Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach

Wednesday December 4 - Sunday December 8, 2024

PREVIEW

Adriana Farmiga

Index

September 4th – October 30, 2024

In this exhibition, Index, Adriana Farmiga, argues that the reliance on abstracted, oversimplified, and predigested expressions removes nuance and agency from the public sphere and from interpersonal debate.

At the center of the exhibition is a sculptural installation of ambiguous plywood forms. Originating from run-of-the-mill children’s crafting masks of characters like princesses and pirates, Farmiga broadens the scope of these abstracted icons to include the forms of an emoji keyboard. In scaling up these objects of play to monumental size, Farmiga transforms them into protest posters that – devoid of any specific rallying cry – obscure both their reference and their wearer.

Against these contradictory forms, Farmiga displays a triptych of watercolors from her still life collection. These red, yellow, and blue materials are categorized and reproduced in a painstakingly analog process. The drawings are time-consuming expositions on everyday objects that, through what Farmiga calls “deep looking,” are studied, translated, and expanded to reveal alternate understandings.

Gallery hours are Monday through Wednesday, 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

For inquires, please contact marisa@marisanewman.com

Susana Wald: Las Mujeres De/The Wives

Independent 20th Century

September 5 – 8, 2024

"The series started as a joke. I didn't know what I was painting until years later” - Susana Wald

As is so often the case with the early women Surrealists, they were first seen as the muses and/or wives of the artists. Many of the most well-known Surrealist women - and almost every artist related to the avant-garde of the 20th century- became involved with the movement through their personal relationships. Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning became involved with Surrealism through Max Ernst and Remedios Varo through the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller both worked with Man Ray, in addition to making their own Surrealist works. This was also the case for Susana Wald and her life partner, the Chilean poet and artist Ludwig Zeller. Faced with this historical dynamic, artists found different strategies to reclaim their identities. Leonora Carrington already said it in her iconic phrase, "I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse... I was too busy rebelling [...] and learning to be an artist." Wald begins her Mujeres de (The Wives of) in the early 80s as what she thought was a very funny joke: they are women turned into furniture, inspired by the trades of their male partners. Gardeners, painters, sculptors, fishermen, collectors –they are the belongings of their all-important husbands. From a surrealist imaginary that mixes humor and transformation of the body, this series provides a key imaginary for the representation of the female body made by women artists.

Gallery hours are Monday through Wednesday, 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

For inquires, please contact marisa@marisanewman.com

Strawberries, Strawberries, and Time

June 21 - August 7, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday June 21, 6 - 8 PM

In this exhibition, Strawberries, Twine, and Time, Jude Broughan’s rhythmic artworks meditate on daily life habits, and how they reflect values and norms. Her photographs, prints, and mixed media works examine our relationships with nature, with each other, and with ourselves; and consider ways of living more sustainably.

Jude Broughan is a Brooklyn based, New Zealand born artist. She has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Benrubi Gallery, New York, Marisa Newman Projects, New York, Calder and Lawson Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand, Dimensions Variable, Miami, and Churner & Churner, New York. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Yaddo residency.

Checklist (PDF)

Prints

For inquires, please contact marisa@marisanewman.com

Press Release (PDF)

Essay by Priscilla Fusco (PDF)

Priscilla Fusco (b. 1973, Montague, MA) holds a BA in English from Barnard College and an MFA from Hunter College. She works mostly in clay and fundraises for the Xerces Society of Invertebrates through her art. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

May 1 - June 19, 2024

“... the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”

- Ocean Vuong

“This sudden access to terrestrial madness illuminates his heart: he begins to think about the other Caribbean islands, their volcanoes, their earthquakes, their hurricanes.”

-Suzanne Césaire

In the current exhibition, wanders a never fixed nor dormant landscape, Adler Guerrier continues an exploration of landscapes, gardens, and verdant salons as places for interrogating the conditions for flourishing, prompting deeper reflection on awe, imagination,and cultivated hope that keeps us living.

Adler Guerrier lives and works in Miami, Florida. Recent exhibitions include Adler Guerrier: Wander and Errancies, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum; Des grains de poussière sur la mer, Friche la Belle de Mai; I drank words submerged in dreams (23rd Bienal de Arte Paiz), Guatemala. Guerrier’s works can be found in public collections including ICA Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Walker Art Center, and Studio Museum in Harlem.

CHECKLIST (PDF)

Essay by Leslie M. Wilson, PhD (PDF)

Leslie M. Wilson is Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is part of the curatorial team for David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive (2023) and was the curator of not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago (2022). She has recently written for publications including Ernest Cole: The True America, Jamel Shabazz: Albums, Dear Dave, FOAM Magazine, and Manual: a journal about art and its making, and interviewed Larry W. Cook for Weiss Berlin. From 2017-2021, she was an Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. And from 2019 to 2021, she held a curatorial fellowship at the Smart Museum. She was previously a Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellow at CASVA and received a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago in 2017.

EXPOCHICAGO 2024

11–14 APRIL 2024

EXPOSURE | BOOTH 322

Uta Bekaia

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili)

PREVIEW (PDF)

For the EXPOCHICAGO 2024 edition Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present a two-person presentation centered on world-building, featuring sculptures, mosaics, mirror paintings, and marble furniture by Uta Bekaia and Levani.

Through their intricate craftsmanship, material diversity, and conceptual scope, these artists blur the boundaries between the myth, the cosmos, the imaginary, and the everyday. Like magicians or space/time travelers, they reveal zoomorphic hybrids, primarily deers, that allure the viewer into the worlds of deepened connections and new possibilities.

Uta Bekaia uses textile, ceramic, embroidery, gold, and gemstones to create sculptures that capture the dream-like states and imaginations of the child's innocence and joy. Small-scale mosaic pieces on the wall are assembled by hand-made ceramic tiles and depict celestial bodies, spaceships, and other creatures. Levani's "iii. the goddexx" carries the quality of an ancient deity, staring incisively across the times. Assembled from an antique saddle, vintage jewelry, stainless steel, wood, glass, neon, and antlers," I think of my process as grafting, a merging of the opposites -organic with inorganic, ancient with something very new to create new forms of life" - notes the artist. The large-scale multi-panel painting in liquid mirror depicts the Tree of Life—a recurrent theme in Levani's work. Inspired by medieval stone carvings, the painting contains other motifs of their vocabulary. The palm tree leaves are symbols of eternal life and the cut-out alphabet from their childhood. Inspired by the same alphabet shape is Levani's collaboration with Papuna - a sculptural modular furniture in marble shown to the public for the first time.

On April 10th, preceding the opening of the EXPOCHICAGO, Uta Bekaia and Levani present their new collaborative performance at the "Costume and Collapse" - screening and conversation with Nick Cave and Chaos (Uta Bekaia, Levani, Lucas de Lima), hosted by the Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago and organized by Hoda El Shakry, Leah Feldman, and Payam Sharifi (Slavs and Tatars).

EXPOSURE section of EXPOCHICAGO features a curated selection of emerging artists in solo and two-person presentations. Rosario Güiraldes, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curates the EXPOSURE 2024 exhibitors.

Uta Bekaia's (b. Tbilisi, Georgia) practice revolves around the speculative recreation of ancestral rituals reimagined for a Queer utopian future. Drawing inspiration from traditional crafts, Bekaia creates elaborate wearable sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and objects assembled into immersive installations, films, and live performances. Bekaia studied Industrial Design at Tbilisi Mtsire Academy. He has been awarded the residences at ART OMI, Museum of Art and Design MAD, NY; Garikula, Georgia; His work has been shown at Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona; The Pickle Bar (Slavs and Tatars), Berlin, Kimball Art Center, UT; Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi; Kyiv Biennial in Istanbul and Kyiv; Silk Museum, Tbilisi; The Lodge Gallery, NY; Center for Contemporary Art, Batumi; among others. He has staged parades for the Tbilisi City Hall Tbilisoba Festival, Book Capital of the World Opening Ceremony, TurnPark, and ArtPark, among others. Bekaia's work has been written about in publications such as W Magazine, Fucking Young! MoMA NY [Post], ArtAsia Pacific, Huffington Post, and The Art Newspapers, among others. Bekaia is a founding member of the Tbilisi-based queer creative collective Fungus.

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili, b. Tbilisi, Georgia) is a transdisciplinary artist who creates immersive installations, sculptures, films, neon, and images that are inspired by the examples of radical transformations and address questions of identity, collectivity, and world-building. Levani graduated with an MFA from Buenos Aires National University of Arts (2010) and a BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2003). They had exhibited extensively at the institutions and venues at the Georgian National Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, National Art Museum of China, EFA Project Space, BRIC Biennial, Tartu Art Museum, Yerevan Folk Arts Museum, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, Artists Alliance Inc., Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Marisa Newman Projects, NARS Foundation, Silk Museum, and more. Levani is a recipient of the Artists Alliance Inc. LES studio residency program; Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship; Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant; NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program fellowship; Creative Time X Summit Grant; AIM Fellowship of the Bronx Museum of the Arts; NARS Foundation Studio Residency; and the National Endowments for the Arts. Levani's work has been reviewed in publications such as Frieze, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, HYPERALLERGIC, The Art Newspaper, BOMB, ART PAPERS, ArtAsiaPacific, PIN– UP, HuffPost, OSMOS, and more.

