Hovey Brock at work on Crazy River, 2019, acrylic on panel, 30” x 40,” a work from his Crazy River series.
Hovey Brock’s current paintings are part of Crazy River, a larger project he has been developing since 2017. The paintings are based on his life-long relationship to the West Branch of the Neversink, which runs between Ulster and Sullivan counties in New York state. The project also includes text and videos, drawing on the artist’s experience and stories about the West Branch and the western Catskill mountains handed down through his family.
Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, Installation view of Somewhere Around There, 2022. Photo courtesy of Maggie Pavao
It is perhaps in this state of “not knowing” that we first encounter the works in artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s current solo exhibition Somewhere Around There, on view at the Amos Eno gallery. The exhibition, which presents works from the artist’s KuroKuroShiro series (‘black-black-white’ in Japanese), features dynamic shapes in shaded monochrome that seem to alternately emerge and recede from view. Faced with this shifting visual field, the viewer gradually develops a kind of intimacy with these unknown forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation and engagement.
Gallery View. Photo courtesy of David Richard Gallery
Vigil, Ellen Kozak’s first solo painting exhibition with David Richard Gallery, featured two fully realized series of abstract oil paintings on panel. The painter, with studios in New York City and beside the Hudson River in Greene County, explores the relationship between the fluidity of paint and river surfaces affected by the intersection of natural and manmade phenomena. Altogether the paintings activated the gallery space into a cohesive site-responsive installation.
Unprecedented, 8 ft. x 15 ft., mixed media on canvas, 2021. Photo by Joseph Hu
For over fifty years, Philadelphia-based painter, photographer, and activist Diane Burko has translated her love for large open spaces and monumental geological sites into powerful and alluring landscapes. Her exhibition at the American University in Washington, D.C. (August 28 – December 12, 2021), titled Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change 2002 – 2021, contained 103 paintings, photographs, and time-based media depicting mountains, oceans, snow and ice, glaciers, volcanos, and fires that address the growing impact of the climate crisis.
Delicate Rainbow, 2021, 24”x30”, oil on canvas, photo courtesy of the artist
In her solo show at 490 Atlantic Gallery, New York based painter Claire McConaughy features landscapes depicted in vivid colors and expressive linear marks. In Delicate Rainbow for instance, the painting plays on tension between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations – an unexpected pale pink flow becomes a backdrop horizon to green vegetation spreading its limb-like branches diagonally upwards; on the top, blue-purple brush strokes depicting sky or water, lead the eye sideways, and then right above, a surprising orange linear brush stroke with the other rainbow colors hinted, stretch across the middle top.
Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)
At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.
Previewing – with gallery founder and curator Catherine Fosnot
Fred Gutzeit (2021) Future Life Puzzle, Acrylic on paper on canvas, 72” x 72”
The Opening Fall Season at the Fosnot Art Gallery will showcase Fred Gutzeit’s body of works from 1966-2021. Although he began as a painter of found objects and landscapes, Fred Gutzeit has never been satisfied with capturing the realism we “see“ in nature. He has continually sought a realism through abstraction that would capture the hidden complexity of nature juxtaposed with a human search for structure. Musings about complexity and chaos theories, string theory, mathematics modeling, and current scientific speculation about “multiverses” are employed as he explores consciousness, interaction, identity, and searches for structure. His bold use of color and dimensionality are wonderous and aesthetically pleasing allowing us to travel into the cosmos of his world.
In her solo art exhibition at Reeves-Reed Arboretum, Pamela Casper invites the garden-loving public to reconcile a personal relationship of guardianship that goes beyond admiring nature’s beauty. The artist says that the trajectory of the work in this show follows her own path of transformation—from observing beauty and imagining nature “above ground” to exploring the endless networks hidden below. The show is curated by Executive Director Jackie Kondel and runs through October 31tst, 2021.
Amy Talluto in her studio in Upstate NY, 2021, Photo courtesy of the artist
Amy Talluto’s paintings and collages depict landscapes, ranging from representational wood-scapes to more abstracted forms reassembling a hybrid of landscape and still life. Darren Jones wrote in Artforum that Amy Talluto’s series of oil paintings from 2017 produce “symphonic arrangements of green, ranging from deepest phthalo to honeyed laurel. Dashes of pink, crimson, and yellow also crop up, to shimmering effect. The technical proficiency of her sumptuous compositions, based on forests around the artist’s Catskills home, parlays them into sites of ethereality.” (Darren Jones, Artforum). Recently, during the pandemic, the artist started exploring collage, resulting in bold cutouts, and consequently paintings, where the previously hinted pinks, yellows and crimsons become central alongside the blues and greens. Amy Talluto participates in The Upstate Art Weekend show at the rambling old manufacturing building in High Falls, NY. This art event was initiated by Todd Kelly, Alex Gingrow and Shanti Grumbine, who have studios in that building and have invited over 30 artists to show their work there from Aug 27-29, 11am-6pm.
Working across media— from VR and robotic installations to gestural and vivid paintings—Los Angeles based artist Vita Eruhimovitz creates landscapes of imagined environments which resemble hybrid worlds with references to actual, fictional, and digital realities.
