OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER | OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER | LOS ANGELES 29.05.25 - 03.07.25
A display of monochromatic free newspaper distribution boxes, all 2025, Citizen (Free), Daily (Green), Insider 2 (Purple), Observer (Beige), and Sun (Orange), sits on a series of pedestals made of four worktables of varied heights from Rita McBride’s studio. The sculptures, which were removed from the street and painted to closely match their original color, stand as monoliths empty of information. Like much of McBride’s work, their meaning is responsive and mutable to the conditions in which it is displayed. They are a site of potential, nodding not only to shifting modes of design, but to a given form’s relationship to the public through both intended and actual use.
Alan Charlton had his first exhibition with Konrad Fischer in 1972, when he was twenty-four years old. He has been working ever since in steadfast dedication to the painting of gray monochromes on standardized, shaped, and multi-paneled canvases. Grounded in the register of the real, his work engages with and absorbs its surroundings. They, too, are emptied out of information, simultaneously containers of the infinite, and flat executions of slapstick semiotics gesturing towards the urban and the industrial. For example, five gray panels, Untitled (May 1977), fold interior and exterior, like the poured concrete sidewalk from which McBride’s works were pulled and which is visible through the gallery door.
Each working with self-imposed restrictions, Charlton and McBride’s works act on the edge of formation and dissolution of their own meaning. For Charlton, a painting is only completed in the site of the exhibition when it is first put on display. McBride’s sculptures walk back function to allow contemplation of the politics of form, flirting with the possibility of their own return into the world from which they sprung.