Gallery Sonja Roesch in Houston has a great show up right now. Roesch is a German native, and she likes minimalism, which admittedly is not everyone’s cup of tea. But Berlin-based Dieter Balzer‘s constructions hit all the right spots. For one thing, they are impeccably constructed — and by impeccably, I mean as clean and perfect as anything I’ve ever seen. He uses MDF painted with the enamel with the adhesive foil that’s used on the exterior of airplanes.
For another thing, Balzer is doing colorful, hard-edged abstraction very, very well. The colors are great, and the use of 3-4 overlapping layers in each piece makes for interesting changes in depth of field as you walk by them.
These images don’t really do them justice, and the best works are multi-layered boxes that seem to float from the wall, not pictured. The boxes manage to hint at Judd obliquely, while remaining very much their own thing. Go see the show. It’s up through January 2.
