paper – Art Spiel

April 14, 2025April 14, 2025, by Art Spiel

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Rodney Ewing

Studies for “*The Architecture of Memory and Loss”* 2024-2025, Drawings: Ink and Colored Pencil on Paper.

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Rodney Ewing has been in DUMBO since 2022. His studio is at 20 Jay Street, #M09.

March 15, 2025March 19, 2025, by Stephen Wozniak

A Sight for the Senses: Dance the Distance at Atlantic Gallery in Chelsea

The two-person show of luminous abstract wall works at Atlantic Gallery offers viewers a dynamic sensory experience where light, shadow and unexpected materials form a conversation about how we see and engage with the world.

Installation view of *Dance the Distance* in Atlantic Gallery, 2025

Dance the Distance: Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer at Atlantic Gallery.
Curated by Suzan Shutan. It runs through March 23, 2025

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024, by Claudia Gottridge

Snubbing the Earth: Matías Duville’s Vertices of Time at Barro Gallery New York.

*Caída del peñón, 2024, Acrylic and polyurethane on wood, 15 67/100 × 20 7/25 in*

In a recent conversation at Barro Gallery in New York, the Sue and Eugene Mercy assistant curator Ana Torok (MoMA, prints and drawings), likened Matías Duville’s artistic process to “throwing a lance” at the canvas. Indeed, Duville is not kind to his materials. His artistic oeuvre is replete with scratched metal and burned wood. For his paper works, charcoal is inflicted, not applied. When I had the good fortune to speak with the artist about his current exhibition at Barro Gallery, Vertices of Time, I asked what kinds of materials he had used for his paintings. One material stuck out as particularly harsh: “heat gun.”

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

This Bitter Earth: Deborah Wasserman at Kuma Lisa

Photo Story

Deborah Wasserman, Rubble, 2021, ink and acrylic on paper, 28″ x35.5″

Rubble, mutated crop fields, floods, scorched earth, and occasional female figures floating or submerged unfold throughout the sixteen landscape paintings in Deborah Wasserman’s current solo show, The Bitter Earth at Kuma Lisa. Though the paintings differ in scale and media—from small acrylic and oil on panels to larger acrylic, oil, and stained clothes on canvas to medium-sized works on paper—they all share the sense of a world where multiple perspectives from different vantage points co-exist. Wasserman’s energetic strokes and searching lines create a rhythmic movement upward, downward, and sideways—reminiscent of the fluidity in Chinese and Japanese calligraphic scroll paintings and the clear, directional lines of a hand-drawn map. These linear dynamos intertwine with a palette of earthy tones, greens, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, and pure blacks, creating multiple vignettes within a layered landscape.

May 4, 2022May 4, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Natalie Westbrook: Faces at Zynka

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Natalie Westbrook’s exhibition at ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh features new paintings on canvas and drawings on paper. Westbrook depicts faces as thick lines immersed in saturated hot pinks, greens or monochrome gradations—altogether fluctuating between the monstrous and the angelic, the scary and the pathetic. Sometimes they are solitary and sometimes they indicate twins or perhaps a fragmented self. In her catalogue essay on Natalie Westbrook’s work, Larissa Pham observes that Faces “come for you, leering, grinning, mouths a garish lipsticked rictus of joy, embedded flat against the canvas, their features seeming to emerge from the psychological fabric of the painting itself.”

April 1, 2022March 31, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: ARTspace

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Description automatically generated — Michelle Weinberg, A Personal Situation, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 20 3/4” x 16″

The two-person exhibition Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: 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.

October 12, 2021October 6, 2024, by Art Spiel

Harriett Finck: MVA Open Studios

Harriett Finck in front of Gears, 2021, 52” x 52”,acrylic on paper

Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.

October 9, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

An Architecture of Longing at Hopkins Art Center

Featured artist

Keren Kroul, An Architecture of Longing, series of four works, 2021, watercolor on paper, 60” x 48” each. Photo courtesy of Keren Kroul.

Minnesota based artist Keren Kroul shows watercolor on paper in her current solo exhibition at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. The show runs through October 23^rd, 2021.

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September 30, 2021October 6, 2024, by Art Spiel

Jennifer T. Ley: MVA Open Studios

Jennifer T. Ley, work in progress in the studio, 2021, Paper, Anishinaabe Bimishimo tin jingles, watercolor, digital photos, Photo courtesy the artist

June 3, 2021June 3, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Alyssa Fanning: A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space

In Dialogue with Alyssa Fanning

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Description automatically generated with low confidence — *Alyssa Fanning in her studio in northern NJ, 2020. Photo courtesy of Emma Fanning.*

A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, features Alyssa Fanning’s elaborate and richly layered graphite and colored pencil drawings on paper, focusing on the duality of strength and fragility of the natural world. The work includes drawings from two related series, created through a process of combining projection, stencil and improvisation. The pieces range in size from 2.75 by 4.75 inches to 16 by 20 inches and within these intimate boundaries, Alyssa Fanning creates intricate worlds which invite you to plunge in. The exhibition opens June 5^th with an opening reception June 4th, and runs through July 3^rd, 2021.