All Photos By Gail

At his eponymous gallery on West 25th Street, painter/sculptor Paul Kolker has launched his return to both abstract painting and light sculpture with his yearlong series entitled The New Abstract!. This is an exhibit that we literally stumbled onto during our May 1st art crawl, and what a cool find it turned out to be!

Ishidots Circulare Blanc, OP.1, 2014

Paul Kolker is known for his light sculptures and also his paintings and prints incorporating rectilinear grids of dots, halftone phases and curvilinear patterns of multivariate dots; the latter which he calls Ishidots in attribution to Shinobu Ishihara. When you first enter the downstairs gallery space, you’ll pass through a corridor lined with these circular, dot-field paintings that reminded me of those Color Blindness tests. I liked them immediately.

Ishidots Circulare Noir, OP.1, 2014

In both paintings the dots are painted in the same hues; but those on the black ground appear more saturated and emboldened, “like bright stars in a black night sky.”

In this cool sculpture, curved mirrors reflect, distort and thereby abstract light into infinity.

Here’s a really big one! The perfect background for a selfie!

In the same room as the Big Dots painting, this Factory-esque Silver Mylar Balloon Sculpture covers an area of the ceiling.

The group of paintings above and below are each on a wall that features four paintings in total. But I was shooting with a big clumsy iPad and to get a wide angle you practically have to back up to New Jersey, so you’ll have to visit the exhibit in person to see what I had to crop out. Trust me, it will be worth it.

Paul Kolker: Halftones and Ishidots…The New Abstract! is on Exhibit Through July 3rd, 2014 at the Paul Kolker Collection, Located at 511 West 25th Street in the Chelsea Gallery District.