Markus Amm continues to examine the roots, both conceptual and material, of abstract painting. He locates abstraction––as a discipline––not as a system of gestures, but as a way of orienting oneself toward the world. His work is less about accumulating a series of marks than it is about constructing an atmosphere or attitude, and accordingly, he upends expectations about how the process of painting takes place. This is especially apparent in the latest gesso board paintings. To create these works, Amm puts down a layer of oil paint, waits for it to dry, sands it down, and then applies another layer before repeating the sequence again. Each hue seamlessly blends into the others, creating a field of luminosity that appears to be in constant flux, and that never settles into a single color. Furthermore, because the paint is allowed to accumulate on the edges of the gesso board, Amm complicates the relationship between the center and the edges of each composition, and makes distinctions between foreground and background difficult to make. Though it can be read as a new entry in a lineage that spans from J.M.W. Turner to Rothko, Amm's work has a sculptural, matter-of-fact immediacy that places it in conversation with contemporary practices outside of painting.