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Artists on Coping: Pauline Galiana

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Working space view with Tears of Fire, drawing series in progress. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Pauline Galiana’s work, from collages to paintings, ephemeral installations to small sculptures, addresses the broad themes of deconstruction versus reconstruction, mixing intuitive states of mind with free hand, formal associations, and meditative processes with rigorous grids. Galiana was born in Algeria and grew up in France.  She received her MFA at ESAG, Paris. Her work is included in the collections of UBS, New York University, the National Museum of Romanian Literature, where she won the 2018 Bibliophile Object-Book Biennale award, and private collections in New York, Washington, Houston, Paris, Riyadh, London, and Sydney. She lives and works in New York City.

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Artists on Coping: Elisabeth Condon

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Elisabeth Condon in front of Urban Idyll at Ditmars Blvd., Queens, in 2019. Photo Phillip Reed

Informed by scroll painting and 20th century abstraction, Elisabeth Condon’s landscapes intersect nature and décor. While the overlap of New York and Florida inspire the majority of her compositions, Condon frequently travels to numerous residency fellowships from Shanghai and Mexico City, to the Grand Canyon and Florida Everglades. She recently completed Urban Idyll, thirty-six laminated glass panels for the NYCT Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. Station in Queens, commissioned by MTA Art & Design. Her work has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and State of Florida Individual Fellowships.

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Denise Sfraga: Constructing and Disclosing

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(left) Malignant 40” x 32” flashe, pastel on paper 2019, (middle) Gone (series of 9) 8” x 6” each colored pencil on paper 2018, (right) New Mourn 40” x 32” flashe, pastel on paper 2018

The NYC based artist Denise Sfraga intersects in her work photography, drawing, and painting. The evolving processes, history, and aesthetics of photography altogether inform Denise Sfraga‘s thought process and practice. This results in an abstracted biomorphic imagery resonating with botany and other organic life forms. At first glance her well defined colorful shapes appear as beautiful abstractions but as you spend more time with them, you may realize that their beauty is a camouflage for darker, mysterious and disorienting undercurrents. Denise Sfraga first elaborates for Art Spiel how her way of thinking came about and then takes us through different series of work to reflect on her process in depth.

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Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard at Super Dutchess

In Dialogue with Andrew Woolbright

Installation view of Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard. Alex Kovacs, Fernando Pintado, Craig Taylor

Andrew Woolbright, a NY based artist, curator and founder of Super Dutchess, shares with Art Spiel the genesis of this lower east side art space, sheds some light on its key organizers, and describes the philosophy behind it. He elaborates on Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard, the 3-person current show that he has curated at the venue, with an upcoming reception on January 10th.

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Blue in Green at Platform Project Space

Art Spiel in Dialogue with Alyssa E. Fanning on Blue in Green

Elliott Green. Inhale, Exhale, 2018, Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery

Platform Project Space, a Dumbo art venue geared to support curatorial projects by artists and independent curators, features the group exhibition “Blue in Green”, curated by artist and curator Alyssa E. Fanning. The show features paintings and drawings by 13 artists: Eric Wolf, Lee Lee Walker, Emma Tapley, Barbara Takenaga, James Siena, Alexander Ross, Joey Parlett, Andy Mister, Daniel Herwitt, Elliott Green, Nancy Goldring, Alyssa E. Fanning and Alec Dartley. Alyssa E. Fanning shares with Art Spiel her background, the art venue, and her premise for this show.

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TRAPS! Ebecho Muslimova at Magenta Plains

Exhibition review by Torey Akers


Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Deep Frog Organza, 2019, oil and acrylic on cavas, 60” x 66”, courtesy of Magenta Plains

Human civilization has always maintained an uneasy relationship with female monstrosity—just watch the cavalcade of sirens, witches, harpies and hags that stalk the perimeters of every major mythology on earth, luring hapless men to their deaths. This hyper-visible, oft-storied, but deeply erasive marginalization has long plagued the non-normative woman; however, there’s a certain freedom in the fringes. Take Baubo, the Orphic goddess of chaos and mirth, whose paunchy, wizened appearance belied a frisky bawdiness that ancient Greeks adored. Ebecho Muslimova’s ‘Fatebe’ character, whom she has been drawing since 2011 and features vivaciously in her latest solo exhibition, TRAPS!, at Magenta Plains, New York, builds on Baubo’s cultural legacy with appropriately grotesque panache, taking a wide-eyed, manic approach to the tandem joys and pitfalls of embodiment.

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Actual and Implied – Gregory Coates at Monica King Contemporary

Gregory Coates, My Big Brown Peace, 2019 deck brushes 76 x 252 x 3 inches

Each of Gregory Coates’s wall-based assemblages in Actual and Implied, the artist’s solo show at Monica King Contemporary, commands the space with its own powerful presence. Altogether, the show features over a dozen new mixed media assemblages made of found objects created with post-minimalist sensibility, for which Coates is mostly known for. It is a bold encounter with the objects of art at first, but the longer you look, the more subtle and fragile it becomes. The seemingly simple monochromatic surfaces from afar transform to complex arrays of color, line and dot from close-up.

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Plastic Expressions in Particularity: Nature Moves in Tracy McKenna’s Shift at Able Baker Contemporary

Elise Ferguson. Pebble. Pigmented plaster on MDF panel, 2018. Photo courtesy of Able Baker.

“Wisdom was the feeling for what is high, great, broad, sharp, even, heavy, bright, light, colorful . . . Wisdom was the feeling for an essentially shared reality, for the mystical, for the indeterminate indeterminable, for the greatest determinacy of all . . . but art is reality, and the reality we share must assert itself beyond all particularity.” Hans Arp, Introduction to a Catalogue

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Julien Gardair: Polyphonic Situations

Julien Gardair, Whole together, All apart, 2019, pigments and acrylic on industrial felt cut in space, 7x20x16ft, BRIC, Brooklyn, photo courtesy the artist

The French born Brooklyn based artist Julien Gardair makes carpets, paper cutouts, paintings, sculptures, video or everything in between. This proclivity for smooth sail between forms in context of specific sites globally paired with his insatiable explorations, make his body of work versatile, whimsical and layered. Julien Gardair shares with Art Spiel his ideas, experiences, and what is behind some of his many projects.

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