The upcoming 13th solo exhibition of new color paintings by Mark Sheinkman at Von Lintel GAllery is a special treat.

I believe that having worked with Mark since 1997 has made me a bit of an expert. In 1994, Sheinkman decided to confine himself to the use of paper, graphite and erasers, forcing himself to squeeze new life out of these conventional tools. Mark once told me that by reducing his options, he was able to access more possibilities.

His consistent investigation of the figure-to-ground relationship, with the chosen limitations of his materials, has become a trademark of his. Over the last two decades, I have witnessed his profound evolution, from works on paper of relatively simple compositions based largely on repetitions of a single line or shape, to paintings reminiscent of translucent ribbons of light and whisps of smoke, made, remarkably, almost entirely through a subtractive process.

More recently, Sheinkman has moved from a series of black and white canvases with deliberate, yet spontaneous, mark-making, to this new body of work, which I would describe as canvases marked by untethered, exuberant freedom, with graceful, painterly lines of color.

On the surface, Sheinkman’s most recent foray into color looks like a giant shift, but it is really a culmination of his ambition to synthesize sculptural and architectural features with abstraction, using the visual language he has been perfecting all along. Tarrah von Lintel

Sheinkman was born in New York in 1963 and received a B.A. from Princeton University. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He has exhibited regularly in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany.