Thompson mines the histories of modernism in his work, critiquing how images have been produced, displayed, and circulated. Here he collides past and present, making reference to Robho (1967–71), the French journal that promoted Kinetic art (an international movement of the late 1960s rooted in abstraction and motion), while also examining the everyday life of objects in today’s art market. For the installation, five sets of lithographs are each arranged on the wall in an X formation. The individual prints are based on five photographs of the storage tills at Andrew Kreps Gallery (the Manhattan gallery that represents the artist), capturing the perpetual behind-the-scenes movement of artworks within the commercial space. While Thompson works predominantly as a painter, here he has explored the print medium’s capacity for reproduction and technical variation, printing each image in five different colors to generate a full range of permutations, a decision perhaps also inspired by Robho, whose five issues were each printed in single color.
Gallery label from Abstract Generation: Now in Print, March 15–September 2, 2013.
