NYC Art Shows- Peter Opheim at The Hole

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 252024
 

Peter Opheim has created a charming, colorful world for Cocoon at The Hole. It’s worth bending down to get a closer look at the little clay creatures that helped form the basis for the characters in his paintings.

From the press release-

After a 25-year career as an abstract painter, Opheim started anew; “since everything we see in the world around us has already been painted”, a family of imaginary creatures and Opheim’s career-defining style was born. His works are an intuitive manifestation of emergence: sculpting the figures first in clay, Opheim removes roadblocks to his imagination. Working intuitively with his hands, the creatures reveal themselves to him and he then paints “from life”.

Not focused on conveying a snapshot of our contemporary world or visual markers of the present day, the sculptural approach to making the subjects of the paintings results in works that exist out of time—the characters are transient yet grounded in subdued color fields, their bodies and borders ambiguous and hazy. In Meadow of My Heart, Holding You and others, multiple figures fill the canvas, an assortment of semi-recognizable parts from a few fuzzy friends fill the canvas, cat-like ears, skinny arms or blobby bodies, with many large eyeballs blinking. In paintings such as Thinking of You a lone figure presents themselves, staring right back at you.

Rather than conveying grandiosity, Opheim instead is in the pursuit of emotional impact. The exhibition includes smaller paintings than ever before, making viewers look closely and the textural brush strokes more prominent. In the large rear gallery, small sculptures are positioned on the floor, barely visible from the other side of the room and dwarfed by 17-foot ceilings. Above the paintings, large woven flowers climb the length of the wall, further figures revealing themselves at the base of the stems: a sense of coziness and protection settles in with clay figures nestled in a small wooden home carved by a fallen tree on his property in Taos, New Mexico.

For this recent body of work there is a shift to a different type of subtlety based on concepts of emergence, interconnectedness, and growth. The title Cocoon is a multifaceted metaphor for these themes, as when a caterpillar spins its body transforming into a chrysalis and cocoon, it is surrendering to transform. This emergence can’t be expedited; patience and independence are crucial, a butterfly must emerge on its own. In the work we see an emergence of form, skillful blurred brush marks of creatures in a softer, hazier palette than when we first showed Opheim in 2018 and an emergence of emotions, a warm joy, the sensation of standing in the sun. These new paintings were difficult to make, notes Opheim, with the figures only starting to reveal themself once the painting was close to completion. Opheim notes the importance of an intuitive organic emergence: “we can have preconceptions on how something is supposed to be, but that’s not how they are made”.

Standing In The Sun, I Feel Your Arms Around Me the title of one of the larger paintings in the show and one of the potential titles for the exhibition, evokes the physical warmth that you feel in these paintings. The hues and figures are inviting yet the asymmetric, spherical bodies have just enough wonkiness to not be classified as overly “cute”. Opheim has shown extensively in Asia where Kawaii culture is widely pervasive and appreciated: New York is known for many things, but cuteness would not be one of them. While foreign, Opheim’s visual language feels refreshing and necessary, inviting curiosity and play through imagery we don’t often see in Western art. Here, Opheim is deliberately moving on from a lot of what we see in galleries at the moment and instead gives us enough room to think on our own, leaving space for our own joy and pleasure.

 

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

NYC Art Shows- Rachel MacFarlane at Hollis Taggart

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 242024
 

“After Storm in the Fen”, 2024, Oil on canvas

“Squall Lines”, 2024, Oil on canvas

For Rachel MacFarlane’s exhibition, Coming Events Cast Their Light Before Them, at Hollis Taggart, she has painted several dreamlike landscapes based on her travels to places impacted by climate events. She first creates maquettes from her observations (three are on view) and then uses them as the basis for the paintings.

From the press release-

At its core, MacFarlane’s work is about lamenting the loss of specific landscapes through creating and depicting new worlds where humans are no longer the protagonists. MacFarlane spends much of her time immersed in unique geographical environments – often ones that have been heavily impacted by climate change-related weather events. While working on her newest body of work, MacFarlane spent extensive time in places ranging from the Adirondacks to Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park in Maine, and from Prince Edward Island right after it had been hit by Hurricane Fiona to Clearwater, Manitoba during unprecedented flooding. As has always been her practice, MacFarlane does not document while she travels, instead preferring to absorb the atmosphere of a place and spend time really immersed in its sights and sounds. Upon returning to her studio, MacFarlane transforms her observations into three-dimensional maquettes created out of paper, paint, and plastic.

