Loren Connors: Evening Air

opening reception: Saturday, May 31, 4–6pm, with a performance from Connors at 5pm.

“Evening Air,” Loren Connors’s third solo exhibition with Blank Forms, presents a suite of five large-scale works that push the artist’s exploration of atmosphere and landscape toward pure  abstraction. These works shift as the light changes, revealing subtle internal geographies: reflective sheens of smoothed acrylic, stray brush hairs, and embedded lint—residues of Connors’s physical process. The paintings’ roughly assembled frames, variously nailed and stapled together, heighten the sense of immediacy and tactility. Traces of Connors’s earlier influences—Rothko’s “Dark Paintings,” “the feeling of horizon” gathered at the canvas’s center—do linger here, but the paintings in “Evening Air” drift focus, homing in on the materiality of paint and color, exploring opacity, density, and nearly imperceptible gradation. Layers of saturated and unnatural red, green, and blue accumulate so densely that they become asymptotically black, creating surfaces that absorb and withhold.

Loren Connors (b. 1949) studied visual art at Southern Connecticut State College in his hometown of New Haven in the early seventies. An active musician and poet, Connors is most well-known for his distinctly ephemeral blues. His visual practice reflects a similar approach to his music—both are marked by open forms, light touches, and sweeping gestures. Connors’s delicate, skeletal drawings have appeared as album art on his records and served as backdrops for live performances. More recently, his paintings, drawings, and compositions have been the subject of the books Wildweeds (2021) and Night of Rain (2022). Connors has exhibited his visual work in group settings, including Sonic Youth’s touring exhibition “Sensational Fix” (2009), and solo exhibitions, including “Wildweeds” (2018) and “A Coming to Shore” (2023) at Blank Forms.

Please join us for the exhibition’s opening from on Saturday, May 31. The gallery will open at noon, drinks will be served from 4–6pm, and Connors will play a special solo set at 5pm.