Introduction

Jennie Goldstein: My name is Jenny Goldstein and I’m an Assistant Curator at the Whitney.

I couldn't stop thinking about this idea of balance, and how that resonates across mediums. This idea of balance just kept coming up for me over and over, and I kept thinking about all the different ways that the word balance can mean, in other words all of its different definitions. 

There's maybe literal understandings of it, like equilibrium, you know something that is compositionally balanced. And there’s also ways to think about balance that are more tied to remainders, like if you take money out of your bank account: there's a balance. And what remains is often just as important as what you've spent. So what's there? What's visible is very much alive in the space. But the space the artists aren't using, what they cut off, or what becomes part of the wall versus the painting itself is also incredibly important. 

And I think about this a lot when I'm considering artists who are working with shaped canvases for instance. What relationship to the wall does that bring?

It's maybe less about questions of positive and negative space, and more about questions of this actual physical environment, and how much it matters to our understanding of the object, that remainder, the wall as a kind of remainder. The space of the gallery is a kind of remainder.