As MacFarlane describes it, a lot of play takes place at her collage table, as she manufactures new spaces based loosely on the spirit of specific ones, drawing on a myriad of influences from theatre and architecture to the world-building of science fiction literature and movies. The paintings in this show were specifically influenced by MacFarlane’s research into the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a manuscript depicting celestial and weather phenomena made in Augsburg, Germany in the sixteenth century. MacFarlane was moved and inspired by how these anonymous illustrators centuries before her were also dedicated to tracking warning signs in the landscape and to recording them in creative ways.

While she describes the model-building as a distancing method, it is also one that creates intimacy, as the scale shift to a shallow box model leads to the creation of a miniature world we can literally hold in our hands versus the enormity of the environment. After MacFarlane distills the memory of a place into an object, she further transforms it into its final form on the canvas, using bold colors and thick brushwork that highlights the painterliness and artifice of her landscapes. As art critic Barry Schwabsky notes in the catalogue essay, these multiple translations and transformations allow MacFarlane to “operate with and against flatness and depth, illusion and physicality, naturalness and theatricality… Her work gives pleasure but also warns that with all these unavoidable antitheses, the choice of one pole or the other would be hopeless, and we have to learn to live with the tensions between them.”

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

NYC Art Shows- Edward Holland at Hollis Taggart

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 242024
 

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024, Acrylic, charcoal, colored pencil, graphite, ink and marker on canvas with collage

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024 (detail)

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, Acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, ink, permanent marker and oil-based permanent marker on canvas with collage

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, (detail)

Tomorrow (5/25/24) is the last day to see Edward Holland’s mixed media zodiac paintings, At the Bottom of the Celestial Sea, at Hollis Taggart. The layers of color and the collaged items combine to form fascinating portraits of the astrological signs, while also hinting at larger themes.

From the press release-

Edward Holland’s zodiac painting series, which he started creating in 2014, are inspired by the many dimensions of zodiac signs from the astronomical to the astrological and the mythological. Holland incorporates the linear geometry of a zodiacal constellation in each painting, using this as a kind of framework onto which he collages printed papers ranging from notes from his neighbors and poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti to maps and doodles created by his two daughters. Holland then builds on this foundation with graphite and paint, at times scribbling out the words on the printed papers, and at others layering expressive brushwork – usually incorporating the color associated with the given zodiac – in what resemble fragments of Abstract Expressionist paintings. The resulting works are almost like abstracted portraits of each zodiac, inviting the viewer into a game of excavating their many layers of meaning.

To take one example, The Archer (Version 18), 2024, is scaffolded by the constellation of Sagittarius rendered in purple and anchored by moments of bold yellow, which is complementary of the color attributed to the zodiac. Partially hidden beneath layers of paint are instructions for how to bandage a wounded leg as well as anatomical drawings of legs, nodding to Sagittarius’ association with lower limbs. Peeking through at the center of the canvas is the signature moustache of Frank Zappa, the legendary musician and composer born under the sign of Sagittarius. Each painting contains dozens of such zodiacal associations – some more obscure than others, with certain material so painted over that it is no longer visible to the viewer. While it may seem that Holland would search for such reference material intentionally, he only ever uses materials he finds on the street or which is shared with him by friends and family. This adds a sense of wonder to the works, as the material has come to the artist through serendipity.

For more on the artist and this series, Artnet recently visited him in his studio to discuss his work and process.

 

NYC Art Shows- Susan Lichtman at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 232024
 

steven harvey fine art projects is currently showing several of Susan Lichtman‘s paintings for the exhibition Autofiction. Through her use of light and color, her domestic scenes become enchanting.

