The Hole is pleased to announce The Concept of Calm, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of sculptural wall works by Robert Moreland. Subtly inhabiting the space in restrained three-dimensional hangings, Moreland’s objects offer an emotional tenor often absent from the formal severity of other minimalist work.

In his wall works, maquettes, and freestanding objects, Robert Moreland’s constructions represent an arresting intersection between painting and sculpture. With hand-stretched canvases along angled wooden beams, held together cleanly by hinges, tacks, and leather straps, Moreland’s works are as much an investigation of material as they are a declaration of objective unity on a minimalist picture plane. Jutting into the gallery space, and often warped or creased along parallel lines like folding partitions or the pages of a book, Moreland’s large works minutely alter the space they are in, provoking a relationship of direct proximity with their viewers.

“A work needs only to be interesting,” Donald Judd declared in his 1965 essay, “Specific Objects.” “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” In his unified formalism and masterful craftwork, Moreland shows himself here as a successor to Judd—albeit, by hand-making his objects rather than formulating their industrial fabrication. While the latter’s near-scientific focus on purely formal qualities now reads as aggressively masculine, Moreland is willing to acknowledge that minimalism carries its own specific affects and responses. The works which compose The Concept of Calm, crafted in isolation over this past year, and the outcome of the artist’s intensive twelve-hour daily studio practice, involve and project this emotion from within, contemplating its qualities through their crystalline imposition on the surrounding gallery space.

The Concept of Calm

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