Museum showcases work of local abstract painters

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Unknown_Spaces.jpg” caption=”A visitor in front of Michael Allgoewer’s Contingent I. Photo courtesy of McMaster Museum of Art.”]Unknown Spaces, the newest exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art, features the work of two Hamilton-based artists: Michael Allgoewer and Peter Kirkland.

“Both artists have a long and active history with the Hamilton arts community,” says Museum director and curator, Carol Podedworny. “Over the past decade and a half, I've watched and been impressed by their ongoing participating in artist-run, commercial and public gallery culture in Hamilton and I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to bring their work together.”

The title of the show comes from a quote by Marc Rothko, one of the key figures of 20th century abstract expressionism: “My paintings begin an unknown adventure in unknown space.”

The Unknown Spaces exhibition is composed of a recent selection of paintings by Allgoewer and paintings and drawings by Kirkland.

All of the works in the exhibition are abstract both stylistically and conceptually. The artists draw on their engagement with Medieval and Renaissance art as well as a dialogue with Modernism in the articulation of canvases and works on board that read variously as radically discontinuous surfaces and reductive experiments.

The Museum will host Allgoewer and Kirkland at a public reception for this exhibition at the Museum on Thursday, Nov. 22, from 6 to 8 p.m. Unknown Spaces continues until Jan. 5, 2008.