Britta Bogers, Mark Holmes, Jered Sprecher

devening projects + editions presents Kabinett 4 featuring new work from Mark Holmes, Britta Bogers and Jered Sprecher. Kabinett 4 — including works on paper, painting, sculpture and installation — looks at collaborative practices within carefully defined contexts.

Britta Bogers’ work in Kabinett 4 is a small fraction of an expansive practice that includes large-scale paper works and paintings. By limiting the focus here to a specific group selected from hundreds,we glimpse into the practice of an artist who is continually making decisions that move form, line and composition forward. These drawings, made with acrylic and pigment colors on primed paper, are defined by a distinct set of chromatic decisions. The result is immediate and direct; well past a sketch but never taken to over-definition. The structural forms come from memories of concrete things; but those memories are blurred and fused with other influences, leaving the images feeling familiar but still elusive. Britta Bogers’ drawings are made with a light touch, but securely anchored by the masterful use and understanding of her visual language. Britta Bogers studied at the Kunstakademie in Münster, Germany, and has been featured in many group and solo exhibitions. Recent shows in Germany include The Coop Galerie in Bergen auf Rügen, the Kunstverein Emmerich, the Kunsterverein Rügen and Galerie Martin Turck; in Belgium at Croxhapox; and in Liverpool at Arena. She lives and works in Cologne.

For more than 10 years, Mark Holmes has been making sculpture from common materials that riff on functional construction. The work never stays there though. With subtle pronouncements revealed through the joinery and other key elements of the facture, Holmes makes poetic and nuanced declarations about form, space and light. The sculpture can be languid or highly dynamic, but it always shifts as you move from one point to another. His past productions of floor and wall objects referenced vaguely functional objects, but here, things are slippery. These objects feel domestic in scale but his use of color creates a tricky deflection that leads the allusion to functionality astray. In linen, wood and pigment, his recent standing sculptures are clearly figurative but feel more like sentries than moving bodies. Surfaces striated with horizontal seams keep us aware of the floor and hold them firmly in place. But in the end, their emphatic color and a weird sense of direction keep these characters active. Mark Holmes is associate professor of Art at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He received his MFA from Yale University and has exhibited widely including solo and group exhibitions at Sidecar Gallery in Hammond, Indiana; Judith Racht Gallery in Harbert, Michigan; The Beverly Arts Center in Chicago; and Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois.

Jered Sprecher’s studio practice explores the “handwriting” of humankind. He collects the markings of cultural communication and filters and processes these notations into complex visual constructions. Laden with a dense vocabulary culled from endless sources derived from his immediate surroundings, Sprecher’s paintings, drawings and installations reflect on how we process information and make sense of “noise” in our environment. Kabinett 4 includes a group of new paintings and a Project Table with source material from all three artists in the exhibition. Jered Sprecher has been featured in solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles, Wendy Cooper Gallery in Chicago, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston. His work has been in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York; Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville; Des Moines Art Center; and Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, among others. In 2009 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee and is assistant professor of art at the UT Knoxville.