“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”

The quote from the computer scientist and mathematician, Edsger Dijkstra gives us another way to think about abstraction much in the same way artists have allowed us to see the world in a different way. From work based on the material world, your inner life, transient feelings or a purely non-objective approach Core Art Space invites you to participate in this fresh take on abstract art.

Juror, Michael Paglia, an art and architecture critic, wrote a weekly column for Westword, Denver's alternative weekly, for 25 years. He taught in the art history department at the University of Colorado at Denver and has authored several books and monographs. He also worked on arts programming for Denver's Channel 12, a local PBS station. In 2023, he received a Colorado Governor's Award for the Arts.

The Edgewater Library Reading Room is a beautiful, quiet place to display work. Curator Erin Mulrooney invited me to show, “Three large pieces.”

BRDG Project’s first open call juried by Michael Burnett, Curator/Owner Space Gallery.

“A testament to the transformative power of art, nature, and the limitless depths of beauty that emerge from the smallest beginnings.”

The space around a page of text; the edge of the image, the border of a country; the perimeter of an ocean; the amount of profit or the difference between winning and losing: outside the norms; on the edge of vision; living on the edge; outsiders. Where do your margins begin and end? A margin of error might be a saving grace, but falling outside the margin can mean anything from stepping off a curb to falling off a cliff. Explore this liminal space  with Core Art Space. We can’t wait to see what you find on the margins!

Juror: Joe Higgins is a well-respected Colorado artist working primarily in monotypes.

"I work in monotype and my pictures deal with place, spiritual presence  and the vexations of making connections of the spirit. The images are representational, but also conceptual and symbolic." 

Higgins has taught classes in monotype at the Art Students League of Denver  since 2010. He has shown in many venues including Boulder Art Center, Sangre de Christo Arts Center, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, and the  Aspen Art Museum. In 1988, he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Colorado Council on the Arts. His work is available at G44 Gallery, 1785 8th St in Colorado Springs.

July, 2024 D’art Gallery 900 Santa Fe Dr., Denver, Co

Jul 5 First Friday 6-9pm

Jul 12 Artist Reception/D’art 5th Anniversary Party 6-9pm

Jul 19 Live Music 6-8pm

Jul 28 Sundays on Santa Fe 11-4pm

My Ambiguous Abstraction can’t escape the use of lines. Where do these lines begin and end. How do they terminate? Where do they go?

Do lines outline a form, or are they long, thin forms themselves? Do they contain a shape or lend definition. Are they a map or schematic or a graph of some inner activity? Do they lead or block the eye as it transits the field?

These are some of the questions that run through my mind as I paint these lines…

Fred Voigt Becker’s annual “shared solo” show at Core Art Space. This year showing with Reed Weimer, “Strata - A Continuation.”

Fred enjoys his exploration of combining patterning and color field painting in this new body of work.

Drawing on the success of his recent series derived from patterns found in crushed Ram trucks and exemplified in “Nature of Dust,” Fred continues extrapolating from the imagery and incorporates mark making and language.

Niza Knoll’s Alternative Printmaking show celebrating The Month of Printmaking. Mo’Print is a biennial celebration that highlights the art of making original, fine art prints to inspire, educate and promote awareness in the Denver metropolitan area, the front range region, and throughout Colorado.

“Scales” investigates the role size plays in the understanding of an artwork. From the tiniest, most intimately sized sculptures to paintings that loom impossibly large, viewers will journey across a crescendo of visual scales within the gallery.

Juried by Laine Godsey

January 5 - January 21

Core Art Space, located in the 40 West Art District in Lakewood, Colorado is a member-run artists co-op. Core has a long and vibrant history of providing a platform for exhibiting a diverse community of artists.  In the first members’ show of the year, Core invites the public to help us kick off the new year by celebrating the wide array of individuality, expression, and community in this exhibit of “New Beginnings”.

In keeping with the mission of Core to create and maintain a dynamic, independent forum for the contemporary arts, we strive for an atmosphere that will encourage both non-judgmental, competitive and accessible exhibitions for the community at large.

Please see our website to  Meet Our Artists www.coreartspace.com/artists-gallery   

Fred Voigt Becker regards the world as a place of great excess and great want. He views the visual world as a cacophony of brilliant sounds and colors directly leaping into one another. Nothing is spared. There is nowhere to hide from the aural and visual intensity or variety - it's an endless flood. There is no want and nothing is lacking in this world.

Desire is also a flood, but one that leads to drought. Endless, unsatisfiable greed drive our species to unimaginable extremes of inhumanity, and in the daily, mundane sense create income inequality, hunger, homelessness, and despair.

Would that he could feed us with color! But paintings are not food that fills a hungry belly. Fred's own desire to make great paintings, to be known, drives his ecstatic expressions. At times he thinks it all seems futile, childishly egotistic, and he wants to bury them all in dry dirt. Can you eat of this and be satisfied?

Still, the flood keeps coming.

Annual Solo Show at Core Art Space located in the 40 W Art Hub, 6501 W. Colfax Av, Denver

“On Edge” Edge Gallery Annual Juried Exhibition, Juried by Annie Geimer

931 Gallery, 931 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO

Mark Brasuell has invited me to show with him at 931! Mark’s show, “Traumwelt,” will feature his new, very large, charcoal drawings on paper.

