NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by John Tremblay. The exhibition will be on view from March 5 through April 9, 2005, at 521 West 21st Street. This will be the artist’s second one-person exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

John Tremblay’s abstract paintings strike the viewer at first as optical explorations of pattern and color. Tremblay uses templates to draw black-outlined shapes (rectangles or ovals) on a multicolored canvas in order to isolate areas of color activity. Often, the space between the shapes is filled in with a different color, creating a play between negative and positive space. In one painting, an accumulation of ovals will appear as an organic mass hovering somewhere beyond the picture plane. On another canvas, a wavelike pattern of rectangles of varying sizes creates an undulating movement over the surface.

Although Op Art is a visible reference of Tremblay’s, the artist is also interested in bringing the history of modern abstraction into dialogue with more recent developments in contemporary culture. His paintings, while firmly inscribed in the Pop/Op tradition, also often allude to graphic design (recalling advertising logos), as well as to urban planning, technological warfare, film and other aspects of consumer culture. This hybridization of the high and the low, of art and non-art often comes through in Tremblay’s titles: Coca-Cola Sunrise, Rock Crystal Antlers, Drop City. Taken as a whole, the works contribute to a redefinition of abstract painting in contemporary terms.

John Tremblay first exhibited in New York in 1990, and has since then shown extensively in Europe and the United States. Most recently, his work was included in Minimalism and After, an exhibition of the Daimler/Chrysler Collection, as well as Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity, at PS1, New York, last summer. A monograph is coming out from Editions Sujet/Objet (Paris) next month. Tremblay’s works are in the collections of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, France, the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., and the Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva, among others. He lives and works in New York.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or info@paulacoopergallery.com