Thomas Erben is very pleased to present new paintings by New York based artists Sara Kane, Jackie Saccoccio and Rachel Urkowitz. Starting from diverse sources – magazines, photographs, satellite images – the artists’ works hover between pictorial dissolution and conceptual stability. Landscape veers in and out, promising, but often denying, expectations of scale, mass, and a coherent universe.

Painting is a field in which visual language is processed and refracted. The idea of “making the invisible visible” plays out in Sara Kane’s works, which toy with what the “visible” actually is. The resulting images, gleaned from multiple photographic sources, have the quality of half-remembered scenes and strange daydreams.

Jackie Saccoccio’s canvases are based on photographs of an existing painting. Through the use of multiple projections, the reference to the gestural abstract painting and photography are degraded. The gesture of the painting becomes and impotent tangle of lines whereas the photographic projections transform a once stable image into stable inconsistency and disparate information.

Rachel Urkowitz presents paintings and a new wall piece. The works visualize the slippage between organizing systems and the chaos they attempt to overcome. Based on images generated from NASA’s TOM satellite, the wall piece “Ozone Holes, 10.13.00” maps the distribution of ozone over the Earth’s surface on a particular day, using models of visual information and revealing the underlying anxiety implied in their use.

Central to these artists’ various approaches is a shared interest in exploding both the pop and conceptual vocabularies of recent painting. They take on Gerhard Richter’s comment that the act of artistic production has to do with deciding “what is to be made visible,” and let the question of “how” take care of itself.