SO SWEET… SO PERVERSE
Freight + Volume
July 12 – August 30, 2025
39 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013
Curated by Steven Stewart, So Sweet… So Perverse at Freight + Volume brings together a group of eight artists—Derek Franklin, Ethan Greenbaum, Peter Gronquist, Terry Haggerty, Jim Lee, Sylvan Lionni, Jessica Sanders, and Frank Stella—for a fresh take on Minimalism’s enduring tensions and unexpected sensualities. In a moment where figuration has regained dominance in contemporary art, this exhibition makes a compelling case for abstraction’s mischievous and materially rich return.
The show casts Minimalism not as a static historical movement, but as a living, morphing language—an “imperfectly perfect” tool for confronting contemporary disarray. The legacy of Frank Stella looms large here, but not reverently. Instead, his flat geometries and literalist materiality are reinterpreted as points of departure for artists who wrestle with Minimalism’s austerity while infusing it with humor, politics, and physicality.
Jessica Sanders’s beeswax sculptures evoke bodily vulnerability, resisting the cool detachment often associated with minimal forms. Derek Franklin’s cast-concrete works, by contrast, lean into raw weight and presence, emphasizing physicality over refinement. Sylvan Lionni’s paintings obsessively reimagine comic book icons into precise, abstracted forms—mimicking the grid while undermining its authority. Ethan Greenbaum and Peter Gronquist each contribute pieces that toy with illusion and dimensionality, while Jim Lee’s and Terry Haggerty’s contributions push the surface tension of painting to a breaking point.
Despite the show’s cerebral references, it refuses to be cold. There is irreverence here—visible in the show’s title, its playful curatorial text, and in its embrace of “kinky formalism.” Whether in wax, concrete, digital fabrication, or ceramic, these works collectively nod to Minimalism’s rigor while rejecting its severity. It’s not a return, but a reanimation.
