Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to announce Excavation, featuring works by: Zahoor ul Akhlaq, N. Dash, Josephine Halvorson, Corin Hewitt, Erik Lindman, and Stanley Rosen, on view at 176 Grand Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, June 7 from 6-8 pm. The exhibition runs through July 27.

Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999, Lahore, Pakistan) was a pioneering artist from Pakistan whose works combine Southeast Asian traditional aesthetic values with Western modernism, pop art, and color-field painting. Akhlaq's paintings incorporate motifs from Mughal Miniatures, calligraphy, and vernacular architecture, among a wide range of other influences from around the world. Most of Akhlaq’s career was spent in post-colonial Pakistan during a time of social and political instability. The works he made in this environment resonate with the complicated dichotomy between “East” and “West”. We will present a group of small heavily textured paintings from the early to mid- 1990’s.

N. Dash (b.1980, Miami, FL) has a multivalent practice that involves painting, sculpture, and photography, and often incorporates linen, graphite, styrofoam and adobe earth. In all of Dash’s work there is a concern with bodily intelligence as it is expressed through tactile interactions and interventions with natural and synthetic materials. The ultimate form, color, and constitution of the works is shaped by the artist’s physical engagement with material over time. We will present a new large scale painting.

Josephine Halvorson (b.1981, Brewster, MA) investigates objects and environments through paintings made directly on site. Working within arm’s length of her subject over the course of daylight hours, Halvorson’s position foregrounds attention, experience and locale. We will present five recent gouache on paper works, which were made of the dirt and detritus Halvorson observed at a disused mine in the California/Nevada desert.

Corin Hewitt (b.1971, Vermont) has a project-based practice that spans sculpture, photography, video, and installation. Hewitt’s work probes history and domestic life, creating narratives and integrating personal biography into the places and objects that he encounters. The resulting constellation of artworks and experiences conflate real and fabricated histories, playing with notions of authenticity and value. Since last spring, Hewitt has been digging trenches, excavating walls, and conducting archival research into the history of his current home/studio in Richmond, Virginia. We will present sculptures that come out of this recent ongoing project titled The Granby Inn, which takes its name from a bar and restaurant that occupied Hewitt’s house from 1932-74.

Erik Lindman (b.1985, New York, NY) uses anonymous found surfaces as compositional elements in his paintings. Found sheets of painted luan or marred shards of stainless steel are joined, glued, and screwed to the canvas, initiating a cascade of decisions that ultimately articulate value and attention. Cropping, awareness of scale, and use of negative space combine with the absorbency, luminosity, and superficial variation of these surfaces. The specific processes and material choices Lindman makes function to both focus attention on the cultural ramifications of the works and assert the plain material fact of their existence. We will present three recent large scale paintings.

Stanley Rosen (b.1926, Brooklyn, NY), makes intimately scaled ceramic stoneware sculptures, often unglazed and within a range of earthy browns, tans, and grays. Rosen’s objects are built up with a slow accumulation of small rolled coils of clay around an inch in length. The sculptures show clear reverence for artifacts, architecture and aesthetic principles of past civilizations while at the same time resonating with an energy that seems foreign and futuristic. We will present a selection of five ceramic sculptures.