From the gallery-

Autofiction is a genre of literature that combines autobiography and invention. Lichtman paints scenes of her household and family, however her works serve a novelistic function instead of a documentary one, creating what she thinks of as fictions, which attempt “mystery and specificity at the same time.” Working from memory to depict her own home “somehow allows for a more resolved image.” These scenes are the emotional result of prolonged meditation; portraits of continuity and change over time rather than immediate snapshots. Lichtman’s practice is situated within a long history of painting domestic interiors, her recognizable motifs of household objects and figures invoke a sense of ease and familiarity. It is her distinct perspective – that of an insider as well as observer – and her autofictive blend of observed truth and imagination that gives the work its singularity.

Working in the intimist traditions of Vuillard and Bonnard, Lichtman is a subtle and skillful colorist, creating complex harmonies on a large scale. She states, “to me, close-valued color is magical. It’s a way for the paint to imply the fiction of light and air. A palette of close values also gives the picture a kind of envelope into which everything is placed.”

This exhibition closes 5/24/24.

NYC Art Shows- Rob Davis at Broadway Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 232024
 

Rob Davis’s paintings for The Golden, his solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery, challenge the viewer to look beyond these quiet moments to what lies beneath the surface.

From the press release-

These modestly scaled oil on linen works take depopulated 1970s and 80s domestic interiors and culturally-charged objects as their subject.  While initially apprehended as a mode of photorealism, prolonged viewing reveals a gauzier, mediated affect that hints at a more considered approach. Painting from photographs (with an intermediary study in watercolor) Davis evokes a peculiar vestige of the source image rather than a mere virtuosic reproduction. In doing so, he homes in on the slippery complexities of individual and shared memory.

The beckoning interior of a pick-up truck, a shark-skinned Cadillac Eldorado (that gives the show its title), a wall-mounted telephone on faux-wood paneling, and a backyard tire swing all conjure a certain vintage of American middle-class signifiers, but with a suggestive twist. These images harbor an extraordinary potential energy that something is about to happen—and gets at an unsettling underbelly of the era and nullifies nostalgia. The tire swing, for example, traces an arc between innocent play and the specter of something more malignant, acknowledging a diffuse dust of unease that has settled on everything.

Elsewhere, Davis engages some curious strategies around reproduction. With Quilt 1-3 and Window 1 and 2 (all works 2024) the artist repeats views of a suburban bedroom in multiple iterations identical in size and only subtly varied in appearance. This has the peculiar effect of calling to mind both the ready reproducibility of the source image and the tremendous effort undertaken to render it by hand. Seriality generally favors the immediacy of the photograph, but for Davis all reminiscence is muscle memory and these paintings carry the imprint of his labor as a potent lever for narrative and remembrance.

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

Ohio Art Shows- Andrea Bowers at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Cleveland, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Politics, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

Artist and activist Andrea Bowers is based in Los Angeles but was born and raised in Ohio. This provides the connection to the work in Exist, Flourish, Evolve, currently on view at moCa Cleveland, which advocates for environmental protections for the area. The educational material informs the viewer, while the artwork reminds us how much beauty there is to lose.

From the museum-

LA-based artist Andrea Bowers bears witness in her work, drawing attention to and inspiring movement around the most urgent issues of our time. Her drawings, sculptures, installations, and films chronicle and preserve history as it occurs, documenting collective action and amplifying the labor and lived experiences of activists dedicated to socio-political change.

Developed through an ongoing partnership with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and activist Tish O’Dell, Exist, Flourish, Evolve is a new, multi-site, multimedia campaign that builds awareness and action around the dangers facing Lake Erie and all of the Great Lakes ecosystems. It features a monumental neon sculpture installed on a waterfront balcony of the Great Lakes Science Center; a documentary investigating the impact of factory farming on Lake Erie’s ecosystem; and a presentation in moCa’s Lewis Gallery that includes a newly-created drawing of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, first-of-its-kind legislation protecting an entire US ecosystem that is part of the global Rights of Nature Movement.

Bowers was raised in the small town of Huron, Ohio and spent her childhood on the shores of Lake Erie, connecting to the lake itself like a member of her family to be cared for, cherished, and protected. Yet, Lake Erie and its watershed are abused and endangered by corporate practices such as contaminant dumping, toxic runoff from industrial farming, and the introduction of non-native invasive species. Exist, Flourish, Evolve demands justice for the Great Lakes, urging us to prioritize the preservation of our natural ecology over industrialization and capitalism.

