David Row's Counter Clockwise exhibition at Loretta Howard Gallery explores abstraction through cropped Xs and Os

David Row's exhibition "Counter Clockwise" ran from September 6 to October 20, 2018 at Loretta Howard Gallery in New York City. The show featured nine small paintings, most under two feet in size, continuing Row's work with irregularly shaped canvases. Unlike his 2017 exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, this series employed a limited palette of cobalt blue, black, and white. Row crops painted forms—reclining Os and Xs—with diagonal edges, creating spatial illusions that amplify pictorial depth. Five of the nine paintings incorporate shapes with three, four, and five sides, creating interlocking geometries. The largest piece, "Counterclockwise" (2018), features a black ellipse on blue with a keystone-like section pulled out of alignment. Row introduces selectively distressed surfaces with embedded gray newspaper text, adding temporal aspects through unreadable body text. His approach references earlier abstract painters like Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne, and Al Held, with whom Row shared a close friendship. The work avoids ideological traps while investigating multiple aspects of abstraction simultaneously.