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EXPOCHICAGO 2024

NAVY PIER | CHICAGO

VIP PREVIEW

Thursday, April 11 | 12:00 noon – 9:00pm

OPENING

Thursday, April 11 | 6:00–9:00pm   


FAIR HOURS

Friday, April 12 | 11:00am – 7:00pm


Saturday, April 13 | 11:00am – 7:00pm


Sunday, April 14 | 11:00am – 6:00pm

INQUIRIES

marisa@marisanewman.com

MORE INFO

www.expochicago.com

JACKIE BROOKNER | SITTING PRETTY

January 22 - March 20, 2024

While postmodernist thinkers have successfully problematized our assumptions about how we know, what we know, and who we are, telling us that language determines them all, humanity has been insistently placing its own existence, as well as that of the rest of life on Earth, in dire jeopardy—poisoning water, land and air. Postmodernism’s deconstruction of the autonomy of the individual and its breakdown of the borders of the subject are consistent with the awareness ecology brings to us that our human actions have effects far beyond our intentions and desires and that our dreams of technological control are fantasy.

—Jackie Brookner from ‘The Heart of Matter,’ Art JournalSummer 1992

On January22, 2024, Marisa Newman Projects is honored to present a suite of chairs made by the late American ecologist Jackie Brookner. In 1992, at a pivotal moment when her art practice was called into question by her own writing which at the time began to focus on how “our materialistic culture could be so at war with the matrix of its own matter: the Earth.” Using soil as a metaphor for the planet, she made the chairs as a way to investigate the cultural associations of dirt, excrement, sex, and death. This exploration would ultimately shift her practice from the studio to the outside world where she would go on to create landscape-scale™Biosculptures that continue to provide ecological benefits and transform cultural values in locations around the globe where they are still in operation today. Brookner considered the earth and its resources in everything she created. The human body and its functional parts; head, legs, hands, feet were recurring forms in her sculptures, and the tongue, the fleshy muscular organ in the mouth of mammals, used for tasting, licking, swallowing, and [in humans] for articulating speech. She began to sculpt with dirt in the same way she once used clay to work out ideas and together with the malleable qualities of the tongue—moist, rough, silken—she created the chairs indifferent shapes of articulation. They are seductive, playful, gritty, surreal and an invitation to sit, relax and experience the comfort of being at one with the Earth.

Jackie Brookner was a celebrated ecological artist, sculptor, educator, and prolific writer on subjects at the intersection of language, ecology, human nature, and our connection to the natural world. She is the recipient of numerous awards including The National Endowment for the Arts, The New YorkFoundation for the Arts in Sculpture, Drawing, and Interdisciplinary Work, The Nancy Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, New School University Pedagogical Innovation Grant, andNational Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” Grant for The Fargo Project,Fargo, ND [ongoing]. She completed her B.A. at Wellesley College and holds M.A. and A.B.D. degrees from Harvard University.

View Checklist (PDF)

View Checklist (PDF)

Marisa Newman Projects introduces surrealist artist Susana Wald's Alchemical Exercises, an exhibition that brings together some of Wald's most striking erotic drawings, paintings, and ceramic sculptures. Created between 1976 and 1982, the works exemplify the artist's constant quest for transformation by means of the alchemist's prima materia and the predictable quotidian: voluptuous sculptures made during her years as a ceramist engage in dialogue with her earliest painted works. Shown publicly for the first time, 18 drawings on paper from the series Ultramuebles de la pasion (1981-1982), act as the link between Wald's sculptures and paintings. The exhibition acts as the stage for a sexuality without limits, as Susana Wald puts pleasure and imagination at her service to create works of unbound daring. Alchemical Exercises is an ode to the transformational power of surrealism, a movement that continues to subvert the canon and imagines a different world, a world where the most hidden desires are satisfied. Alchemy is the union of opposites, the irrational approximation of human and artifact, and all that lies between, and triggers the viewer's imagination. Wald, b.1937 in Budapest, Hungary. Studied art in Buenos Aires, Argentina and science in Santiago de Chile. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, the most outstanding of which include the XLII Venice Biennial (1986). Alchemical Exercises will be her first solo-show in NYC.

Checklist (PDF)

June 16 - August 10, 2023

Opening reception: June 16, 6-8 PM

The Missing Painter aims to recreate the gallery space into a collection of Portraiture and Still Life. Each piece holds a reference to these genres through practices whose intentionality is to produce objects inherently meant to operate within the functional realm. Through fragments of daily life objects, we aim to copy-cat painting’s tradition of immortalizing the subject through its representation. While we fail, we are forced to replicate, if not the subject’s material possessions, at least their dimensions. The sitter has vanished and everything aims to reconstitute its presence through a system of proportions; we have a body for which we knit and mold and a body that knits and molds. The closer we get to the physical actions the further we get from representation, creating a fragmented object that dwells within the sphere of “resemblance” and struggles to escape its intrinsic functionality. We are missing the painter and the painting and we are left with shallow appearances of the genre and its history.

This collaboration places at the center of the discussion the problem of the absence of the body, giving a common ground to construct–in a curatorial manner within the exhibition space— what could be conceptualized as the inside of a broken Still Life painting. The works appear in the space as replicas of everyday objects and by dwelling in their lack of functionality they rebuild purpose. The domestic aspect of the Still Life genre is accentuated by the knitted component and its reference in the ceramic. Patterns in books, web pages and magazines meant for domestic craft practices are here appropriated and serve as the departing scores. The act of knitting has a fundamental relation with the body of a wearer. With the absence of the wearer the objects in the show get fragmented and forced to reshape themselves as new bodies that occupy the gallery space.

Montserrat Albores Gleason (born in Mexico, lives and works in Mexico and New York) Formed as a visual artist and specialized in curatorial practice and fashion design Albores Gleason worked for years as an independent curator. In 2007 founded PTRA, originally a curatorial project that through the years evolved to a fashion creative entity dedicated to both the technical and creative construction of garments. Through PTRA Albores Gleason has delved into a creative space that dwells in the division line between Fashion and Art. Her work has been shown in both fashion and artistic contexts and it forms part of the collection of Museum at FIT.

New York-based artist Nicole Cherubini works largely in sculpture and mixed media. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, NJ) and the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions across the US and beyond. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Bomb, Frieze Magazine, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

For inquiries, please contact marisa@marisanewman.com

Moon Madness

May 3 - June 14, 2023

Opening Reception

Wednesday, May 3rd, 6-8 PM

MARISA NEWMAN PROJECTS

BOOTH R7

CAROLYN CARR

CHARLOTTA WESTERGREN

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VIP PREVIEW BY INVITATION

Wednesday, May 10, 2023 | 4 PM – 8 PM

PUBLIC DAYS

Thursday, May 11, 2023 | 12 PM – 7 PM

Friday, May 12, 2023 | 12 PM – 7 PM

Saturday, May 13, 2023 | 12 PM – 6 PM

CHELSEA INDUSTRIAL

535 W 28 Street, New York, NY

Tickets and More Info

www.futurefairs.com

EXPOSURE

Booth 470

LEVANI

SUSANA WALD

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Marisa Newman Projects is thrilled to present an intergenerational dialogue between Levani and Susana Wald. Centered on emergence and rebirth - central topics for each artist - our presentation pairs Wald's paintings from the "Egg" series with Levani's works from the "imago of a queer artist*" project. The two artists share similar biographical paths. Born in eastern Europe—Susana Wald in 1937, Budapest, Hungary, and Levani in 1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia—both artists' formative creative years were spent in Buenos Aires (and in Chile for Wald); later, they both migrated to North America. Susana Wald lived in Canada before relocating to Oaxaca, Mexico, while Levani calls New York home. At the fringes of patriarchal normativity, both artists develop seductive visual language permeated with erotic resilience to explore feminist and queer subjectivities.

LEVANI (Preview PDF)

SUSANA WALD (Preview PDF)

About the Artists:

SUSANA WALD Born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary. Lives and works in San Andrés Huayapam, Oaxaca, Mexico. Painter, literary translator, graphic designer, publisher, and writer, Susana Wald's extensive work encompasses painting, ceramics, murals, drawings, and collages. A key figure in understanding international Surrealism from a feminist standpoint, Susana Wald has been creating work for over 60 years.

Presented at ExpoChicago is a selection of her historic Egg series spanning from the earliest ceramic pieces from 1972 (Tea for Two) to the most recent paintings completed in 2010 (Emblematica de Americas). As in the best traditions of Surrealism, the subconscious and the sublime leads Susana Wald's quests to challenge and expand philosophical questions of life and existence. The Egg, an already complex and loaded image/concept, is intertwined with the artist's personal history, like an alloy spoon from the WW2 aid package, which the artist carried with her for decades (100 ańos, 2001). Wald remarks: "I only now understand that the egg series is about emergence, the emergence of female energy that has been suppressed for so long. And now, in its resurgence and growing strength, we need it to bring balance into today's world."

