Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists contemplate nature and cycles of change.

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1. An exhibition deriving inspiration from the seasons themed paintings in the Frick Collection by François Boucher; artists are invited to create four paintings of the same size to commemorate each one of the seasons at Haven Art Gallery
2. Multiplicity examines our individual and cultural environments through the use of archetypal and reflective imagery. The artists create multiples as a way to reflect on our psychological, natural and societal predicaments.  The use of archetypal imagery varies widely in this show from cultural constructs to the mythological, and the symbolic, encompassing individual as well as collective psychological landscapes at Dacia Gallery
3. Highlights features portraits of individuals from the Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s past, who, through various means, were able to make it out of the notorious Robert Taylor Homes public housing project. These compositions give shape to Quinn’s memories, the figures from his past finding their way from the subconscious to the paper. In their abstracted bodies and faces, Quinn’s personal narrative transforms into a wider exploration on the resiliency of human nature at M + B Art
4. Nina Yuen’s two new films and a series of photographs poetically and intimately explore universal themes of time, death, and beauty at Jane Lombard Gallery
5. Amandalynn intends to capture the beauty of nature’s cyclical change within this newest series of work at Distinction Art
6. For Mountain Full, Andrew Hem was inspired by the action of leaping, depicting many of his stylized subjects hovering or plummeting over expressionistic landscapes. Like snapshots taken from a dream, his surreal figures and environments retain familiar elements but are otherworldly, existing one step outside of everyday life at Jonathan LeVine Gallery

May 17, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists explore impact of chaos and mythology on their art creation.

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1. Keiichi Tanaami’s Visible Darkness/Invisible Darkness contains powerful images drawn from dreams and memories, most notably those from his experiences as a child during World War II at Sikkema Jenkins & Co
2. Aaron Morse’s various landscapes depict survival amidst a harsh ecology, the strangeness of inherited mythologies, and perspectives obtained from a distance at ACME
3. Franz Ackermann seeks to chronicle new urban realities and the ways in which they are perceived, at a time when both realities and perceptions are driven by ceaseless flows of tourists and information. His monumental paintings take the form of large exploded views that combine architectural elements with numerous Modernist references and abstract shapes in a burst of colors and materials at Galerie Daniel Templon
4. Dave McDermott continues his ongoing allegorical examination of the complexities of human nature and the societies we build to house them, the isolation inherent in those structures, and how we represent those ideas through art itself at Brenna Griffin
5. Erik Jones challenges viewers to see beauty in his chaotic, mixed-media works that merge nude subjects with nonrepresentational, abstract elements. Describing the human figures in his compositions as “aesthetic anchors,” they are the calming foreground upon which bursts of color, stenciled shapes and custom-made stickers create surreal landscapes at Jonathan Levine Gallery
6. Hope Gangloff is known for creating vibrant and truthful portraits of her friends as a way to share her view of modern American life. By capturing this generation of young adults in her illustrations and paintings, she documents this era’s struggle during these tumultuous times at Richard Heller Gallery

April 13, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists take things apart to put them back together.

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1. In drawing from the urban storefront and its familiar yet overlooked signage, Brice Bischoff’s installation of photographic and architectural structures, videos and fiberglass sculptures considers how the experience of place is shaped by way of light, reflection and architecture at Cirrus Gallery
2. Jason Middlebrook’s signature towering “Plank” paintings are geometric abstractions painted directly onto internally cut trunks from the local mill in Hudson New York. Middlebrook’s signature patterning weds the geometry of modern abstraction with the lines of wood grain to “create a tension between something organic and something man-made.” at Gallery 16
3. WILDSCAPES examines two distinguished artistic approaches to depictions of nature, with a focus on ecological (dis)balance between the natural and the man made world. By utilizing different materials, aesthetic approaches and iconographies, Ivan Stojakovic and Paula Winokur deliver compelling takes on wilderness and its fragility and/or pertinence within contemporary cultural context. They reinvent the notion of the sublime, dwell on the ways both nature and culture are fabricated, contemplate on their coexistence and clashes, and call for reflection on the existential and ecological issues of our times at Christian Duvernois Gallery
4. Arman’s Accumulations features around forty historical sculptures produced between 1960 and 1964. In his quest to construct an ‘archaeology of the present’, Arman created an artistic language that had a deep-reaching effect on contemporary art. The Accumulations explore the loss of individual identity and the neutralization of human interactions by consumer society, the violence of abundance and the aesthetics of rubbish at Galerie Daniel Templon
5. Extending and intensifying the method of image making (and unmaking) that he has employed for a decade, John Sparagana has spent the last two years deep in the comics, with very serious results. His most ambitious and accomplished work to date, the Themesong Variation works, which are technically cut paper collage of 1/8-inch squares mixed and laid down onto Dibond aluminum, open a whole new universe of potential for image intervention and reinvention at Corbett vs. Dempsey
6. Roddy Wildeman sees beauty in distressed and damaged surfaces and works solely with materials fitting that description. The two main focuses of Wildeman’s work are historic preservation and sustainability. He collects wood from a majority of buildings that are over one-hundred years old and have a legacy of sentimental value attached to them.Everything that enters his studio gets incorporated into a phase of his process and his studio functions at a 100% sustainable level. Committed to his social responsibility to reuse and recycle, Wildeman views his practice as an effort to preserve our environment at Jonathan Levine Gallery

