Material Memory

Hollis Taggart Downtown is pleased to present Material Memory, a group exhibition featuring new and recent paintings and sculptures by seven contemporary artists, Megan Baker, Edward Holland, Ashanté Kindle, Hans Neleman, Cordy Ryman, Kelly Wang, and Michael Wolf. Material Memory proposes that memory is not something we recall, but something that is physically constructed and embodied in surfaces, bodies, systems, and structures. Across painting, relief, sculpture and assemblage, the artists in the exhibition treat memory as an active process that is built through accumulation, altered through time, and sustained through material form. The works do not illustrate the past, they retain and remake it. Curated by Eleanor de Ropp Flatow, the exhibition celebrates the first anniversary of the Hollis Taggart Downtown, and underscores the gallery’s continued commitment to emerging and mid-career artists. It will be on view from May 15 through June 20, with an opening reception on Friday, May 15, from 6-8pm.

Cordy Ryman’s work serves as a structural anchor for the exhibition. Emerging from the tradition of minimalism, he fuses painting and sculpture. For Material Memory, Ryman presents a site-specific installation of approximately 65 wall-mounted box elements that extend into space, activating the architecture of the gallery. Built from layered, carved, painted wooden panels with exposed edges, each block emphasizes Ryman’s playful and improvised process. The installation registers time through accumulation and interaction, transforming discrete units into a larger evolving system. Memory is embedded not only within each component, but also in their shifting relationship as a whole.

Megan Baker’s paintings absorb and reconfigure the compositional languages of Old Master works, specifically for this series the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites. She embeds art history into the works so that memory operates as a material inheritance rather than a reference. Her compositions balance a visual structural language of the past with fluid and painterly gestures of the now, creating surfaces that feel measured yet improvised.

Hans Neleman’s assemblage collages reconstruct fragments of classical portraiture into layered, sculptural compositions that exist between representation and abstraction. Working with torn historical imagery, distressed paper and mixed media, he creates fractured portraits that appear both eroded and reassembled. These box-like constructions function as intimate reliquaries, where faces emerge from layered surfaces, suggesting that the past persists as something continually reconstructed in the present.

Edward Holland’s paintings draw from a series exploring the overlap between myth-making and abstraction, using the modern Zodiac as a geometric foundation. His works rely on geometric frameworks, layered patterns, and collaged cosmological references over painterly backdrops. The paintings evoke diagrams, constellations and symbolic matrices, and suggest that abstraction remains deeply connected to human attempts to organize perception and meaning.

Ashanté Kindle approaches abstraction as a biographical and spiritual process. Celebrating the unique qualities of Black hair, Kindle uses hair tools like brushes, barrettes, hair knockers, and cowrie shells to create circular compositions that treat the body as a carrier of memory. Rooted in a personal and cultural investigation of identity, her work draws on the symbolic significance of hair as a site for autonomy, transformation, and inherited history. Through layered compositions that suggest portals and shifting states of being, Kindle positions memory as something actively reconstituted through material and ritual.

Kelly Wang’s multidisciplinary practice draws on Chinese art history, and ink traditions, which she reconfigures through collage, painting, sculpture, and found materials. Subtle tonal modulation, restrained palettes, and atmospheric surfaces create tension through nuance and delay. Balancing hard edges with fluid, organic forms, her work positions cultural memory as something continually translated and reworked through material experimentation and the diasporic experience.

Michael Wolf’s sculptural constructions similarly explore abstraction through structure and balance extending painterly activities into three dimensional spaces. Drawing on traditions of 16th through 18th century wood carvers, his works emphasize weight, balance, physical labor, and spatial tension. His surfaces are treated with tactile directness with deep carving and gilding that reveals the labor of making. The pentagonal geometry of the works combined with the fluid draped forms, generates tension between mass and weightlessness. He creates structures where past and present converge, and memory is shaped through place and material.

Together, the artists in Material Memory demonstrate through form, gesture, and material, that memory is not fixed, but continually constructed. Memory is embedded in materials, shaped through process, and reconfigured over time.

For more information about Material Memory, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact us at press@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.