Susana Wald's work has been exhibited extensively. Among the most notable ones should be mentioned her retrospective "En busca de lo Inasible" at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, curated by Macarena Bravo Cox (2021), "Iberoamérica Pinta" a traveling group show organized by Fondo de Cultura Económica and UNESCO, exhibiting in more than 20 countries (1997-2000), "Surrealism in Chile," at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (1970), and the 42nd Venice Biennial "Arte e Sienza" organized by Arturo Schwarz (1986). Susana Wald will have her first solo show with Marisa Newman Projects in September 2023, focusing on her historical paintings and drawings from the 80s.

Join Susana Wald in conversation with the curator of EXPOSURE section this year Aimé Iglesias Lukin (Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts at Americas Society, NY), on Sunday, April 16, 12-1 PM.

LEVANI’s transdisciplinary practice is an eco-centric inquiry into the questions of identity and belonging. The works in the booth are from their current project imago of a queer artist* that offers a space for an expanded notion of queerness as the capacity for porousness, fluidity, and transformation. Drawing inspiration from linguistics (i·ma·go Latin for "image"), biology (imago is the last, winged stage in insect development followed by the complete metamorphosis), and psychology (an unconscious idealized mental image of someone, which influences a person's behavior), Levani creates complex, layered images that affirm desire and imagination as primary tools for world- building.

Levani is a Tbilisi-born artist based in New York. They hold an MFA from IUNA Buenos Aires and a BFA from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts. Levani has exhibited extensively at venues and institutions such as Artists Alliance Inc., Georgian National Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Tbilisi Kunsthalle, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Beijing Biennial, Tartu Art Museum, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and the BRIC Biennial, among others. Their work has been featured in Frieze, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsia Pacific, Art Papers, Art News, Observer, HYPERALLERGIC, and more. Levani's work is in public collections of The National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Georgian National Museum, Mestia; and Tbilisi Silk Museum, Georgia.

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EXPO CHICAGO

April 13 - 16, 2023

NAVY PIERS CHICAGO

VIP PREVIEW

Thursday, April 13 | 12:00 noon – 6:00 pm

(By Invitation Only)

OPENING NIGHT

Thursday, April 13 | 6:00–9:00pm

(Limited Availability | A portion of each ticket sold will benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago)

GENERAL ADMISSION

Friday, April 14 | 11:00am – 7:00pm

Saturday, April 15 | 11:00am – 7:00pm

Sunday, April 16 | 11:00am – 6:00pm

Tickets and More Info

www.expochicago.com

March 1 - April 26, 2023

Opening Reception: March 1st, 6-8 PM

For her new project Totally Tails, Alicia Gibson presents an installation comprised of 18 oil paintings of her dog Tails. Always mining her surroundings for her still-life paintings, Gibson now turns to portraiture but still looking at what is by her side, what is nearest and dearest –Tails.

Throughout art history, dogs have been prominently featured - in mosaics at Pompeii to Gaugin’s painting Still Life with Three Dogs and often depicted in hunting scenes and as lap dogs in aristocratic portraitures of the Renaissance. Gibson’s focus on her dog in this intimate and often humorous setting has its own more of a 21st Century flavor. From CM Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker to Francis Picabia’s Femme au bull-dog, the 20th Century saw a new way to incorporate the canine image. Anthropomorphic representations of dogs, as well as using source materials from magazines and photography became more prevalent. Gibson’s work echoes this kitsch and the uses mash-up aesthetic, but these works seem more akin to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills than William Wegman’s Weimaraners. Tails personality is shown through various poses and filters in a performative nature but getting to the core of the canine spirit which is Totally Tails and ultimately which is Totally Gibson.

Alicia Gibson was born in Manhasset, NY. She received her BA from Boston College, a Post-Baccalaureate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and an MFA from Hunter Col-lege. Solo exhibitions have included Backronym in a Sentence at Grifter Gallery, NY, NY (2021), Friend from Foe at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2017), Backseat Bingo, Marvin Gardens, Ridgewood, NY (2017), Not in a Million Beers, Real Estate Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Pur-gatory Emporium, CANADA Gallery, NY, NY (2016), and Flip the Script Turn the Tide, Julius Ceasar Gallery, Chicago, IL (2016). Alicia has exhibited at Breeder Gallery, Greece, Rod Barton, UK, Venus Over LA, Howard’s, GA, Adams and Ollman, OR, Carroll and Sons, MA, Nevvan Gallery, Sweden and Stems Gallery, Belgium. Select NY galleries include Lyles and King, Derek Eller, Rachel Uffner, Zurcher, and Underdonk. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze, NY Times, Art News, Frontrunner Magazine, Hyperallergic, MOMUS, Art Papers and the Boston Globe.

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Alicia Gibson

by Catherine Spaulding

From prehistoric cave paintings to Jeff Koons’s Puppy, the dog has been an art subject for thousands of years. And it’s not hard to see why: from loyal hunting companion to lapdog, the dog is more than worthy of our cultural (and personal) attention. Was the artist thinking about this distinguished history when she made these oil paintings of her dog? Probably not.

Definitely not.

During the height of the COVID pandemic, Alicia, a native of NY and decade-plus Brooklyn resident, left for her mother’s home in the relatively isolated foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina. Her plan was simple: she would save a little money while the city was shut down and return once the city was fun again. Then, her mother got sick—very sick—and so the artist stayed in South Carolina, enduring the hard labor and anxiety that comes with being the sole caregiver of an ailing parent, all while lacking her social and emotional support system back in Brooklyn. The works that resulted from this period are a series of oil paintings of the one constant in her life from Brooklyn to South Carolina: her dog, Tails. The portraits range from realistic—Tails in a Uhaul, Tails in a “Just Be You” t-shirt, Tails with his head caught goofily in a plastic Thro Yo frisbee—to surrealistic patchworks of the Sheltie nearly hidden behind digital makeup filters, masks, and other transformational accessories. The many faces of Tails, a cloning–Dolly situation of sorts. But the artist is not just having kitschy fun in painting these breezy depictions of her amusing canine companion. Like Alicia’s past work, the portraits are full of popping, girlish colors, such as the bright pink bow and floating purple hearts in “Pinky Bow Tails.” Her brushwork remains energetic and her lowbrow humor intact with such pieces as “Tails From The Crypt” and “‘We Can Do It’ Tails.” But there is also something new in these works: a radical tenderness, an appreciation of her canine companion’s ability to enjoy life in a lighthearted and unselfconscious way, even as the artist herself is trying to hold everything together. And as Alicia revels in the endlessly playful nature of her closest companion, it is also a reminder to the viewer to breathe, even when life feels lonely and uncertain. In these works, Alicia is doing what many of the best artists do in isolation: combining two things that bring her solace— painting and her eccentric Tails.

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Exhibition Catalog

Published by Marisa Newman Projects

Softcover, 7×7 in (18×18 cm), # of Pages: 20

ISBN 9798211453302

Preview / Order

December 14, 2022 - February 22, 2023

Jude Broughan

Adriana Farmiga

Rune Olsen

Gabriela Vainsencher

Juana Valdes

Mandy Cano Villalobos

Charlotta Westergren

Checklist (PDF)

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Notes on Dreaming

by Samuel Draxler

(Catalog Essay)

In the threat simulation theory of dreaming, negative dreams and nightmares function as rehearsals to help navigate real life threats. While the theory concerns the individual, dreams operate on a social scale as well. But rather than preparing us, the national fantasy of the American Dream has accelerated ecological collapse, an unending pandemic, housing and economic crises, and a weakening social contract. What are we rehearsing through the collective dreams of the present?

A home of one’s own is out of reach for most, and in Rune Olsen’s Bathroom Drawing (inspiration), collaged cut-outs of tubs, showers, faucets, and fixtures are arranged over a tiled floor drafted in linear perspective. The “inspiration” recalls using mood boards or Pinterest for home renovation, but instead of the tasteful design favored by the market, the space is jagged and unsettled, with a lone figure obscured behind a mirror-like gradient. Olsen’s to Such Great Heights uses related domestic materials (copper piping, a bathtub) dissected and welded into a sculptural form that seems to reach upwards. The exclusionary spaces of moneyed architecture can be subverted: brightly colored textiles spread softly over the topiary ball form of Mandy Cano Villalobos’s September Song, recoding the traditional underlying form through the floating ephemera of a personal life.

The natural world once promised limitlessness resources, but that bounty has been cut short. Charlotta Westergren’s Gardening 6 and Gardening 7 take the form of wall sconces with botanical glass elements echoing their brass tubing. Hanging cherries recall the symbols of a slot machine, and on the gallery walls painted mice emerge as sculptures in relief — one eating cherries as if snatched from above. In these works, the built environment and the natural are delicately balanced — a prize we’re forced to question. The finiteness of resources also inflects Jude Broughan’s Sunshine Haircare Bars and Tube, a photograph of shampoo and conditioner bars standing balanced beside a plastic tube of another product. Textured orange vinyl is sewn onto the surface of the photograph: these bright forms emphasize the abstracted form of the small, totemic sculpture with its dappled colors, but they also physically wrap the work, shifting consideration back onto the tube’s packaging.