March 22, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The artists in this week’s gallery picks use location as metaphor and inspiration.

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1. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Continental Shift reflects on the hypothetical underground passage connecting Europe to Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar at Galerie Jérôme Poggi
2. James Hyde’s Ground “uses the flat field of painting as a topological arena that ties together the physical substance of painting and the ground on which it is laid, extracting spatial dimensions and new meanings from this relationship. In these increasingly direct works, he utilizes abstraction to break photography’s semantic hold on the way we construct an image of the world” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
3. Inspired by scenes from his everyday life, this entirely new body of work continues Nobuyuki Takahashi’s careful observation of place and distills from an undulating world a quiet sense of equilibrium at Rena Bransten Projects
4. The cycle of the destruction and rebirth of Detroit at Five Myles
5. Where Seonna Hong’s previous works focused on reckoning, forgiveness and ‘wishing I said all the things I didn’t say,’ If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now explores the possibilities of what’s to come. In the artist’s words, “My once melancholic and somber pieces have given way to a new kind of hopefulness.”  at Jonathan Levine Gallery
6. Mary Iverson, on her latest show You and Me in the Aftermath: “For many years, I have been inserting shipping containers and shipwrecks into pristine landscapes, inspiring conversations about the relationship between the environment and industrial activities. In my current body of work, I have brought the figure into the scene, adding another layer to the narrative.” at G. Gibson Gallery

November 3, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday Gallery Picks




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Myth and ephemerality play a large part in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. A group show with a throughly playful vibe at Andrea Schwartz Gallery
2. Saner’s works are heavily influenced by traditional Mexican customs and folklore. ForPrimitivo, the artist created lively portraits of characters wearing Nahuale masks reminiscent of those found on the streets of Mexico and according to legend, have the power to transform human beings into animals at Jonathan Levine Gallery
3.Integrating memory, literature, art history, and contemporary culture, Heidi Howard deftly paints portraits with loose, lively, gestural brush strokes, full of color, pattern, line, and a figuration, abstract to defined, reminiscent of old masters such as Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Botticelli at Nancy Margolis Gallery
4.On the theme of the artist as mythologist, in her series ‘I remember Paradise’, Lakwena Maciver uses the relationship between myth and adornment to explore the possibility that myths – expressed through films, paintings, songs, advertisements – carry ‘echoes’ of paradise, pointing to a past and a future glory which we only see glimpses of in the present at Papillion Art
5. The Making of Personal Theory: Mysticism and Metaphysics in the Work of Sara Kathryn Arledge, Charles Irvin, and Jim Shaw is a three-person exhibition that takes notions of “the mystical” as an entry point to consider daily encounters that are marked with eccentricity, the surreal, and a dream-like passage of time at Armory Center for the Arts
6. Yellena James’ ethereal ecosystems at LeQuiVivre

January 27, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Get drenched in color, as this week’s artists apply brights boldly over geometry and planes.

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1. Aikaterini Gegisian’s new work is built around the concept and practice of collage or – in a more cinematic sense, the ‘jump-cut’ at Tin Type Gallery
2. Rachel Siporin, a painter for several decades, discovered color reduction woodcuts in 2011. Her latest exhibition investigates personal narratives that include bathers by the shore, singers under the spotlight, and figures against the backdrop of natural disasters at Bowery Gallery
3.Jeffrey Beauchamp is a trickster with prodigious skills and a wry sense of humor. Every painting is an improvisation, the artist surfing the imagination and remaining loose enough to respond to images and impulses that reveal themselves at Seager Gray
4.Through stream-of-consciousness painting, Doze Green creates fractured imagery to convey infinite possibilities at Jonathan Levine Gallery
5.Ricardo Mazal’s paintings evolved from a recent journey to Bhutan. The work draws on previous explorations into themes of life, death, transformation and regeneration at Sundaram Tagore
6.Small is Beautiful challenges contemporary artists working in all media to produce works with a fixed economy of scale, each piece measuring approximately 9 x 7 inches at Flowers Galleries

November 18, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

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