Helen Beckman, Jude Broughan, Carolyn Carr, Khatia Esartia, Adriana Farmiga, Chris Fennell, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Adler Guerrier, Gerben Mulder, Pierre Obando and Alessandra Olanow

February 14 - March 22, 2019

The upcoming group exhibition, Paper Chase, at Marisa Newman Projects features works on paper by eleven artists of various generations and nationalities. All of the works on display, ranging from abstraction to representational, landscape to still-life, harken to a personal narrative within the artists’ practice.

Carolyn Carr, Chris Fennell, Lynne Golob Gelfman and Alessandra Olanow all work within the frame of abstraction. Carr and Fennell’s gestural lines, Gelfman’s ephemeral grids, and Olanow’s mark-making are non-representational, and yet still all draw from a personal narrative and reference of their surroundings. Carr’s gesture is based on her signature/tag, while Fennell ‘s gestures are linked to organic imagery, with elemental woodcut quality. Gelfman’s grids reference the sun burnt landscapes that surround her and Olanow’s works are “memories” that illustrate the permanent impermanence of life. 

Adriana Farmiga and Pierre Obando through their diptychs present still lifes that celebrate the poetic and uncanny within the quotidian. Farmiga's drawings of iconic chocolate wrappers with graphic patterns allude to the geometric paintings of Tomma Abts. Obando’s pixelated overlays of the studio space with mirror, recall Sigmar Polke patterns with gestures of Lichtenstein.

Helen Beckman, Jude Broughan and Adler Guerrier create fantastical landscapes. Beckman’s graphite drawings muse on imaginary perspective. Guerrier blends the landscapes from varying countries and regions with an overlay of mark making and mapping, thus creating ideas of utopian space. Broughan’s mixed media works feature heightened or otherwise manipulated color, reflecting an intensity of emotion and energy associated with the sites they depict.

Narrative is a thread throughout all the works in Paper Chase and is most directly perceived in the watercolors of Khatia Esartia and Gerben Mulder. Using characters that occupy the imaginary spaces both Esartia and Mulder create visual stories using broad brushstrokes with vibrant colors that activate movement within the work, pushing the viewer into their journey.