Muriel Guépin Gallery is pleased to announce a two-persons show featuring new works by Patrick Carrara and Inger Johanne Grytting. Grids, myriad lines, repetitive marks are present in both artists’ work to reveal tension and an unquestionable connection to the original American minimalist movement. While Carrara’s geometric ink drawings and Plexiglas sculptures attempt to offer the viewer a space for meditation and elevation, Grytting’s line paintings make visible emotional nuances, process and time.

For over twenty years now Patrick Carrara has lived in Brooklyn, where he has maintained a studio, striving to give his personal vision a place and space. In Paris he had already abandoned the use of color as he preferred working exclusively with graphite on paper, but four years ago, Patrick Carrara began exploring the possibilities of using black ink on Mylar in conjunction with the geometry of design that has long typified his graphite-to-paper renderings. In the intricacies of the geometric grid, Carrara intends to reflect aesthetically and metaphorically, the design he imagines to be inherent in the cosmos. Through webs of myriad lines he links the microcosmic “us” to the macrocosmic “it.”

In this exhibition, Carrara will present a completely new body of work: String Theory Sculptures. The strings in Carrara’s sculptures form lines that may be thought of as flat or one-dimensional, similar to lines drawn on paper or painted on canvass, but as they are wrapped to bind the Plexiglas sheets together, they form beautiful three-dimensional objects which are filled with elliptical rhythms. The sculptures in the series “String Theory” may be seen simultaneously as tangible objects and as representations of imagined elemental physics: structures of matter, energy, and light.

Since emigrating to the U.S in the early 1970s, Inger Johanne Grytting has devoted herself to creating an artistic idiom that is just as subtle as stringently conceptual. She works with a set of self-imposed, variable rules and limitations that emphasize the materiality and the experience of mark-making.

Grytting’s graphite drawings and paintings are like diary entries of her psychological states. Her work is built up with sedimentation of close, parallel strokes, organized into tightly fitted columns. The controlled gesture is repeated over and over, but because of the imperfect movement of the hand, the ultimate character and tension of each line cannot be known in advance. The relationship of these lines to each other is the subject of her work. As Grytting says: “I am interested in the basic, physical act of line/mark-making, and in the abstract character of each line/mark. When I repeat the same gesture over and over in an obsessive practice, it unveils a register of emotional nuances, tensions and rhythm. The resulting grid remains a kind of diary of my time spent.” 

This exhibition will be on view until November 16, 2014.