Installation view, L-R: “Crossing” (2023), “Inter-rupted” (2024), “Signage” (2024) (photo by David Cateforis)
Three solo exhibitions at Haw Contemporary — by painters Warren Rosser and Alayne Spafford and ceramist Andy Brayman — offer rich rewards for lovers of abstraction, a vital modernist form of expression for more than a century.
Rosser’s show, “Unexpected Occurrences,” shines in three upstairs galleries at Haw. The dean of the Kansas City art world, Rosser has been exhibiting in the city since the early 1970s, alongside teaching for 46 years at the Kansas City Art Institute before retiring in 2018 as William T. Kemper Distinguished Professor of Painting.
A restless and prolific innovator, Rosser has consistently experimented with new forms, materials and processes, ever committed to the modernist ideal of artmaking as a voyage of discovery without a predetermined end. A strong formalist impulse animates Rosser’s investigations of shape, space, gesture and color, which routinely achieve compositions that are both dynamic and rigorous.
Rosser’s latest efforts extend the direction he unveiled in his previous solo show at Haw’s downtown Kansas City Lightwell space in 2023. He is making sophisticated, boldly colorful “paintings” containing little or no paint. His principal medium is collaged fabric — opaque or translucent, in various colors and printed patterns — that he arranges and layers intuitively to produce striking formal juxtapositions, the “unexpected occurrences” of the exhibition’s title.
In several of the show’s larger works, these fabric elements are laid over and around photographic images that Rosser manipulates digitally — fragmenting them, altering their color — and prints onto the canvas. Some of these images are occasionally superimposed on abstract digital paintings Rosser made in the late 2010s. The intricate layering of these components creates visual density and complexity that is tempered by Rosser’s unerring sense of overall compositional structure and balance.
Rosser sourced his photographic images from the internet, and many retain the watermarks of the stock agencies (Alamy, Getty Images) from which he appropriated them. Most depict pedestrians crossing city streets, giving the paintings an upbeat urban vibe. In works such as “Crossing” (2023) and “Urban Crossing” (2023), Rosser cannily applies sections of striped fabric that play off the crosswalk stripes in the photographs.
The broad alternating white and colored stripes that recur in many of Rosser’s works recall Daniel Buren’s signature deployment of this motif, while Rosser’s use of commercially produced patterned textiles evokes Sigmar Polke’s employment of similar materials. His combination of contemporary photographic imagery and vivid abstract elements also resonates with Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen paintings such as “Tracer” (1963) in the Nelson-Atkins. Rosser’s strongest paintings in his Haw exhibition would hold their own on a museum wall alongside those of Rauschenberg, Polke and other canonical postwar artists. One hopes they will have the opportunity to do so.
Alayne Spafford’s handsome show, “Over/Under,” fills the first two first-floor galleries at Haw. A midcareer Canadian artist, Spafford shares Rosser’s commitment to intuitive creation, rich color and the layering of compositional elements. Spafford begins with a foundation of collaged paper elements, loosely brushed and dripping acrylic, and spray paint. Over this she lays large, flat, hard-edged, abutting irregular geometric shapes in oil —usually of solid color but sometimes mottled or striped — or occasionally circumscribes a section of the sprayed and running acrylic underlayer within the borders of a geometric shape. The interplay between the carefully limned surface shapes and the spontaneously applied foundation — the “over/under” of her show’s title — manifests what Spafford’s bio calls her attempt “to reconcile a natural tendency to organize and polish with a strong desire to reject those principles in favor of chaos and disorder.”
Often, Spafford will completely cover the collaged paper elements with which she begins her paintings, though they can still be sensed beneath the painted surface. In some cases, however, the paper’s printed contents remain visible, as in “fiftyfive-12” (2024), which features near its center a phonebook page loosely covered with translucent red paint and a sheet of paper bearing an ornate decorative pattern (perhaps wallpaper). These bits of the real world playing off the picture’s purely abstract elements recall similar ones in the Synthetic Cubist paintings of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Spafford’s formal vocabulary of simple irregular geometric shapes is likewise rooted in Synthetic Cubism, which she creatively extends into the present to realize highly personal and gratifying results.
Brayman, in “Material Forward,” occupying Haw’s large central first-floor gallery, shows several ceramic objects grouped together on two low, industrial-style tables. Produced at the Matter Factory, his Kansas City studio, laboratory, and production space, Brayman’s ceramic works — including his signature tall, bucket-like wide-mouthed vases with ribbed bodies based on the structure of a double helix, and short square-bodied double-stemmed flower vases — are meant to be functional but can be appreciated as elegant, streamlined, geometrically perfect abstractions. Brayman achieves this precision by designing his vessels with computer software informed by sensor data from the natural world. The computer mills plaster molds for slip-casting the forms in porcelain, which are then glazed and fired. The finished works emerge with refined surfaces accented by geometric patterns or motifs — also digitally designed — applied as decals.
Also featured in “Material Forward” are some of Brayman’s other functional designs that take on the character of abstract sculptures. One is an assembly of plank-like green and white glazed ceramic “baguettes,” each roughly three-and-a-half feet long, intended for use as sunscreens in architecture. Displayed in a gallery corner, two baguettes lie on the floor perpendicular to ten leaning upright against the wall in the manner of a post minimalist sculpture, reading as purely formal elements akin to Rosser’s stripes. In another corner, “Yellow Glass with Red Grid” consists of an approximately four-and-a-half by two-and-a-half-foot yellow glass tabletop printed in red ceramic ink with a regular grid of crossing diagonal and vertical lines. Wedged into grooves in two elongated rectangular red cedar blocks — reminiscent of units of a Carl Andre sculpture — the glass forms a plane perpendicular to the floor that projects lambent wedges of golden light onto the floor and walls behind it.
Planar geometry and luminous color are also dominant in the centerpiece of Brayman’s show, “Fabric Structure I,” an installation of five evenly spaced identical rectangular sheets of brilliant orange marine canvas draped over two parallel horizontal aluminum poles suspended from the ceiling to form a nine-foot-tall and two-foot-wide central passageway. Close in hue to the saffron used in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s famous Central Park “Gates,” Brayman’s canvas panels cast warm reflected light that activates the surrounding space. Positioned between Spafford’s and Rosser’s galleries, “Fabric Structure I” functions as both a literal and symbolic bridge — linking three artists who demonstrate that abstraction remains a fertile language for invention in contemporary art.
“Warren Rosser: Unexpected Occurrences,” “Alayne Spafford: Over/Under” and “Andy Brayman: Material Forward” continue at Haw Contemporary, 1600 Liberty St., through April 15. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, 816.842.5877 or hawcontemporary.com.
