A Red Letter Day

A red letter day

Curated by Terry R. Myers

June 20, 2003 through July 25, 2003

Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce “A red letter day,” a group exhibition organized by Los Angeles-based critic and independent curator Terry R. Myers. The exhibition will include new paintings by five emerging artists from Los Angeles and New York: Lecia Dole-Recio, Kim Fisher, Darcy Huebler, Stan Kaplan, and Michael Lazarus. While all of these painters share an interest in abstraction, it is the distinctive nature of their individual approaches that initially motivated Myers to bring their work together.

Myers has described this exhibition as follows:

For me, “A red letter day” is significantly related to “This must be the place I waited years to leave,” an exhibition that I organized in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000. As a juxtaposition of art works by Mary Heilmann, Zaha Hadid, and Budd Hopkins, with a specific selection of Pet Shop Boys videos from the early 1990s, this exhibition was an attempt to look at some of the ways abstraction enters the everyday, even when it remains committed to the extraordinary.

For me, borrowing another Pet Shop Boys song title for this new exhibition helps me make a direct connection to the LA show. It also provides a phrase that describes the celebratory yet refreshingly familiar attitude that exists in the most interesting emerging painting. Each of these five painters bring the everyday to abstraction, not to “tame” it or otherwise encapsulate it within what is now a very elastic definition of representation, but rather to open it up to a vernacular that can stay comfortably and productively within painting and abstraction without provoking a separation or a sense of exclusion.