paint, rubber, wire, hot plastic glue, 84 by 108 inches.
This show is a double first: the new gallery’s inaugural offering and the artist’s solo premiere in New York. Washington—who received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and last year completed an artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem—offers large, wall-mounted collages that evoke the grid while dynamically counterbalancing abstract black-and-white forms. Composed of a wide range of materials (including canvas, paper, acrylic, charcoal, string, tape and even cut-up bits of the artist’s own paintings), the compositions explore texture, structure and movement, yet ultimately suggest a unifying order behind the complexity of the work’s (and the world’s) immediate appearance.