Roland Gebhardt: The Incisionary Construction of Space and the Void as Imaginary

When someone trains to become an artist, s/he or they are given a set of biases. S/he or they are told that light carries information and must come forward in space, while darkness lacks such information and must recede back into space. The person is also made to believe that the positive space positions the subject and the foreground, while the negative space carries the background. At a certain point, however, a reversal of relationships occurs in what s/he or they observe and conceive. It is a reversal of highlight to shadow, foreground to background, and positive to negative space, which breaks the rigid associations and hierarchies in how one perceives and understands the visual world around oneself. Roland Gebhardt (Born 1939, Suriname) has dedicated a lifetime honing a practice wrought from this paradigm shift, and the presence of the void is the basis of Gebhardt’s solo exhibition at David Richard Gallery, titled “Framing Perceptual Illusions: A series of wall sculptures examines presence, absence, and voids.” The viewer is presented with white, minimalistic geometric constructions that play with the concept of information in terms of presence versus absence and the real versus the imaginary. 

Gebhardt pioneered minimal sculptural works in the early 1960s when he initially played with the concept of in-between spaces that result from the interaction of shapes. Subsequently, the artist began to make precise surgical incisions in the form of a long line or edge of a plane into objects to create “linear voids” that he equates to drawings. Gebhardt continued this trajectory by … Click here to read more