Exhibition Review: "So Sweet ... So Perverse" at Freight + Volume Gallery, Tribeca (on view through August 30, 2025)

Installation view of So Sweet ... So Perverse at Freight + Volume, Tribeca (on view through August 30, 2025)

By LIAM OTERO August 22, 2025

It’s been a fantastic year for Minimalism in New York and we’re only in August. Hunter Dunbar’s East <—> West show got the job done in breaking down the invisible barriers that divided Asian minimalism from its North & South American compatriots. Now, Freight + Volume’s So Sweet … So Perverse exhibition examines Minimalism from a totally different angle - the “less is more” sentiment, which is my numero uno draw for why this particular style of art is so incredibly distinct. Though this show’s narrative exposes viewers to the visual and conceptual vigorousness that lies at the heart of Minimalism, it does not overwhelm nor take an aggressive approach in demonstrating Minimalism’s might, for as the opening line of the press release so eloquently prefaces: “A yawn is just a silent shout …”. And thus, the artists & works selected here vie for equilibrium in articulating Minimalism’s presiding influence along with its meditative calm.

Whenever an exhibition has a big claim that it needs to advocate for (i.e. its thesis statement), it is imperative that the show does not lose sight of its objectives and throw everything at the viewer at once in a showy display. Amazingly, Freight + Volume handles this with the utmost grace. All of the works are spaced out in such a way where there is literal breathing room for each painting, sculpture, and print on view - not a single work steals the show from its neighbors. 

Terry Haggerty, Step by Step, 2016, acrylic on wood panel. 72 x 149 in. / 182.9 x 3785. cm.

Minimalism’s ties to abstraction is the primary mode of how this style is represented in the exhibition. Op Art is clearly making a comeback thanks to Terry Haggerty as his acrylic paintings are optically arresting plays on color, movement, and repetition. The coexistence of diagonal and straight vertical black-and-white lines practically squished together in the shaped canvas work of Step by Step (2016) will have you convinced that this painting’s surface is alive and pulsating. Jessica Sanders’s Field SU6 (2016) is a stretched linen work with applied beeswax. The darkened green ground appears fairly uniform from a distance, but one cannot just look at this work from afar, as closer inspection is equally meritorious in discovering the variations of shading and application (think of how Barnett Newman preferred his viewers to stand almost at nose-length from his humongous zip paintings). The more intimately-scaled oil on cast concrete paintings of Derek Franklin are like the broken pieces of a glass window that have been reattached and reordered, but to what end in potentially transforming our perceptions of the subjects from its original context?

Derek Franklin, Constructing a World in A Predetermined State #25, 2025, oil on cast concrete. 9.5 x 1.375 x 11.5 in. / 24.1 x 3.5 x 29.2 cm

Ethan Greenbaum, on the other hand, initially seems to divert from the exhibition’s narrative with his gesturally warm-toned painting of splotchy orange and yellow patches of paint over monochromatic white-black striations. However, the title says all: “__________, _____________, ______________”. It’s not an untitled work, for the blanks are used as the title itself. Absence giving form. Jim Lee, Peter Gronquist, Sylvan Lionni balance out the show with their more puristic minimalist works rendered with the least amount of color and detail possible (with the exception of Gronquist’s Triangle I that is beautifully framed by the gallery’s back gallery exposed bricked archways). Although Jim Lee deserves special mention for his quite tactile and materially varied manifestations of spatiality as he has used everything from homemade tattoo ink to rabbit skin glue. 

Peter Gronquist, Triangle I, 2025, stainless steel, ammonium nitrate, oil. 71 x 26 1/4 x 62 in. / 180.3 x 66.7 x 157.5 cm.

While abstraction is an overarching theme, Freight + Volume proves that this is not exclusionary as there are excellent examples for how Minimalism enters the figurative realm. Gronquist and Lionni both emphasize the thingness of found objects in a sculptural vein. Gronquist’s Civil War (2025) is a combination of two shopping carts whose caged bodies merge with one another in a collapsed backwards position. Like deer horns locked in combat, these carts seem to exhibit a moment of physical tension with one another. The two carts look piled up and nothing more, yet I can sense there is more than meets the eye because of the implied formal narrative given through Gronquist’s economical interventions in how much material he relies on to communicate its story. Lionni does something similar with Stack (2025), a white metal folding chair on top of another at an oblique angle. But hold on a minute, this is not any chair stack. Look closely and you will see that the legs of the topmost chair goes through the bottom chair. Are these two chairs or one? Lionni presents us with a formal dilemma in how we perceive the work because of this very minor, albeit significant technical choice. 

An early Frank Stella work on paper, Untitled (1966), that presages his trippier, tunnel-vision geometric works of around 1968 - 1969, is possibly the quietest and humblest work in this show as its brown-on-brown, shrunken, off-centered square hangs off to the side along the protruding section of wall near the desk that can only be seen when you are leaving the gallery. Even then, you need to get up close in order to really recognize this as a Stella. I found this placement to be a respectful homage to Stella’s legacy in being one of the most important post-war American painters, but in also reminding viewers that Stella’s creative contributions to the rise of Minimalism is why we are even able to see these kinds of works in an established gallery like Freight + Volume. The press release - one of the best texts I’ve read all year - was so correct in describing this cohort of artists as being “a congregation of weirdoes doing unexpected things in this unexpected new chapter of the art world.” I think that excerpt alone perfectly sums up the history of Minimalism in a nutshell, too.

Installation view of So Sweet ... So Perverse at Freight + Volume, Tribeca (on view through August 30, 2025)