Within moCa’s gallery, a timeline connects Bowers’s new and recent artworks with historical facts and archival materials using two catastrophic climate events as bookends to Bowers’s life thus far: the 1969 fire on the Lake Erie-connected Cuyahoga River (a result of oil slicks covering the water) and the massive 2014 algae bloom that blanketed Lake Erie and invaded Toledo’s water systems, preventing residents from using tap water.

From the Maumee to the Cuyahoga, the works in Exist, Flourish, Evolve come together to share the histories of our water, demonstrate the interconnectedness of ourselves and our natural world, and remind us, as Dr. Vandana Shiva states, “nature is not out there; we are a part of it.”

 

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

Ohio Art Shows- Frank Stella at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

Pictured above is Frank Stella’s 1986 work, La vecchia dell’orto, on view at Columbus Museum of Art, part of New Encounters: Reframing the Contemporary Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art– a reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary galleries.

About the work from the museum-

In the 1960s Frank Stella began creating paintings with a composition of lines that closely followed the shape of the canvas. These works often resisted any sense of depth, but in the following decade, Stella would go on to create exuberant works like this, composed of brightly painted cones and other shapes that extend beyond the surface of the rectangle behind it.

The title of this work, like others in his Cones and Pillars series, is taken from an Italian folktale in which a mother’s only daughter is kept by a witch as payment for a cabbage she stole from the witch’s garden.

Stella’s practice was always evolving. In his most recent large painted sculptures, currently on view at Deitch in NYC, you can see how he expanded on the concepts he was working with here.

NYC Art Shows- Frank Stella at Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

There’s only a few days left to see Frank Stella’s recent sculptures at Deitch’s New York location. The large colorful works look drastically different depending on the angle with which they are viewed.

Stella sadly passed away at the beginning of this month. Although it is sad that we won’t be able to see what he would have come up with next, these sculptures help demonstrate how inventive he remained throughout his career.

From the gallery’s website-

Double wide flatbed trucks navigated the bridges into Manhattan to transport five monumental works by Frank Stella to Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery.

They are among the most ambitious and most radical works being made by any artist today. They extend Stella’s forms even further into three dimensions. The works are not painted sculptures or relief paintings. They completely fuse painting and sculpture in a way that has never been achieved before. The sculptures have never been shown in New York City.

Frank Stella said that one of the objectives of his recent artistic approach has been to “build a painting rather than painting a painting.” The new work is a realization of this ambition. Stella combines traditional artists’ techniques with high technology to create his new work. His monumental sculptures begin with computer models that are transformed into a series of small sculptural maquettes through 3-D printing. The artist refines these models in the studio and then sends them to fabricators in the Netherlands and Belgium where they are engineered and constructed using technology derived from shipbuilding. The sections are then shipped to Stella’s studio in the Hudson Valley where they are refined and painted with automotive paint.

The exhibition features works from two series, Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick from 2014, and Atlantic Salmon Rivers from 2021-23. The Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick sculptures are created with high density foam covered in fiberglass. The Grand Cascapedia, inspired by the Canadian river known for salmon fishing, is made from aluminum. As in all of Stella’s work, the forms embody their materials. The materials inspire the forms.

Stella’s work of the 1980s were characterized by its extension of two-dimensional painting into his version of baroque space. These new works extend beyond baroque space into outer space. The forms seem to float in anti-gravity. They ascend, transcending their weight. They do not have front or a back, existing in the round.

Frank Stella has expanded the art discourse for more that six decades. His new work continues to advance art into a place where it has never been before.

If you are able to see the work in person at the gallery, make sure to take the steps to the top where you will find a diorama containing the sculptural models (pictured below).

Brooklyn Art Shows- Ann Schaumburger, Roberta Dorsett, and Denisse Griselda Reyes at A.I.R. Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
May 192024
 

Ann Schaumburger, “Silver Moon in Darkened Sky House”, 2023, Flashe on wood

Ann Schaumburger

Ann Schaumburger

The three exhibitions currently on view at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn all focus on homes in unique ways. In the first gallery, Ann Schaumburger’s paintings of houses for New Work continue her exploration of color.