Loss and mourning run through any assessment of the current scenario. Gabriela Vainsencher’s photographs Treasure 03, Treasure 07 and Treasure 09 evoke the absence of precious artifacts. The objects are gone – excavated from their site, excised from their catalogue pages – but their existence is implied by their plinth and shadow. The negation is an open wound and a reminder of loss. In Juana Valdés’s Thirst, a luxury water bottle is translated from plastic into porcelain, its preciousness made clear. While water scarcity disproportionately affects marginalized populations, plastic consumables marketed towards the wealthy remain profitable. Encased in stone as if a fossil, the flask hints towards the extinction that may follow this rising tension.

To say that something feels like a dream is to declare it pleasant, but to mark it as unreal. The two still lives by Adriana Farmiga both feature pairs of objects against a minimal backdrop. In XX two feathers arc gently away from one another over a mottled pink ground, seemingly depicting one X chromosome of a female-coded pair. Para:Sympathetic, the title referencing the nervous system driving bodily operations towards rest and relaxation, shows a cocktail umbrella next to a taped scrap of gift wrap. The future is female, and it’s happy hour.

A dreamscape extends indefinitely – no margins, none marginalized.

Untitled Art Miami Beach

November 29 - December 3, 2022

Booth A51

Uta Bekaia

Khatia Esartia

Adler Guerrier

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili)

Susana Wald

Charlotta Westergren

Poetry reading / Performance by

Lucas de Lima

Friday, December 2, 5 PM

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VIP Preview

Monday, Nov 28, 1–8 pm

Fair Dates

Tuesday, Nov 29 – Saturday, Dec 3

11am – 7pm

12th Street and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL

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PREVIEW (PDF)

Uta Bekaia (PDF)

Khatia Esartia (PDF)

Adler Guerrier (PDF)

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili) PDF

Susana Wald (PDF)

Charlotta Westergren (PDF)

Alexander Lee

RĀ‘AU

September 7 – November 23, 2022

Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

Rā’au by Maia Nuku (PDF)

Recuperation by Todd Porterfield (PDF)

Exhibition Catalog (Preview)

with essays by Maia Nuku, Curator of Arts of Oceania at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Todd Porterfield, Professor of Art History at New York University.

Rā’au is Tahitian for both wood and medicine in reference to the traditional views of plant-based pharmacopoeia. Through this new series of sculptures made from various types of reclaimed wood, Alexander Lee brings concepts and narratives from Tahiti where he grew-up into the urbanity of New York City where he has been a resident for 25 years. “If Manhattan is the urban epitome of an island in the Western construction, and Tahiti is its imaginary Indigenous opposite, how does a subject from both realities learn from it and navigates the world into the 21st century?” asks Lee.

The American born artist goes at it collapsing Polynesia and its English and French colonial narratives, Protestant and Catholic evangelization, traditional indigenous culture, and his own Hakka Chinese-French-Polynesian-American-Catholic-Queer upbringing in a commentary on what the Pacific and its oceanic potentialities can inspire today, on the footsteps of Epeli Hau’ofa’s Sea of Islands.

The works, installed in a colored space, were made with woods gathered in his East-Harlem neighborhood, some from an art residency in the oak forest of the Meuse region of France, some from walks in the mountains of Santa Fe, and some from Tahiti where he splits his time.

Rā’au is part of the second installment of what Lee calls his tāpa’o (sign) series he started in 2019, a long-term project and reflection on our environmental collapse and the transformations our civilization must contemplate in order to survive in a fast and furiously changing landscape. It acts as a parable and refers back to a time when evangelization was an arm to Western colonization, and the burning of pagan idols were replaced by wooden Christian icons. How does a culture transform its signs and entire belief system and enters another moment of Modernism? In this shifting paradigm, Lee composes works and recrafts traditional Polynesian sculptures and tattoo motifs with modernist forms - themselves derived from so-called “primitive art” and indigenous artifacts - the contemporary forms from the Western art canon he learnt as a young art student on the streets of this city.

The main form he crafts are based on the Veri, a centipede motif that is both venomous and used as a medicinal ingredient in Chinese infusion. The shapes, curved, hollow and stretched; at once female and male, play on the poly-sexual trans-formed genres the artist is interested in writing into the XXI century. The objects are at once infinity columns, beaded sex-plugs, burnt and christened pagan idols, up-cycled materials, and objects of consumption and ritualized devotion. In our 2022 continued-Covid moment of infectious fear, Lee recalls first contact that led to the indigenous decimation by pests and cholera and the mournful ills of industrialization that brings us to this moment.

Lee invokes the mana (energy and spirit of the animate and inanimate) into these works, at once to’o (ritual object), memory helpers, narrative devices and descendants; into an incantation: can we plant our own medicine?

Alexander Lee and Rā’au are supported by Air Tahiti Nui.

Alexander Lee was born in Stockton, CA, and grew-up on the island of Tahiti, French Polynesia. He earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000), his MFA from Columbia University (2002), and MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2004). Lee’s work has been exhibited extensively worldwide, including MHKA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2017), 1st Honolulu Biennale (2017), TBA21 - Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Wien (2017), CAC - Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2019), Musée de Tahiti et des Iles (2016, 2021), and most recently at MoCNA - Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (2021-2022) , and Vent des Forêts, France (2021-22). Lee is a founding member of a Tahiti based artists’ collective 'ŌRAMA Studio (2015), which published its first monograph in 2021. In 2018, he re-designed the brandmark for Air Tahiti Nui, the international airline of French Polynesia, with Future Brands. His multi-room installation TE ATUA VAHINE MANA RA O PERE - L’Aube où les Fauves viennent se Désaltérer, collapsing the narratives or Pele and the many nuclear tests in the Pacific, premiered at the 1st Honolulu Biennale (2017) and is currently part of Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology, an exhibition organized by MoCNA traveling to the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, in 2023. Since 2021, part of a residence at Vent des Forêts, a rural art center in the Meuse region of France, Lee has been at work on his tāpa’o, a new series of totemic sculptures in five materials: earth, wood, stone, metal, and glass. His efforts have been followed by Director Mélissa Constantinovitch for an upcoming series documenting creative processes to be aired on French television in 2023. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Village Voice, TimeOut New York, Tahiti Pacifique, and most recently L’Est Républicain, and Le Monde.

Kunsthalle Tbilisi

Adler Guerrier

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili)

Nested in a Place of Becoming

September 22 – October 26, 2022

Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

On Becoming: An Evocation for Adler Guerrier and Levani By Re’al Christian (PDF)

Kunsthalle Tbilisi is pleased to present a two-person exhibition, Nested in a Place of Becoming, by Adler Guerrier and Levani at Fabrika Tbilisi. With inquiries into history, race, identity and notions of place, the exhibition is centered around an expanded ecological view of human habitations as sites that engender openness, possibilities, learning, and liberation. The show is informed by gardens, as physical and metaphysical forms, engaged "always [as] a place of becoming" (Solnit, Orwell's Roses), where tending to one amounts to seeding hope and investing in the future.

Guerrier's installation of mixed media drawings and photography suggests formulation of thoughts related to a proximity of plants and open to the natural, from which expressions of everyday beauty have intimated a deepened perspective of place, one's self, shared affinities with others, and outlook on the possible.

Titled “what color is the BlackSea?” (2021-ongoing), Levani’s installation foregrounds Ecology's potential for cognitive restructuring. An ecosystem of its own, the installation is inhabited by living plants and their casts in silicone and resin, growing horticulture lights, latex fabric imprinted with Georgian language, neon, and sound. Inquiring into the material, cosmological, and psychological dimensions of the human and nonhuman beyond identity categories, the installation collapses the binary dichotomies of living vs. non-living, natural vs. synthetic, material vs. spiritual. It offers an iconography of pluriversal belonging, empathy, solidarity, and care.

Exhibition is organized with Marisa Newman Projects, NY and is accompanied by a catalog with essay by Re’al Christian.

Exhibition at KunsthalleTbilisi.com

Gallery Hours: Wed -Sun: 1 - 8 PM.

Exhibition address: Fabrika Tbilisi, Ninoshvili 8, Tbilisi, Georgia 0102

May 23 - July 27, 2022

Opening Reception

Monday, May 23rd, 6-8 PM

To my fluffy little rabbit,

hiding within.

Always so frightened.

So fragile, so frail, so easy to break.

Thank you for the shelter.

Thank you for the care.

Stay with me...

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Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

A Toy Story: Uta Bekaia’s My Fragile Little Rabbit by Glenn Adamson (PDF)

Marking Uta Bekaia's first solo show with the gallery, "My Fragile Little Rabbit," is an immersive installation featuring soft sculptures, embroideries, watercolors, and animation video. The exhibition explores what it meant for the artist to grow up as a queer child in a patriarchal society.

Uta Bekaia is a Tbilisi-born multimedia artist. His work is a speculative recreation of his ancestral rituals restaged for Queer utopian future. With the fascination with traditional crafts, Bekaia creates richly adorned wearable sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and objects, bringing them together as immersive installations, films, and live performances. Bekaia studied Industrial Design at Tbilisi Mtsire Academy. He has been awarded the residences at ART OMI, Museum of Art and Design MAD, NY; Garikula, Georgia; His work has been shown at Window Project, Tbilisi; SchauFenster, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi; Kyiv Biennial in Istanbul and Kyiv; ERTI Gallery, Tbilisi; Silk Museum, Tbilisi; The Lodge Gallery, NY; Center for Contemporary Art, Batumi; among others. He has staged parades for the Tbilisi City Hall Tbilisoba Festival, Book Capital of the World Opening Ceremony, TurnPark, and ArtPark, among others. Bekaia is a founding member of the Tbilisi-based queer creative collective Fungus.

