André Viana is pleased to announce Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow with works by Matt Connors and a selection of Klara Lidén’s “Poster Paintings.”

The exhibition borrows its title from one of Piet Mondrian’s most notable works from the 1930’s. The painting’s elements have been reduced to its simplest colors and rectilinear forms in a new method for representing the underlying structure of the visible world. His integrative approach to abstraction was a great influence on painting, design and architecture throughout the twentieth century and still today. Through Matt Connors and Klara Lidén’s works, the show explores how the adaptive language of geometric abstraction can be actualized to render contemporary reality and new concepts of social space.

Connors’ loosely gridded compositions seek to blur the distinction between art and life by relating social and pictorial space. His paintings incorporate rubbings from the floor or the artist uses one wet painting to imprint another, acting as both pictures and objects alike. By pouring layers of paint into the fabric like dye, they draw particular attention to their surface, and result in colorful yet translucent compositions that “register the surfaces behind or beneath them, as well as those before them.”On the other hand, if Mondrian’s floating geometries sought to reflect the underlying spirituality of nature, Klara Lidén engages directly with the fabric of the city. Her interest in the urban environment frequently manifests itself in built structures described as “un-building, re-cycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up.” The works on view are created by an accumulation of fliers and advertisements gathered from the street and seek to challenge our most fundamental perceptions of private and public space. The “Poster Paintings” have been covered with a layer of white paper in order to erase or silence the oversaturated metropolitan landscape.

Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow brings forward Mondrian’s vision of modern art as a common language based in the pure primary colors, along with the Modernist belief in abstraction as an expression of living. Working within the contexts of Minimalism and Conceptualism, Connors and Lidén forge recognizable, stripped-down vocabularies that expand and actualize the language of abstraction, embracing geometry as a democratic device. Their works turn away from utopia, and add the expedience and restlessness of our times.

Matt Connors was born in 1973 in Chicago, IL. Connors studied at Bennington College, VT, and received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2006. He has had solo exhibitions in galleries such as Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles, Herald St., London, and CANADA, in New York, as well as institutions like MoMA PS1, New York, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Veneklasen / Werner and Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin, The Dallas Museum of Art, and The Breeder in Athens, Greece. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; The Walker Art Center, and the Hammer Museum; among others.

Klara Lidén was born in 1979 Stockholm, Sweden. She attended the School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (2000–2004), the Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin (2003) and the University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Konstfack, Stockholm (2004–2007). Lidén has had solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, and the Serpentine Galleries, London, and The New Museum, New York. In 2009, her work was presented in the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and she received a special mention from the jury of the 54th Venice Biennale. Lidén’s work resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; among others.