In Brief: Evan Nesbit at Weiss, Berlin

With Evan Nesbit’s paintings, the memory of 20th-century colour-field abstraction seeps into the present. His mid- to large-scale canvases are made of burlap, which he stains, dyes or bleaches, before using his paintbrush and hands to press paint – as one might in a garlic press – through the material’s warp and weft. This performative action has sculptural results; pigments are secreted as slender filaments from fibrous pores. In this show of eleven works at Weiss Berlin, paintings including Fragile Style Light Farm (2019) reference the grid, with canary yellow oozing through an uneven network of black lines. Its variegated surface is topographic.

Nesbit lives in Grass Valley, US, a slow-paced town in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and has cited an interest in California’s anti-establishment Funk Art scene – the zany colours of Maija Peeples-Bright, for example. His multi-coloured tie-dye ‘Porosity’ series (2017–19) winks at the movement’s bohemianism. The tactility of Nesbit’s paintings begs to be physically experienced – his response to the inevitability of today’s infinite screen time and scrolling. His practice implores: what will slow us down; how will we appear on the other side of digital culture? Squeezed individuals, once connected. 

'Evan Nesbit' runs at Weiss Berlin until 25 May 2019.

_{Main image: Evan Nesbit, Modal Painting (detail), 2019, acrylic and ink on dyed burlap, 2.0 × 1.8 m. Courtesy: the artist and Weiss Berlin}