A catalog with an essay by Glenn Adamson will accompany the exhibition (forthcoming end of June).

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A Toy Story: Uta Bekaia’s My Sweet Little Rabbit

by Glenn Adamson

It was exactly a century ago, in 1922, that Margery Williams published her immortal children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. It tells the story of a forlorn stuffed animal, which has been overlooked in favor of newer, shinier playthings. The rabbit becomes fixated on the idea that “when a child loves you for a long, long time… then you become real," and eventually sees that dream come true, hopping off into the forest to live happily ever after.

Williams’ spare and beautiful book has inspired generations of readers (not to mention the blockbuster Toy Story film franchise). Unfortunately though, narratives don’t always come so neatly wrapped. In Uta Bekaia’s installation, mordantly titled My Fragile Little Rabbit, the rest of life comes roaring in. The show is centered on a procession of friendly-faced bunnies, their pelts rather gorgeously decked out in topologies of red and black faux fur. But all is not necessarily well, here in the nursery of the mind. As they make their way across the floor, the rabbits seem to gradually sink into it. One is half-embedded in the wall, trapped. A preponderance of soft, tentacle-like roots hang down like stalactites from the gallery ceiling, and append themselves to Bekaia’s leporine protagonists. Watercolors, hung in a tight two-by-three arrangement on one wall, depict these proceedings as if documenting them for some future inquiry. And a video, hung low in one corner, whispers:

To my fluffy little rabbit,
hiding within.


Always so frightened.


So fragile, so frail, so easy to break.

Thank you for the shelter.

Thank you for the care.

Stay with me...

What are we to make of this scene, evenly balanced between sweet dream and dark nightmare? Clues come in the embroidered emblems that adorn the walls – a striated moon, stars (or are they explosions?), a battle tank. The iconography has a certain universality to it; anyone who’s ever been a child, or still is one, can relate. For Bekaia, it comes from a very particular set of experiences. Born in the country of Georgia, for some years he has divided his time between its capital, Tbilisi, and New York City. His practice, meanwhile, has unfolded across many disciplines, incorporating aspects of fashion, sculpture, performance, and video. He weaves them all into a single fabric, rich with the texture of fable and mythology.

In this newest work, Bekaia has adopted the rabbit as a sort of avatar. It’s a self-representation and self-multiplication (that’s what rabbits do, after all), which speaks to a certain feeling of vulnerability. As a gay man, he has had turbulent times in Tbilisi, sometimes joyful, sometimes harrowing. He has seen the city come alive with liberating energy; in fact, it has a thriving (though underground) queer art scene. Yet it has also been the scene of ugliness, and violence, directed toward the LGTBQ+ community.

It’s all too easy to internalize this hostility, to be made to feel worthless and afraid. This is how oppression works. Hence the rabbit: a creature with few defenses. “Just like little rabbits,” he has written, “we needed to hide and learn to run fast. To survive. Not to get devoured by wolves.” Hence, too, the black tentacles of doubt, which could be alternately construed as attacking from outside, or sprouting from within.

Yet Bekaia’s installation is not without hope, and humor. His works touch a nerve, to be sure, but they also stir the heart. Their hand-craftedness is key to this emotional affect. The artist has put in every stitch in those embroidered faces, lavishing them care. Just the kind of care that a child might devote to a stuffed animal, in the fond hope that it might one day come to life. In a way, that is just what Bekaia has achieved in this exhibition. He has dared to give embodiment to images – and feelings – that most of us would keep buried, way down inside.

They say that everyone has an inner child. Bekaia’s breathes free.

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Uta Bekaia

My Fragile Little Rabbit

Exhibition Catalog with Essay by Glenn Adamson

Published by Marisa Newman Projects

Softcover, 7×7 in (18×18 cm), # of Pages: 20

ISBN 9798210420282

Preview / Order

May 4-7, 2022

Booth P1

PREVIEW (PDF)

Our presentation for Future Fair NY 2022 comprises four artists: Chris Fennell, Alicia Gibson, Levani (Levan Mindiashvili), and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall.

Each of the artists works with an impulsive response to their environments. Whether it's immediate space around them or global political events – the immediacy of reaction and stream of consciousness is how these four artists work.

Chris Fennell's painstakingly elaborate works are created by the meticulous layering of cut-out paper circles and acrylic paint. Reacting to continuous sirens during the first months of the quarantine, Fennel's works resemble piercing sound waves.

Alicia Gibson's gestural paintings combine texts and imagery that at once seem disconnected yet perfectly convey the frantic of our everyday.

Levani's neons "In search of the Miraculous" and "I should have kissed you longer" seem to become lingering states of these past two years.

Phoneix Lindsey-Hall's new series "Scream Inside Your Heart" is a ceramic series made in response to the recent and tragic death of those lost to police violence and brutality. In this series, Lindsey-Hall literally shoots wet clay with bullets to capture the negative space of the explosion that is made. The organic forms created with the "clay body" are a metaphor for the "human body" in the act of violence. The results are abstracted forms, finished with gun-metal metallic grey glaze.

Future Fair NY

Chelsea Industrial

545 W 28th Street, New York City, NY 10001

www.futurefairs.com

April 7 - 10, 2022

EXPOSURE | Booth 270

Northern Trust Purchase Prize for Walker Art Center

Adler Guerrier (PDF)

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili) (PDF)

PRESS: ARTnews

Our two-person presentation features recent works of Haiti-born Miami-based Adler Guerrier and Tbilisi-born New York-based Levani (Levan Mindiashvili). With poetic inquiries into history, race, and representation, the works of both artists are centered around the imagery of plants and nature. They present the landscape as sites of openness, possibilities, learning, and liberation.

Adler Guerrier's photographic series and works on paper "Wander and Errancies,” were developed during a 2020 residency at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida - the oldest city in the United States that has been part of both colonial Spain and colonial England. It's also, arguably, part of the Caribbean, and Florida borders the former slave states of Georgia and Alabama. As the artist remarks, "the project developed around the question, What would it mean to use the mythology of the flaneur to walk around in this place, to try to find traces that are connected to other histories or new poetics?" The central work of the series "Wander and Errancies— memories within; citrus in Saint Augustine" (2021) shows vibrant Florida oranges with rich green leaves against a dark, dark sky. "I was thinking about how traveling at night was part of the experience of runaway slaves who were seeking freedom. They didn't escape only north, but also south—to the wilds of Florida or to Latin America. The Spanish had announced that they would embrace any formerly enslaved people, provided they became Catholic. Others went south to Cuba or the Bahamas. I was thinking of the oranges as this signal that we're getting closer to freedom —there are almost no orange groves north of Florida, so when you see them on your journey south, it's a symbol that you've entered another land. The work is about finding that sweetness, that possibility."

The transdisciplinary practice of Levani is informed by their interest in microbiology, ecology, and psychology. "Eco-conscious spirituality, the interdependence of every life form, and the holistic approach to the accumulated knowledge are the main frameworks to propose the new models of being in the world," - says the artist. Multi- panel paintings in our presentation belong to the newest body of work collectively titled "Gardens of Eurasia.” This project furthers Levani's ongoing inquiry into ecology as a vehicle for reconnecting with one's ancestral heritage and regaining a sense of belonging. Concerned with the politics of representation and current geopolitical shifts, Levani presents the place of their origin— Eurasia—not as an enduring binary opposition (West vs. East) as it has historically been shown. But as a site of vast cultural legacies and, therefore, potentialities. These paintings are inspired by the medieval carvings of Georgia and hand-painted with a liquid mirror on glass. They act like an actual mirror, reflecting viewers and surroundings, and erasing the boundaries between themselves and the environment. The paintings become embodiments of porousness and merging.

March 30 – May 18, 2022

Opening Reception March 29, 4-8 pm

Checklist (PDF)

At the Vanguard: The Work of Khatia Esartia, by Ksenia Nouril (PDF)

Press

artnet Editor’s Picks: 14 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week by Sarah Cascone

“There is a line in a poem by Ana Boźičivić that paints an eerie similar condition I find myself in while working. “You can’t forget the war that lives on inside you even as you don’t dare share it with your new friends, for fear of seeing them recoil from the war inside you, and so you are always alone,’’ and so alone in font of a canvas, refusing to bend to the panic that comes with powerlessness, I tread lightly, unable to give myself completely over, uneasy of being boxed into a corner where the ‘other’, the victim, the refugee, resides. And so I work, providing punctuation marks in our century-long run on tragedies and absurdism in which we find ourselves in over and over again.” -KH.E.

