solo exhibition – Page 5

September 20, 2023September 14, 2023, by Art Spiel

PE Pinkman: Two Solo Shows at Watchung Arts Center

Featured Project

A collage of a couple of images of a person

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — *(l) Mona Brody, Getting Answers, 60” x 48”, 2023, and (r) Anne Trauben, a section of the installation, Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky, 2023*

PE Pinkman, the chief visual arts curator and executive director of the Watchung Arts Center in New Jersey, notes that two exhibitions — Mona Brody: Portals, Apparitions, and Other Voices and Anne Trauben: Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky — emerged from separate discussions with each artist. For over 45 years, the nonprofit Watchung Arts Center has been a prominent stage, showcasing works from regional artists in New Jersey and New York. Their central mission is to provide visual artists with a platform for engagement, promoting arts education while offering unique exhibition opportunities. At a first glance, both Mona Brody’s paintings and Anne Trauben’s installations appear straightforward. However, Pinkman emphasizes that they reveal deeper layers upon closer inspection. He observes a fascinating contrast: while Brody’s art unveils forms from the shadows, Trauben emphasizes light and shape within a darkened setting.

September 6, 2023September 4, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Art of Getting It Together

Jesse Benson, *Packaging*, 2003/2023. Ephemera from all projects completed in grad school, vacuum-formed plastic, plexiglass, silkscreen on board. Installation dimensions variable, individual dimensions 21 x 28.8 x 3 in. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy As-Is LA.

In Organizer, Jesse Benson’s first solo gallery show since 2017, the Los Angeles artist unpacks the “dialectic of order and chaos” by introducing heterogeneity to organizing systems.

June 22, 2023June 22, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Ruby Palmer: Painter with a Kaleidoscope Eye

A person sitting on a couch with a dog

Description automatically generated — Ruby Palmer with dog, “Oscar,” in her studio in Red Hook, NY, Photo credit: Yuko Yamamoto

Ruby Palmer’s new acrylic and Flashe paintings, currently on display in her solo show Shift at Morgan Lehman through June 30, look like colorfully doodled Rorschach tests. Each work is densely populated with swirling kaleidoscopic symbols like flowers, feathers, and geometric shapes, all set over jewel-toned or neutral grounds. At her previous exhibition with the gallery, she showed wall sculptures made up of painted clusters of basswood, and her new paintings seem to take those networks of wood a step further and expand them outward like Hoberman spheres in a big-bang fashion. It was my pleasure to speak with her and find out more about this exciting new direction in her work.

April 13, 2023April 13, 2023, by Jeanne Brasile

Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space

A picture containing floor, indoor, empty

Description automatically generated

Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space, March 2023 – installation view. Photo courtesy of Kate Glicksberg.

The Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn is a sympathetic environment for Rachael Wren’s Site Lines, a solo exhibition of six paintings and an unexpected site-specific installation. With two large windows on street level, the gallery’s abundant natural light heightens the relationship between the paintings and the outside world. This bright and airy effect is amplified by the minimalist architecture and tall ceilings, leaving the artist’s painted trees room to grow, an illusion propelled by the restrained installation which leaves ample space around each work.

April 8, 2023April 10, 2023, by Art Spiel

Denise Sfraga: Strange Brew at The Garage Art Center

Featured Artist

The work included in Strange Brew, Denise Sfraga’s solo show at the Garage Art Center, explores the life cycle of plants. This fascination with plants has always been at the root of the artist’s creative inspiration. Sfraga, who is based in New York City, says that working in her own garden and experiencing its constant state of flux, gives her the opportunity to witness first hand actual seed germination, leaf and flower growth, the dispersion of the next generation of seeds and the final stages of decay, “an ever evolving landscape of life forms that change color, shape and appearance daily.”

March 22, 2023March 21, 2023, by Art Spiel

Gabriela Vainsencher: Epic, Heroic, Ordinary at Asya Geisberg

featured artist

Gabriela Vainsencher with “Epic, Heroic, Ordinary” at Asya Geisberg gallery, March 2023

In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8^th, 2023.

March 10, 2023March 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

Kahori Kamiya: Long Eclipse at Amos Eno

Featured Artist

Kahori Kamiya, Solo show Long Eclipse Installation view at Amos Eno Gallery

Long Eclipse, Kahori Kamiya’s NY debut solo exhibition currently showing at Amos Eno Gallery, delves into the artist’s deeply personal experience of motherhood, breastfeeding, and the impact of the pandemic. Through paintings and sculptures, Kamiya explores the emotions and challenges of this unique time in her life, while also reflecting on themes of racial discrimination and grief. Her organic shapes run through semi-figurative drawings and painted sculptures, resonating with ancient Japanese spirituality and its relation to nature. The show runs through March 26, 2023.

December 5, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Peter Cvik at Zoya Museum Modra in Slovakia

Featured Artist

A person standing in front of a painting

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Portrait in Zoya Private Museum Solo Show “semagdniM”. Photocredit: Juraj Fifik

For the last few years the Slovak painter Peter Cvik has been layering different experiences and stories out of sheer visual memory. Without using photos or any other found imagery, Cvik builds new positions of “synthetic” reality that reminds us of something real or experienced within a flux of time where memories float. His landscapes evoke a sense of collision between opposing worlds without evoking the sense of a specific place. Peter Cvik equates his paintings to a sentence that ends with three dots which viewers can complete on their own.

November 29, 2022November 26, 2022, by Taylor F. Engle

What it Means to Be Human: HEES Displays Paintings and NFTs at Bechtler Museum and Aktion Art

HEES. “SEE ME FLY.” 2021-22. Acrylic, mixed media, and paintstick on raw canvas with 55 in LED screen insert- 4 NFTs play simultaneously, 84×96 in. Courtesy of Aktion Art.

A former-beauty-photographer-turned-artist, HEES’s creative journey has been one of consistent, self-taught innovation. The creator pivoted to painting 36 months ago, when he realized it was time for him to take on a new form of expression.

November 16, 2022November 15, 2022, by Alicia Puig

Love Letters to Paris: Ekaterina Popova at Cohle Gallery

Ekaterina Popova in her studio, Photo credit: Helena Raju

For the past several years, Philadelphia-based painter Ekaterina Popova has been exploring the theme of interiors in her work. The interest in this subject began as a way for her to reflect on her upbringing in Russia, but eventually evolved into a deeper investigation of the overall idea of “home” and what it means to her now. Her paintings highlight the warmth and beauty of lived-in domestic spaces, including items and objects that refer to a human presence without including the figure.