From the gallery-

For over fifty years, Schaumburger has used the house as a basic structure—a scaffold—for exploring how colors interact with one another. Schaumburger builds her houses with blocks of four pigments, using stencil brushes and tape to fill each house with modular forms. Influenced by the theories of Josef Albers, Schaumburger’s approach to color is meticulous yet playful. Different colors dazzle and dance when placed in proximity, creating a sense of surprise.

The paintings in this new body of work depart from Schaumburger’s earlier explorations in one key detail: the houses are now mounted on wheels. This choice was inspired by Schaumburger’s reading of the biography of Henry David Thoreau, whose family had attached wheels to their domicile, allowing them to transport the house across different sites in Concord, Massachusetts. “The idea of taking a solid house, attached to the ground, and letting it roll away,” Schaumburger says, “seems both comical and deeply suggestive of our times.”

Schaumburger has described her color choices as an attempt to “solve an aesthetic problem.” Yet the work is not entirely abstract. Titles like Forest House Under Summer Sky and Moonscape Moving House gesture toward the fact that certain color relationships become evocative of different seasons, places, and times of day. All of the paintings in the exhibition feature a crescent or small globe in the upper left or right quadrant. Sometimes, this globe is rendered in metallic gold or bronze, recalling the sun. Other times, it is a lunar silver. The round shape of the globe mirrors the house’s circular wheels. Just as the earth rotates around the sun, the wheels rotate around their own axles, allowing the house to move.

The wheeled house becomes a spirited metaphor for Schaumburger’s practice. Dynamic rather than stationary, it embodies the liveliness and energy of Schaumburger’s color choices, as well as the open-ended nature of her process.

Roberta Dorsett’s photos for Sleepwalking explore isolation and uneasiness in her family’s suburban home.

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

From the gallery-

Dorsett’s Sleepwalking is a series of photographs examining isolation in the suburbs and how a sense of danger often accompanies seemingly idyllic environments. The work depicts three women, Dorsett’s aunt, her cousin, and Dorsett herself, occupying the shared space of a suburban home in Connecticut. Tension arises from the camera’s interaction with the women. The camera acts as an intrusive person, an interloper, and a voyeur as it captures the women in moments of discomfort and vulnerability.

In Dorsett’s previous work, she took on the role of family historian, photographing moments of in-betweenness that result in candid and uncontrived images. Her obsession with taking photographs of her family is driven by their lack of extant family albums or other visual documentation. Because of the family’s socioeconomic status, photography was considered a luxury and only done for special occasions. Moreover, Dorsett’s mother had to leave behind her family’s photographic history when she immigrated from Jamaica to the United States.

Dorsett initially intended Sleepwalking to be a straightforward documentation of her aunt and cousin’s experience as first-time Black homeowners. But she found herself drawn into the project’s narrative and began photographing her family in a more constructed and story-driven way, drawing inspiration from slasher and horror films. Dorsett captures the visceral thrills of these types of films by continuing to utilize her family to explore the concepts of voyeurism and anxiety. The single-family home, once a symbol of milestone achievement, now becomes a surreal site of both safety and terror. As she stood behind and in front of the camera, registering the uneasiness and distress of these three women inside their home, Dorsett dreamed up a distorted reality and asked herself, “Am I awake or sleepwalking?”

Finally, Denisse Griselda Reyes multimedia installation for Did you have a hard time finding me?  explores home and identity using a combination of original artwork and family archives.

Denisse Griselda Reyes, “Did you have a hard time finding me?“

Denisse Griselda Reyes

From the gallery-

Featuring short films and familial ephemera alongside a new body of paintings, this exhibition humorously meditates on questions of self-formation, reparative representation, and archival preservation, inviting us to dwell in the absurdity these ambitions unintentionally generate. This is Reyes’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Presenting what Reyes has called a “maximalist constellation of memory,” the exhibition juxtaposes materials from their family archives with paintings and multimedia projections within an installation space that recalls, yet does not perfectly reproduce, the domestic interiors of Reyes’s family. Anchoring this exhibition is a short film that ties together two threads. First, the border crossings of Reyes’s grandmother Anita that were necessitated by the peril of the Salvadoran Civil War, and this history’s impact on Reyes’s mother. Second, the queer dating life of Reyes’s indignant and savvy alter-ego, Griselda. Part-narrator, part-drag-persona, part-survival-strategy, Griselda offers Reyes a means to dictate the terms of their own representation against the expectations that constrict queer Latinx artists in the United States. Still, Griselda is also beholden to identitarian demands. Reyes allows their avatar to straddle the line of spectacle, flirting with failure, acknowledging that self-formation might be an impossible endeavor. By juxtaposing Griselda’s exploits with the narrative of their grandmother, Reyes interrogates whether familial, social, and historical processes have the final word on what generates a self.