“You don’t forget what an air raid siren sounds like, and when you hear such a siren however many years later on another continent your heart skips a beat and your mouth is filled with cotton. When everyone in the new country that surrounds you has forgotten, if they ever even knew the story, you don’t forget what running from your home feels like, leaving the room of your childhood never to see it again the way it was that day, full of your books & old toys & dreams for a future. You can’t forget the war that lives on inside you even as you don’t dare share it with your new friends, for fear of seeing them recoil from the war inside you, and so you are always alone. Living in a pocket of peace when a different kind of war is waged every day on the streets around you, watching a new generation of kids in a sister land far away flee the rooms of their childhood carrying fresh war inside them like a fruit pit, you remember & know & wonder what purpose words can serve, what silence buys, and the memory that won’t let you go grows undeterred from your stomach out your mouth toward the sunlight.” -A.B.

Featuring new paintings and works on paper, My Sweet Potato/ Chapter 7, is Khatia Esartia's third solo-show with the gallery. With dark humor and subtle references to contemporary pop and meme culture, these works accompany Fluffy - a signature character, creation of Esartia- through her quest to bring back to the dinner table a Sweet Potato which has gone missing. As more chapters are yet to come, this open-ended journey becomes an intricate exploration of the post-war and post-traumatic issues, isolation, and dislocation.

CATALOG

Khatia Esartia

MY SWEET POTATO / Chapter 7

Essay by Ksenia Nouril

Published by Marisa Newman Projects

Softcover, 7×7 in (18×18 cm), # of Pages: 20

ISBN 9798210311535

Preview

Gallery hours are Monday through Wednesday, 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

February 10 - March 23, 2022

Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

PRESS

artmirror

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present “Close Quarters” an exhibition of woodblocks by New York based artist Kevin Frances. The opening reception will be held Thursday, February 10, 4-8. Masks are mandatory for all guests.

This ongoing series is set in a home of a fictional couple – the creation of Frances himself. The husband and wife are both artists – writer and sculptor respectively. The woodblocks are of different rooms in the house during different hours of the day. The human presence is evident by post-it notes on the wall, printer paper scattered upon the floor, a glow of the computer screen or the iconic George Nelson lamp still alit. Yet, people are absent from these tableaus, creating an eerie and mysterious feeling about each scene.

The title “Close Quarters” conjures up our recent reality of living and working in our homes/apartments with little opportunity for escape and thus, making these spaces into rooms that are small and cramp.

Frances creates his woodblock prints by first creating detailed miniature models of the couple’s one bedroom split level home. Many of the intricate elements “work” as the lights illuminate the heater goes on the iMac powers up. Then different moments are photographed and those images become the source material for final multi layered carved out woodblocks.

Kevin Frances is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, and his BA from the University of California, Davis in 2010. In 2012 he was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown at the International Print Center New York, the Knockdown Center in New York, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, How’s Howard in Boston, and Galleri CC in Malmö, Sweden. He received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in 2016, the St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award in 2017 and was a 2020 NYFA Fellow.

Exhibition Catalog

Kevin Frances

Close Quarters

essay by Jennie Hirsh

Published by Marisa Newman Projects

Softcover, 7×7 in (18×18 cm), # of Pages: 20

ISBN 9798210037084

Preview

Interior Egos (catalog essay) by Jennie Hirsh (PDF)

Nicole Cherubini

Adler Guerrier

Alexander Lee

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili)

Charlotta Westergren

CHECKLIST

Our presentation for the UNTITLED art fair centers around the most recent discoveries in Neuroaesthetics, proposing that the appreciation for landscape art likely has roots in evolutionary neurobiology. We bring together the works of five artists -Nicole Cherubini, Adler Guerrier, Alexander Lee, Levani (Levan Mindiashvili) and Charlotta Westergren- that explore the imagery of nature to inquire into the intricacies of their cultural upbringing and the relationships with their immediate surroundings. These intricacies are more deepened by the diversity and richness of the mediums employed by these artists.

Inquiries: marisa@marisanewman.com

UNTITLED Miami Beach 2021

November 29 - December 4, 2021

VIP Preview: November 29, 1 - 8 PM

Pubic Hours: November 30 - December 4, 11 - 7 PM

November 11, 2021 - January, 2022

Press Release (PDF)

A catalogue with an essay by Felix Salmon accompanies the exhibition.

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Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present new paintings and sculpture by New York based artist Charlotta Westergren. The show’s title Domicile refers to a legal notion of residence and the current situation of statelessness. The interiors in the large-scale paintings come, sometimes from memories of the artist’s family homes, sometimes from iconic architecture, and sometimes both. All the works are emptied out – the absence of human presence is haunting and the feeling of loss palpable.

Those Who Toil In This Place, combines classical Swedish architecture with French heroic realism, both recalling places in which the artist spent time as a child. At the center of the painting is an open door – an invitation to enter. Yet, the next room has a firmly shut door – giving the viewer mixed messages. The title also mysterious – referencing both a biblical phrase and the Jean-François Millet painting “The Gleaners”- asking the viewer to consider if in “toiling” we still end up as dust and ashes.

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey June 25, 1969 – November 16, 2015 a work that memorialized Westergren’s dear friend who died young and quite suddenly. Again the painting offers us an open door, but we are lead into a bedroom with a single bed – appearing like a casket with its white shroud.

Farnsworth House, another interior, but enclosed in the glass and steel of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, it seems to appear that we are in a landscape full of trees and foliage. The house in this painting, still without people, feels more alive with its proximity to nature. Yet, the irony is that this home was indeed uninhabitable due to the outdoor elements invading the space through the wondrous windows.

Because of their large scale and dedication to the detail – these hyper-realistic paintings almost erase the boundaries of the physical space where the viewers become the main subjects and interpreters. These paintings are richly nuanced with cultural and historical references and pose open-ended questions about the historical narratives and mythologies around the past.

Literally and figuratively illuminating the spaces is, Gardening 4, an exuberant and joyous sculptural chandelier, comprised of colorful glass flowers, petals, insects and fruits. It pays homage to the artist’s love for the Flemish art and -as in its best tradition- acts as an affirmation of the beauty and the magic of the materiality of the everyday.

Charlotta Westergren was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She studied architecture and worked in the field in San Francisco and NYC. Her first exhibition was in 2002 at the Dee Glasoe Gallery in New York. Since then, she's shown at Mary Goldman Gallery, Bellwether Gallery, Arin Contemporary, and Patrick Painter. She has been in museum shows at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, and the Fort Worth Modern. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Dagens Nyheter, Art in America, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Modern painters, ART PAPERS among many others. She directs her own art school in New York City, Downtown Painting.

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Essay by Felix Salmon

Architects don’t walk into a room like most other people. While an art collector might automatically gravitate to the art on the walls, or someone with a bad back might look for a suitable chair, an architect will immediately assess the theater of the space. How do sightlines reveal themselves? What does the eye — and the human body — want to navigate and explore? What are the feelings provoked by the design?

Charlotta Westergren, an architect by training, has spent recent years exploring the theater of interiors in her meticulously-constructed paintings. Her canvases are theatrical themselves — oversized statements, initially overwhelming, that unfurl over time with gestures both big and tiny.

Domiciles features three such paintings: Carolyn Glasoe Bailey, June 25, 1969 — November 16, 2015 (2017); Those Who Toil In This Place (2020); and Farnsworth House (2021). Each is painted in oil on linen, on a scale of 60″ x 72″, and the three together demonstrate Westergren’s protean range of abilities.

The first painting, titled, in memoriam, after Westergren’s mentor and patron, depicts Carl Larsson’s house in Sundborn, Sweden — a house instantly recognizable to Swedes. Over the years, the home has cemented itself in the popular imagination as the archetypal Swedish residence. Larsson was much more than just a painter; his house became a touchstone of interior design, to the point at which Swedes to this day expect their summer cottages to look much like what we see in Westergren’s painting.

Westergren’s depiction is reasonably faithful to the house, but not slavishly so. On the wall hang not Larsson’s paintings but rather a painting of Westergren and Glasoe Bailey as children, as well as a painting by Francis Picabia that the two of them liberated from a gallery that was refusing to give Westergren money she was owed. The colors are deeper than in real life; the painted decorative touches on the wall are more obvious, and the curtain that normally hides the rear bedroom has disappeared, to reveal a luminous light turquoise wall.

Westergren tends to reserve her most loving touches for certain details — the reflection of light off the small blue cupboard next to the stove, for instance, or the ecstatic red flower painted on the wall atop the door jamb, from which spring buds of life. Those details can also jump across paintings: the perspective-skewed angles of the bedroom wall in Sweden are echoed in the similar shape and skew of the celadon ceiling in the Farnsworth House, while the reflections on the battered cupboard door have the same shimmer as the light reflecting off Mies van der Rohe’s polished, yet equally battered, marble floor. This is where Westergren’s facture begins to feel three-dimensional — you begin to experience the texture of the materials, while maybe squinting a little as the light hits your eye.

In Those Who Toil In This Place, such verisimilitudinous touches are less obvious, while the painting itself is more overtly theatrical. This is an interior that doesn’t exist, an architectural portmanteau combining a Swedish manor house, in the foreground, with a French interior visible through the kind of doorway that feels like a welcoming, gesturing arm. Enter here, says the door, and admire the large painting hanging on the back wall — one of those earthy peasant scenes you might find from Breughel. Along the way, check out the walls in both rooms, painted with mildly disconcerting trompe l’oeil drapery — oh, and, of course, pay attention to the ceiling, popping with a plethora of pastels, once again dialed up from the original source. This is a painting one traverses. The viewer moves around the canvas — she can feel herself looking up; down; around the corner.

