Niele Toroni | The New Yorker

Jun 30 2015


For fifty years, the Swiss painter has relied on just one size of paintbrush to make his signature, standardized brushstrokes. (He shares many of the aims of the French conceptual-minimalist Daniel Buren, with whom he collaborated in the late sixties.) In this overdue exhibition, Toroni has cunningly hung twenty-five square paintings from 1987, each one marked with fourteen orange strokes, at the height of the gallery’s mezzanine: in the main space, the canvases are a tick below eye level, while in the upper space they’re propped against the wall, as they rest on the floor. Toroni compounded this overlapping of art work and architecture by painting the gallery’s garage door and panelboard. In a related exhibition uptown (at the Marian Goodman gallery), new canvases and wall paintings jostle with three older quincunxes made of white paint on yellowing newsprint. Through Sept. 6.