Constructures: New Perimetrics in Abstract Painting — Exhibition Catalogue, Nohra Haime Gallery, New York, c.1985

Exhibition catalogue / booklet
Nohra Haime Gallery, 1000 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021
Offset print on matte stock, stapled
c.1985

Rare exhibition catalogue issued by Nohra Haime Gallery, New York, for Constructures: New Perimetrics in Abstract Painting, a mid-1980s group exhibition examining geometric abstraction, shaped pictorial space, constructed surfaces, and post-minimal painting languages at a moment when abstraction was being reconsidered after conceptual art and late modernism.

The publication’s severe typographic cover design — halfway between architectural proposal, proto-digital graphics, and bureaucratic science-fiction — unexpectedly anticipates later conversations around techno-formalism, Neo-Geo aesthetics, speculative architecture, and administrative abstraction. Rather than presenting painting as purely optical, the exhibition reframes abstraction as constructed spatial logic: perimeter, edge, support, structure, system.

Seen now, the document feels surprisingly close to later conversations surrounding Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, Philippe Thomas-era display structures, graphic identity systems, and post-conceptual exhibition design.

Condition: Good vintage condition. Light handling wear, edge softening, surface rubbing, age toning, and minor creasing consistent with gallery circulation and archive storage.

Part exhibition document, part design artifact, part failed future-modernist proposal, the object survives less as a neutral catalogue than as a fragment from a moment when abstraction attempted to reorganise itself through systems language, architecture, and display logic.

A temporary support structure retained long enough to become object again.

Shipping and handling included.