Farnsworth House, as befits its architectural pedigree, receives the most respect of the trio — although even there Mies’s legendary straight lines are rotated into a sharply perspectival framing, with the corner of the building taking an uncharacteristic position at the center of the composition, and a mildly unfamiliar child’s-eye point of view allowing for a significant expanse of blue sky. Nature’s appearance startles, outside the carefully arranged interior, the trees of Illinois showing off maximum sumptuousness to anybody who might venture into this space of perfectionist architectural austerity.

The three paintings are all interiors without people, but they’re all portraits of aspirational architecture, and, thereby, portraits of the people who commission and inhabit such spaces — the unseen yet omnipresent architects and patrons who design, navigate, and fulfill these rooms. Westergren’s installation places the viewer in the middle of all three works, seeing, imagining, feeling a different house each time they turn, a serial visitor rather than a familiar homeowner.

These works dominate the gallery walls; their proximity, both to the viewer and to each other, is heightened by an asymmetrical brass chandelier that forces movement and interrupts both sightlines and contemplation. There’s an essay on the politics of architecture here, but it’s delivered quietly. As with all theater, these paintings’ meaning only emerges with time, and as with all good art, that meaning never stands still. Westergren’s canvases demand and repay attention and attentiveness. These works are painted slowly, with difficulty, and need to be read that way too. Everybody who does so ends up richly rewarded.

Uta Bekaia

Khatia Esartia

Gerben Mulder

FUTURE FAIR HOLIDAY MARKET

November 22 - December 12, 2021

Fairy Tales for the Present Future is a show that reminds us how important the act of looking at things with fresh eyes and new perspectives is. In these times, it is crucial to create stories that will help us understand the absurdities of life and learn to confront fears and make them into magical places. Uta Bekaia, Khatia Esartia and Gerben Mulder use bright rich colors to create fantastical worlds of their own imagination. Whether in embroidery, watercolor or oil paint, the images these three artists depict are based in magical tropes and reference humorous allegories. The artists use figuration within narratives, often placing themselves into the surreal landscapes as surrogates or as references to personal allusions.

The second edition of the FUTURE FAIR's online HOLIDAY MARKET is featuring original artworks, editions, and objects within a range of accessible price points for new and experienced collectors to discover.

ENTER THE FAIR

EXIT WOUNDS

Stephen Irwin

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

September 1 – October 27, 2021

Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

Marisa Newman Projects in collaboration with New Discretions is pleased to present Exit Wounds a two-person exhibition with artists Stephen Irwin and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall.

Irwin and Lindsey-Hall both explore aspects of the human body and its ultimate erasure.

Irwin’s series of either erased or marked over found images is haunting and beautiful. Using steel-wool, astringents, bleach, whiteout - Irwin rubs and abrades or marks over pictures from vintage pornography magazines. The reconfigured image leaves parts of the body intact encircling the hand, chest, face, genitalia in a manner that is like a shrine or a peep-hole or seeing the body-part through the viewfinder of a rifle. The results are Renaissance-like frescoes with a feeling of loss and wonderment.

Lindsey-Hall’s new series “Scream Inside Your Heart” is a ceramic series made in response to the recent and tragic death of those that have been lost to police violence and brutality. This work leverages the intersection of art and activism in response to the Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter, and Queer Rights’ movements. This new body of work builds on Lindsey-Hall’s past projects centering on violence and hate crimes in queer communities and also addresses the larger issue of gun violence in the United States affecting so many of us.

In this series, Lindsey-Hall literally shoots wet clay with bullets to capture the negative space of the explosion that is made. The organic forms that are created with the "clay body" are a metaphor to the "human body" in an act of violence. The results are abstracted forms, which are finished with gun-metal metallic grey glaze.

These works address the violence to the body and often the Queer body.

Stephen Irwin (1959-2010) lived and worked in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has been exhibited at the New Center for Contemporary Art (Louisville, KY); The Speed Museum (Louisville, KY); the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, OH); Maureen Paley (London); Gallery Diet (Miami, FL); r/e Projects (Madrid); PPOW (New York); Vox Populi (Philadelphia); Galerie Stefan Roepke (Cologne); Zephyr Gallery (Louisville); and DePauw University (Greencastel, IN); among others. His work has appeared in Beautiful Decay, The Huffington Post, Vice Magazine, Butt Magazine, and Art Papers, and is in the collections of the Speed Museum and 21c Museum, both in Louisville, KY.

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist who is Georgia-born and Louisville, KY resident. Lindsey-Hall holds a MFA in Photography from Parsons The New School of Design in 2012 and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art in 2004. Lindsey-Hall has had solo exhibitions at Victori + Mo (New York, NY), Christopher Stout Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) Brown Gallery at Duke University (Durham, NC), Gallery Aferro (Newark, NJ) and shown in group shows in various galleries in New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Louisville, KY, Savannah GA and in Pingyao, China. Their residencies include MassMOCA, New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS), and the Emerge Program with the Aljira Center for Contemporary Arts in conjunction with Creative Capital. Their work has appeared in OUT Magazine, Them Magazine, The Art Newspaper, and Vice. Their artwork centers on violence in queer communities.

A catalogue with an essay by Jesse Dorris will accompany the exhibition.

SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY

September 8 - 13, 2021

Room 1062

ARSENAL

Uta Bekaia

Vincent Cy-Chen

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

Levan Mindiashvili

PREVIEW (PDF)

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625 Madison Ave

More info and Tickets* HERE

*Due to COVID-19 protocols, advanced timed tickets are required

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ARSENAL is the title of our presentation for the SPRING/BREAK NY, comprising works by four artists Uta Bekaia, Vincent Cy Chen, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, and Levan Mindiashvili. For all of them, the act of art-making is deeply informed by their queer identities. It has become a form of resistance towards their oppressive cultural upbringing. Yet, at the same time, their work offers an array of resources to navigate and celebrate the "otherness" and open up new possibilities to be in the world. The overall installation is a rebus-like reminiscence of a medieval chapel and/or dungeon, with intricate and enigmatic accents of pleasure, trickery, and desire.

The center of the room is occupied by a life-size standing figure in a richly embroidered and rhinestoned attire inspired by the European medieval clergy of the higher status. Their face is covered with the mask shaped like a sun and holding a polished brass bell in their hand. Next to them, there's a sculpture of the magical creature, half-human/half-animal, obediently sitting at the "master's" feet. Created with the gradient sequence fabric and meticulously embroidered face, the beast emanates a disturbing allure. These are the sculptures of Tbilisi-born Uta Bekaia who's multimedia work is a speculative recreation of rituals of his native Georgia and medieval Europe at large. With the fascination with traditional crafts, Bekaia creates richly adorned wearable sculpture-costumes, ceramics, tapestries, and objects and brings them together as immersive installations, films, and live performances.

On the left side and the wall behind the sculpture is covered in a jacquard-woven, hand-altered tapestry of Georgian-born Brooklyn-based Levan Mindiashvili. Depicting traces of the empty bed and the remnants of the architectural ruins, the tapestries are "translations" of their paintings and the photographs of their sculptures captured by the artist. Subdued in blueish greyscale tones, these works stand as ghosts for vanishing dominant structures yet carry the longing for the spaces for love and desire. The tapestry behind Bekaia's sculpture is flanked by two hand-painted round mirrors of the floral patterns by Mindiashvili - "scratches" from the memories of his childhood floral wallpapers of his Mother's bedroom.

Mindiashvili's tapestry of the empty bed is flacked by the row of ceramic sculptures of belts and chains - wall pieces of Vincent CY Chen. Chen creates multimedia displays that negotiate shame and desire with work that allures saturated colors, curvaceous forms, and illumination. Being a queer immigrant from Taiwan, Chen's work explores competing layers of otherness centering on the body. By examining exotic flora and fauna studies and relics that fetishize the "unknown," he creates a taboo world built of biological oddities, sexual fetishes, and artifacts of power. This world is influenced by surrealist literature, body horror films, and the portrayal of the queer Asian body as emasculated, exoticized and fetishized.

Leaned against the right wall is a row of the unglazed white porcelain sculptures of Brooklyn-based Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, whose work centers on violence in queer communities. Based on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender hate crime cases, these sculptures are distorted base-ball batts, tin cans, and hammers used as weapons in these cases. As she twists and contorts wet clay, the weapons become a stand-in for the bodies entwined in the act of violent urgency and physical intimacy. The disturbance of everyday objects calls into question the very system in which they exist. In her recreation of familiar forms, clay becomes skin as she presses into the wet skin-like surface. The twisting, mutilation, and ultimate undoing of the body are transferred to the objects. The disturbance of everyday objects calls into question the very system in which they exist. Yet leaned against the wall, melting and powerless, these objects can be read as defeated power structures and systems.

As the visitors turn their back to leave the installation, they face hand-scribbled neon by Levan Mindiashvili in light aqua reading "In Search of the Miraculous.”

