Russell Roberts' Grid Paintings at Heskin Contemporary Explore Urban Complexity

Russell Roberts presented his exhibition "Paper Bed Concrete Head" at Heskin Contemporary in New York from March 12 through April 18, 2015. The show featured eight large, uniformly sized off-square canvases and one medium-sized work, all employing a grid structure that marked a dramatic departure from his previous decades of non-repetitive painting. Roberts' new approach uses modular components of white or blue rectangles connected by fluid curvilinear lines, creating compositions that evoke urban windows rather than traditional checkerboard patterns. The paintings, installed at 443 West 37th Street between 9th and 10th avenues, visually unified the gallery's long narrow asymmetrical rooms through repeated horizontal lines defining the lower third of each canvas. Roberts' work engages with the grid tradition extending from Hans Hofmann to contemporaries like Joan Waltemath, Stanley Whitney, and Stephen Westfall, while incorporating complex spatial propositions through varied paint application. His technique ranges from carefully applied opaque layers to brusque, provisional marks, with cobalt blues and vivid oranges recalling Willem de Kooning. The exhibition title's poetic resonance mirrors the varied orientations and patterns within the paintings themselves.