Reyes has produced Griselda as a mediating figure—one who negotiates their own identity between femininity and non-binary gender, and who personifies the absurdity of any singular narrative of origin. In its plenitude and play, the exhibition exceeds the ostensible facticity of the familial and historical archive. Featuring new paintings that hazily recreate family photographs, a vitrine full of childhood teeth that parodies genres of museal presentation, screens that toggle between home videos and the simulation of archival footage, and striking blue-green walls that recall the past domestic spaces of Reyes’s family in El Salvador, the exhibition transforms processes of preservation into acts of mythmaking. The exhibition is less a recreation of the artist’s family’s domiciles than a space of critical reflection and ambiguity. Guests are invited to join in this meditation—and may find their own notions of selfhood implicated as a result.

These exhibitions close 5/19/24.

NYC Art Shows- Lina Tharsing and Miho Ichise at Scroll

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 182024
 

Miho Ichise “Backlit Portrait”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “Late Afternoon”, 2024, “It’s Not All Darkness”,2024, and “High Above”, 2022, oil on canvas

Miho Ichise “Warm, Gentle”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “Golden Ginko”, 2024, and “Waiting for Us”, 2024, oil on canvas

Miho Ichise “Dancing Lights”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “One Clear Moment”, 2024, and “Eclipse”, 2023, oil on canvas

Walking into the room of paintings in the Miho Ichise and Lina Tharsing two person exhibition at Scroll, the outside world seems to disappear, replaced with a sense of calm. Although their subject matter is similar, their approaches are different- as detailed in the press release below.

From Scroll’s website-

Photographing scenes of the life around her, Miho Ichise translates these snapshots into drawings before finishing her compositions on canvas. Rather than paint what is directly and physically in front of her, Ichise turns to photography, which she feels gives her a certain freedom to create her world, taking extracts of an image, changing the colors, and adding other elements. Painting is not just a replication of her surroundings, but a sensory and atmospheric translation – an attempt to capture the sight, sound, touch, smell, and feeling around her. Ichise draws inspiration and admiration from the play of light and shadow by Georges de La Tour, the lush and atmospheric scenes of printmaker Hasui Kawase, the refined and minimal compositions of Alex Katz, and the colorful textures of Pierre Bonnard.

The artist states, “I would like my work to be an open door to anyone where they can enter to enjoy a connection to their childhood or small excitement of daily life.” Her intimate paintings crop to subtle and distinct details – an element of a scene – allowing the viewer to imagine the bigger picture beyond the edges of the canvas. Whether depicting family members, friends, or strangers on a street, Ichise always draws from scenes of her life and experience.

Both intimate and visually transfixing, Lina Tharsing’s paintings are rooted in real places while possessing a dreamlike quality. For Tharsing, nature is a vehicle where she finds moments of transcendence in the ordinary fabric of everyday life. Light plays a major role in Tharsing’s compositions – whether filtering through trees or glimmering across water, light serves as a catalyst, and a reminder to stay curious.

Following the loss of her parents, Tharsing’s work has been shaped by grief, a transformative force that has reframed her perception of the world. Tharsing states, “Grief is a paradoxical experience – a profound journey into sadness, yet also a doorway to nearly overwhelming love and connection. Each of these paintings is a gateway, an entrance, a window, to what I refer to as ‘thin places’ – moments that reveal the veil between the seen and unseen. My paintings are an invitation to contemplate the presence of something beyond ourselves, something ineffable yet persistent, felt, and present. I am more aware than ever of our collective grief about our relationship to this planet, our ecological grief, and the grief associated with war and human suffering. I come back to the invitation of grief which asks us to transform ourselves and to open ourselves towards our connectedness.”

This exhibition closes 5/18/24.

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