Etty Yaniv works on her art, art writing and curatorial projects in Brooklyn. She holds BA in Psychology and English Literature from Tel Aviv University, BFA from Parsons School of Design, and MFA from SUNY Purchase. In her installation work She is integrating mediums such as drawing, photography and painting to form three dimensional immersive environments. More info at: www.ettyyanivstudio.com
Jim Condron installing Close to You, Karen Condron’s clothes, straw, yarrow, 50 x 30 x 30 inches at Wings over Wall Street, Chelsea, NY, 2019
In his sculptures and installations Jim Condron merges found objects—fragmented or whole—to create colorful and textural hybrid entities with distinct yet very open-ended textual undercurrents. Bed frames and tractors, furs and fabric, painted pieces of wood and plastic refuse, assert their past function and hint at potential narratives in playful variations, revealing the artist’s hand and his vivid imagination along the way.
Michelle Weinberg, A Personal Situation, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 20 3/4” x 16″
The two-person exhibition Shuffling Liminal Episodes atProject: ARTspace features drawings by artists Leslie Kerby and Michelle Weinberg, whose works on paper and vellum resemble snapshots of settings, some of specific places, some imagined, capturing an arrested moment from daily life. Both storytellers at heart, the two artists draw objects as protagonists in their visual tales. A desolate bench, a studio table with a lamp, a tiny figure stepping out of a big house —random belongings, furniture, activities of daily life come to the forefront, projecting an inner life while also hinting at human life outside their inanimate existence—always with a lingering whiff of humor. Kerby and Weinberg also share a collage aesthetic which works well to unify their fragmented narratives.
In her solo exhibition Chat & Chew at DFN Projects, multi-disciplinary artist Melissa Stern features drawings, assemblages, and sculptures which probe into the surface of social decorum not only with a biting wit but also with a tender gaze. Her outlandish characters invoke in the viewer an unsettling tension between elusive simplicity of forms and deep psychological complexities. Couples stare or reach out to one another, mouthless faces seem to whisper—whether rendered with graphite, pastel, and colored pencils, or molded with clay, these figures form an array of characters we may interpret as archetypes in dreams or comic strips. They remind me of duos in a Becket play or characters in Saul Steinberg’s absurd universe—with Stern’s very own take. Stern’s protagonists express distinct attitudes and appear to have lots to say. Underneath the verbiage, you can sense a vulnerable core that is silent, on the verge of coming up to the surface.
Portrait of Paul Behnke in the studio with Gloria’s Guardian, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 60 inches, photo courtesy of Robin Stout.
Paul Behnke is a champion of painting – and he does it with evident gusto. His paintings come from idiosyncrasies, life experience, and a process that begins as intuitive, mixed with periods of sharp critical gaze. His paintings have evolved from early contained and minimalistic bold-color geometries, to more recent chaotic forms and layered complexity, at times almost explosive.
In Conversation with Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston
Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston, “May 27” (2021), multi-color woodblock print on paper. 57.5 x 42.25 inches (courtesy the artists and Petzel, New York)
The woodblock prints by the artists Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston at Petzel refer to recent harsh events that occurred in the United States and the way we perceive them through iconic media imagery. The prints specifically address 18 moments that took place between May 24th, 2020 to January 6th, 2021—marked by the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the ensuing protests, and the insurrection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is on view at the gallery Upper East Side location through February 12, 2022.
Gabriela Vainsencher in the studio with “Mom”, 2021
Gabriela Vainsencher works in photography, video and drawing, while merging all of these forms in her porcelain sculptures. Her sculptures and wall reliefs are as far off the smooth perfection we traditionally associate with porcelain – twisted forms merge into each other or repel, forming a fiery existential dance that sometimes invokes symbiosis and sometimes pulling apart.
Portrait of Brenda Zlamany with the Davenport Dining Room Scene, 2018. Oil on panel. Left panel: 58 x 42 in. Right panel: 58 x 39 in. Photo courtesy of Robert Lowell.
In recent years we have been experiencing a major re-examination of iconographies and narratives portrayed in historical paintings and sculptures—portraits of male figures re-evaluated and removed, portraits of females and people of color, added. Working within the context of historical portrait painting, till surprisingly quite recently, has implied working within a mostly male dominated territory, for both artist and subjects. Additionally, depicting Historical figures requires the artist to develop their own research approach, which typically differs from the process of depicting living subjects. Painter Brenda Zlamany, who has been commissioned to paint several substantial group portraits of historical women, among them—Yale’s First Seven Women PhDs and Rockefeller University’s five women scientists—elaborates on these issues and describes her approach to historical portrait paintings.
Linnéa Gabriella Spransy in her studio with ‘Chronos’, an ink drawing on frosted mylar, laminated and partially suspended from the wall.
For LA based, multi-disciplinary artist Linnéa Gabriella Spransy, limits are the core subject. Her curiosity about science, philosophy, cultural theory, physics, history, theology and, as she puts it, “a healthy dose of science fiction”, has led her to notice patterns and contradictions in commonplace assumptions. For instance, the belief that unlimited freedom is the optimal state of being, an idea that is flatly contradicted by the fact that no one is absolutely free, as we are all bound by a certain era, language, and people in our lives. Furthermore, Spransy says, some would argue that knowledge itself is a limit, especially knowledge about the future. She is grappling with big questions such as—does knowledge that deals with predicting the behavior of systems prevent freedom? Do we live in a deterministic universe merely garnished with the illusion of autonomy, or do we live in a genuinely open one? Throughout her reading and experience in the studio, she began to suspect that limitations are not barriers to freedom, but rather gateways.
From line drawings and cutouts to wall reliefs and sculptures, lines shift forms throughout the group exhibition Drawing a Line at Five Myles. Curator Klaudia Ofwona Draber says she was inspired by the gallery founder Hanne Tierney’s vision to organize a drawing exhibition. Ofwona Draber’s interest in social justice and post-colonialism guided her choice of artists as well as the theme of the exhibition – drawing a line as an action of drawing boundaries, whether to protect personal boundaries in the quietude of one’s own home, or at the heart of a political conflict. “By drawing a line, we protect ourselves, our families and our communities from the violence and inequalities that are happening around us,” says Ofwona Draber.