My show, “Generative,” saturated with frenetic color, will make an interesting counterpoint to Mark’s frenetic black and white!

This will be a super-fun show!

Core Art Space

May 12th – May 28th, 2023

Floral imagery has a long history beginning with the Dutch Master’s realistic still lifes, then onto Monet’s light filled water lilies. In contemporary art there’s Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits with flowers, Georgia O’Keefe’s enlarged sensual closeups and Joan Mitchell’s large abstract expressionist florals.

The term Flower Power originated in the 60s where flowers were used to symbolize the passive resistance movement to war. Flowers have long symbolized romance even having its own language and also represents femininity, growth and lushness.

Where do you fit in this spectrum?  Whether realistic, expressionistic, impressionistic, symbolistic, abstract or political and conceptual…. Let’s explore what current floral imagery means to you. All mediums/disciplines welcome but for video.

Juror, Michael Paglia, an art and architecture critic, has written a column for Westword, Denver's alternative weekly, since 1995. He teaches in the art history department at the University of Colorado at Denver and has authored several books and monographs. He also works on arts programming for Denver's local PBS station.

The Lab on Santa Fe Art Gallery, 840 N Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO

I Sing the Body Electric pays homage to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Artists investigate what art means in relation to Transcendentalism and Nature and how spirituality includes everything that life is, the good, the bad and the ugly as well as the thin boundary between our exterior and interior world.

Sack of Muck is about the interface between the body and the spirit.

Sack of Muck is a large, red painting that has immediate visceral impact. Red is a color that evokes passion or warns of danger, and we react to red with increased blood pressure, breathing and metabolism. The color field of the painting is rich with many layers of paint - there is an earlier abstract expressionist style painting showing through under the color field - and demands the viewers close attention. Seen almost secondarily is the text, turned on its side and not immediately literal, the letters of which organize the space on the flat plane. If the viewer decides to read, the philosophical content of the piece begins to reveal itself. However, the content of the message is quite outside our current cultural norms or understanding. It pulls the viewer off balance, demanding they rethink their relationship with their own and other's bodies as an avenue to finding the spirit!

Opening Reception February 17th, 5 - 10 PM

Core Art Space presents a nationwide open call exhibit which presents art focused on what "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" means to the artists. Juried by Dana Cain, a show promoter who owns and operates several large festivals around town, was tasked with considering pieces that might feature a romantic tendency to view things through an optimistic filter… Where the glass isn't simply half full - it's filled with pink lemonade or pink champagne.

Yet on the other hand, perhaps it’s a tendency to falsely paint reality in a rosier hue because otherwise, it's too unpleasant or uncomfortable. Then there is simply the lush color theme of rich reds, marvelous mauves, passionate pinks and rhapsodic roses.

Core Art Space celebrates the coolest street in America along with our new home in the 40 West Art Hub with an open-themed member show featuring a fantastic road-crew of artists. See sculpture, assemblage, painting, ceramics, collage, and who knows what else from the coolest, Colfaxiest art co-op in Colorado.

Four Color Field paintings make a great display in Edgewater Libiary’s perfect reading room! Original Nature is a rich, scraped, lined painting full of nuance and hidden details. The threee “Green Mesa” paintings continue the theme of stripes in a landscape format.

Solo show in D’art’s Gallery East will feature large, color-field paintings.

New Work by Fred Voigt Becker.

Fred Voigt Becker gets half the gallery. Robert Davis Garner has the other half. These artists showed together in 2021 and received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Core New Art Space is moving! Our new location will be just east of our current address, across the Casa Bonita shopping center parking lot in a free-standing building. The new address is: 6501 W. Colfax Ave, Studio C, Lakewood, CO 80214.

We anticipate that this will be the first show in the new space! We look forward to seeing you there!

First Friday and Artist’s Reception, June 3

Core Hours: Friday, 5-10 pm, Saturday, 12-5 pm, Sunday, 12-4 pm

It’s time for CORE’s ode to the joyful renewal marked by the vernal equinox. Spring Break is an open call to artists across America. The rebirth that is springtime has been celebrated with festivals and depicted by artists of nearly every civilization, ancient to contemporary. It’s hard not to love this time of year.

Artist reception: Friday, May 13th, 2022 5pm – 10p

Fred Voigt Becker exhibits, “Cut from a Cloth,” nine oil paintings on canvas
that form one unique instillation, at Awake Café, 2200 Clay St Unit 100, Denver, CO 80211. info@awakedenver.com
Phone: 720-379-7665
Website: awakedenver.com
Fred Voigt Becker's show, "Cut from a Cloth," honors the paintings that exist prior to the finished product. Cut from one, six-foot square canvas, repainted and re-mounted, these nine images work both individually and synergistically.
Awake Café is a radically inclusive alcohol-free bar, bottle shop and coffee house. Awake is
located south of the Highlands Pedestrian Bridge on the west side of I-25. Join us as part of your
First Friday Art excursion, May 6.
Hours: Mon-Tues, 7am-3pm Wed-Sat, 7am-10pm Sunday,7am-5pm.