Lynda Benglis, Mark Manders and Nicolas Party in Infinite Regress
19 September 2024— 22 February 2025
Group exhibition at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA
Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond brings the past in dialogue with the present through selections from the Permanent Collection paired with works by contemporary artists exhibiting at the museum for the first time on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. The exhibition connects these works through a shared vocabulary of mystical abstraction that has both historical and contemporary resonance, engaging periods of extreme transformation in nature and technology.
In philosophy, the term infinite regress refers to an endless sequence of reasoning in which each new idea depends on the one that came before—a paradox of unlimited reformulation wherein the future is built on the past. Infinite Regress is also the title of a series of paintings by Eamon Ore-Giron in which each work is a slight variation on its predecessor. The series is intended to disrupt notions of stable or fixed knowledge, positing an idea of knowledge as cumulative, progressing by always looking to the past yet with new perspectives. Art and ideas advance by recycling their own histories.
Spanning more than a century, this exhibition addresses modern humankind’s search for balance within nature and technology. Artists Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley were inspired by spiritual concepts circulating during the early 20th century, leading many to choose abstraction over the material world. Today, contemporary artists such as Ore-Giron, Chelsea Culprit, and Shannon Bool, draw upon an even broader range of sources, including their artistic forebears, in their search for elevated meaning. Together, these works offer an intergenerational dialogue about art as a spiritual home in a beautiful and troubled world.