Andrew Masullo

November 4 - December 4, 2021

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery presents its second solo exhibition with Andrew Masullo, featuring paintings made during the past decade.

Andrew Masullo’s oil on canvas paintings explore the relationship between color and form. Nonobjective and hard-edge in style, each work comprises an often restrained palette of tube-fresh color: yellow, blue, red, black, and white are frequent players. The flat shapes they form are bulbous and fluid in some paintings, in others more exacting. These compositions are improvisational, and their often years-long process of becoming renders themselves apparent in each painting’s visible crust of paint.

Masullo titles each of his paintings serially—5551 (2012-13), 6417 (2015), and 7070 (2017-21), for example—a matter of fact system the artist has used since 1978. Finding his work neither “untitled” nor ascribable of “word-ideas,” the artist leaves ample room for each painting to speak for itself, no gimmicks or agenda in sight.

Andrew Masullo was born in 1957 and hails from Roselle Park, NJ. He graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art from Rutgers University but his true art education occurred during the 22 years he lived in Manhattan (he now lives in San Francisco but still considers himself "a New York painter through and through"). A selection of his solo exhibitions include those with galleries fiction/nonfiction (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991), André Emmerich (1994, 1996), Joan Washburn (2000, 2002, 2004), Feature Inc. (2010), Mary Boone (2013), and Tibor de Nagy (2015) all in New York; Paule Anglim in San Francisco (2000, 2006, 2008, 2012); Daniel Weinberg (2007, 2009, 2011) and Zevitas/Marcus (2016) in Los Angeles; Steven Zevitas in Boston (2007, 2011, 2015); Texas Gallery in Houston (2009, 2014); Susanne Hilberry in Detroit (2014); and a retrospective with Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich (1999). His paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in their 2012 Biennial, as well as their recent group exhibition Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s (2017). He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011.

Masullo’s work is included in the public collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, AL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland, KS; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among numerous others.