Greg Bogin at Leo Koenig - art exhibition at the Tribeca gallery - Brief Article

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Max Henry

Although the 34-year-old New York painter Greg Bogin has been showing in Europe for several years, surprisingly this was his first solo show in his home city. Inaugurating Leo Koenig's new Tribeca gallery (relocated from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn), the show, which carried the thematic title "Stop 'N' Shop," featured nine new paintings and two sculpture-furniture hybrids.

As with his previous work, Bogin continued to distill modular systems and structures that refer to ubiquitous phenomena such as giant strip malls, package design and corporate logos. To create his paintings, he stencils wide bands and squares of colorful enamel paint over bright acrylic grounds. These stacked shapes are often outlined with black lines. Understanding of Digital Watches, a large horizontal diptych, deploys bright red or yellow L forms that are flanked by vertical bands of color. The painting's surface looks as pristine as porcelain, although up close one can see partly obscured pencil markings. The 34-inch-square composition The Sunshine State consists of an off-centered stack of three differently colored squares (red, hot pink and yellow). Observing the empty squares and rectangles in these paintings, it's hard not to think of those annoying pop-up windows that appear on Web pages, minus the array of advertising content.

The sculptures--geometric volumes covered in Formica--come across as effective three-dimensional versions of the paintings. Floral Arrangement, which visitors were permitted to sit on, is a low-lying, bright green Formica platform of three connected cubes of differing heights. A potted plant rested on one end of the piece. Similarly, Conversation Piece invited one to sit on its adjoining red and faux-wood Formica towers of varying height.

Bogin plays knowingly on the fact that the corporate-style designs he references were themselves influenced by 20th-century geometric abstract artists such as Mondrian. Balancing handmade qualities with the anonymity of high-tech graphics, he uses wry humor to connect one generation of visual language to another.