A painting can carry a field of color, but it can also carry the history of how its material was handled. In “Edgeless: In the Expanded Field of Painting,” opening Sept. 24 at San Diego State University's University Art Gallery, four Southern California artists cut, stitch, burn, dye and fire their way beyond the medium's familiar rectangle.
Curator Jacqueline Marino has assembled work by Anna Betbeze, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Monique van Genderen and Lizzie Zelter. Their methods borrow from sculpture, installation and performance without abandoning painting as the central question. The exhibition's title treats the edge less as a boundary to cross once than as a place where definitions are repeatedly tested.
Betbeze works on flokati rugs, making wool carry pigment and physical alteration. Zuckerman-Hartung layers language, theory, improvisation and comedy into constructed surfaces. Van Genderen experiments with process, material and scale, while Zelter uses what Marino calls a hybridized, additive approach. SDSU's preview describes influences that include poetry, feminist theory, literature and film, translated through abstraction rather than displayed as a reading list.
That range gives the group show a useful risk. “Expanded painting” can become a broad label that absorbs any object with pigment, leaving viewers without a way to distinguish one decision from another. By placing four practices together, the gallery can make comparison do the explanatory work: how a sewn seam redirects attention, how a burned surface records time, or how an object changes when it occupies floor and wall at once.
The public program begins before the reception. Marino will speak Sept. 22 from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m. in Hepner Hall, Room 221. The opening reception with artists follows Sept. 24 from 4 to 7 p.m. in the fourth-floor courtyard at the University Art Gallery. Van Genderen will give a second lecture Oct. 8, also in Hepner Hall. The exhibition is scheduled to remain on view through Dec. 3.
Those events make participation part of the presentation. A curator's lecture can identify the lineage behind the phrase “expanded field,” while an artist's talk can return attention to labor: what was cut, joined, revised or discarded. The work is not fully available through a list of materials, but materials give visitors a foothold. They establish that touch and construction are evidence, not decoration added after an image was conceived.
SDSU Art Galleries organized the exhibition with support from the School of Art and Design, the Richard Anthony Marks Endowment and the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts. The university's announcement does not list admission charges; visitors should check gallery information and campus parking guidance before attending. That practical access matters on a campus where the gallery occupies an academic building rather than a separate museum district.
“Edgeless” arrives as a proposition, not a verdict on what painting has become. Its four artists share an appetite for revision while working from different intellectual and physical starting points. The exhibition's success will depend on whether those differences remain legible in the room. If they do, the edge of a painting will not disappear. It will become one more material the artists can make visible.