Uta Bekaia is a Georgian-born multimedia artist currently residing and working in Brooklyn and Tbilisi. He had studied Industrial Design at Tbilisi Mtsire Academy. He has been awarded with the residences at ART OMI, Museum of Art and Design MAD, NY; Garikula, Georgia; His work has been shown at SchauFenster, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Tbillisi; Kiev Biennial in Istanbul and Kiev; ERTI Gallery, Tbilisi; Triumph, Moscow; Silk Museum, Tbilisi; The Lodge Gallery, NY; Center for Contemporary Art, Batumi; among others. He has staged parades for the Tbilisi City Hall Tbilisoba Festival; Book Capital of the World Opening Ceremony, TurnPark, ArtPark among others.

Vincent CY Chen is a New York based artist who works in sculpture and installation. He received his BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2015, and his MFA in Studio Art at New York University in 2019. His work has been shown in Super Dutchess Gallery (New York), 80WSE Gallery (New York, USA), Field Projects Gallery (New York, USA), MANA Contemporary (New Jersey, USA), and more. Chen is also a co-founder of De:Formal, an online platform dedicated to promoting artists who work with mediums under-recognized in the conventional gallery system.

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist. Lindsey-Hall holds a MFA in Photography from Parsons The New School of Design in 2012 and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art in 2004. She has held solo shows at Victori + Mo Gallery, Christopher Stout Gallery, Brown Gallery at Duke University (Durham, NC), Gallery Aferro (Newark, NJ) and shown in group shows in various galleries in New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Louisville, KY, Savannah GA and in Pingyao, China. She is NARS Residency Recipient, and a participant in the Emerge Program with the Aljira Center for Contemporary Arts in conjunction with Creative Capital.

Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian-born Brooklyn-based visual artist. They received his MFA from Buenos Aires National University of Arts (2010) and BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2003). They have exhibited at East Slovak Gallery, Kosovo; EFA Project Space, NY; ShauFenster, Berlin; BRIC, Brooklyn; National Museum of China, Beijing; Georgian National Museum; Marisa Newman Projects, NY; Silk Museum, Tbilisi and more. They are The Socrates Sculpture Park 2021 Fellow and a recipient of the Peter S Reed Foundation Grant, NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program fellowship, Creative Time X Summit Grant, AIM Fellowship of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and NARS Foundation Residency. Their work has been reviewed in publications such as Frieze, Art in America, HYPERALLERGIC, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsia Pacific, PIN-UP Magazine, Huffington Post, and more.

Natasha Sweeten

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent

May 24 - August 11, 2021

Closing of the exhibition

with a poetry reading by Brad Aaron Modlin

Thursday, August 12, 5-7 PM.

More Info

Created during and in response to the pandemic, this project includes paintings and seven collaborations made with artist friends: Kelly Chorpening, Jeri Coppola, Jeff Feld, Paul Keir, Kirsten Nash, Sam Nichols and Tamara Zahaykevich. The collaborations cover film, photography, sculpture and a flag flying in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Visit our VIMEO or Instagram pages for more in depth conversations between the artist and collaborators discussing the process and the making of the work.

Press Release (PDF)

Checklist (PDF)

The exhibition is accompanied with the book

Natasha Sweeten

What You Missed The Day You Were Absent

Featuring introduction text by the artist and the interview between Natasha Sweeten and Jeremy Sigler.

Softbound,

8×10 in. (20×25 cm),

45 pages.

ORDER HERE

Photography of the installation and artworks by Alan Wiener.

Levan Mindiashvili

what color is the Black Sea?

March 8 - May 12, 2021

Press Release and Selected Works (PDF)

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Exhibition catalog with essay by Lilly Wei

Preview (Online PDF)

Published by Marisa Newman Projects

Softcover, 7×7 in (18×18 cm), # of Pages: 20

ISBN 9781034761488

Order

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Press

Frieze (by Saul Anton / In Print: September 2021 - Issue 221)

Art in America (by David Ebony)

HYPERALLERGIC (by Louis Bury)

ARTMIRROR (Editorial)

Netgazeti (by Ia Merkviladze)

COOL HUNTING (by David Graver)

AT_ (in Georgian)

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what color is the Black Sea? 2021

Artist’s photograph silkscreened with oil on latex fabric, tangerine tree in glass aquarium, horticulture growing lights, oil on green latex in folded brass frame, corroded brass sheet, stone from the black sea shore, plant in lab glass vase, marble weight holders, brass incense holder, on aluminum sheet mounted on plywood and steel; Palm tree wrapped in natural latex, burlap, and fake fur coat with crystalized stone; Blacked out white neon, Hedgehog 27 sec. video loop on iPad on yellow fur pillow on stainless steel stand, Christmas Cactus in cut-crystal vase on stainless steel stand.

Center piece: 84 x 112 x 41 inches. Overall dimensions variable.

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Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian born Brooklyn based visual artist. He holds his BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2003), and MFA from Buenos Aires National University of Arts (2010). His work has been shown at the East Slovak Gallery, Kosovo; Elizabeth Foundation for Arts Projects Space, NY; Shau Fenster, Berlin; BRIC Arts Center, Brooklyn; National Museum of China, Beijing; Georgian National Museum, among others. His recent solo presentations were held at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NY; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; NADA Miami; Tbilisi Art Fair’19; and Berlin Art Fair’19. He is The Socrates Sculpture Park 2021 Fellow and a recipient of the Peter S Reed Foundation Grant (2020), NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program fellowship (2020), Creative Time X Summit grant (2019), AIM Fellowship of the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2019), and of the National Endowments for the Arts (2014). His work has been the subject of an essay by Christian Rattemeyer for the OSMOS Magazine fall issue (2019). His work has been mentioned in publications as Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsia Pacific, HYPERALLERGIC, Observer, Huffington Post, Art Margins, among others. His works are in public collections of The National Museum of Art of China, Beijing; Georgian National Museum, Mestia; State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia.

Natasha Das

Liliya Lifanova

Spandita Malik

Jaye Moon

Elizabeth Moran

Sophia Saze

Gabriela Vainsencher

November 23, 2020 - February 17, 2021

\ ˈtəch \* is a proposition exploring touch as a cognitive apparatus. It poses a simple question: What happens when we are denied our most primal way of understanding, learning, and relating to ourselves and the world around us? Through the intersection of works by seven women artists, the show emphasizes the 'hand-made' as a principal instrument to activate the artwork or define it. Ranging from a broad spectrum of the mediums - such as painting, ceramic, photography, embroidery - the show includes sound, fashion, and design objects - where each work challenges the limits of its own medium and materials.

The exhibition itself questions the ways of representation and concept building. It consists of two physical parts – an installation in the project space and "Indexical" in the backroom. \' təch \ is co-organized with Levan Mindiashvili.

See Full Exhibition HERE

September 14 - November 11, 2020

For his solo project with the gallery Terence Gower organizes the formal vocabulary of Tel Aviv’s “Bauhaus Style” architecture into an alphabet. Gower sees the letters of this alphabet as the building blocks for a new language that was used to write the new city as well as engineer the new society taking root in the desert of Palestine in the 1920s and 30s.

Can buildings tell stories, communicate ideas? Much of Gower’s oeuvre has focused on this question. He is particularly interested in how buildings represent the aspirations of the people and governments that commission them, and of the architects who design them. Gower has focused on modern architecture, interested in how its abstract vocabulary—simple, solid geometry—has come to stand for so much.

A few examples: In Gower's ongoing embassy series, he examines how the US State Department’s Cold War construction program used modern architecture to represent the US as “an open, dynamic and cooperative modern country." A 2008 commission from the Hirshhorn Museum was an investigation of Joseph Hirshhorn’s plan to build a new city in the wilderness of Ontario, Canada. The centerpiece of Hirshhorn’s plan was a “modern highrise in the forest” representing nature dominated by technological modernism. And his long-term research project on post-revolutionary architecture in Mexico has resulted in many projects that trace the official adoption—by Mexico’s government and its elites—of the design philosophy of the pre-war European avant-gardes. Funcionalismo as a signifier of the new society.

All of these projects are echoed in this current project “Bauhaus Style,” an extension of the idea of architectural representation into a metaphorical game of language and syntax. To Gower, the pre-war architecture of Tel Aviv—the famous Bauhaus Style—can be read like a text. The forms you see repeated in these buildings, the white cubes, the curved balconies, the pilotis, form a vocabulary that the city’s early architects used to spell out a message that is still legible after all these years: “This is a city founded on a new set of principles.” The artist’s installation at Marisa Newman Projects consists of a 12-foot wall hydrocal sculpture made up of cast architectural details and a series of gouache and pen drawings.

The Tel Aviv Studies drawings depict four typical buildings of the city in axonometric form, each composed of a series of standard blocks. The blocks combine into solid geometric forms that represent the more common features of the Tel Aviv building vocabulary: curved corners, strip windows, finely detailed overhangs, rounded balconies, etc. These ink-on-velum drawings are laid over gouache-on-paper polygons, their shapes derived from the unusual city lots generated by the 1925 Geddes plan.

Terence Gower has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, Canada Council Long Term Grant; NYSCA Architecture, Planning & Design Project Award, Graham Foundation Fellowship, Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, Peter Norton Family Foundation Grant, World Views Studios Residency (WTC, New York), Cité des Arts Fellowship (Paris), Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (Genoa), and a fellowship to the Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina (Buenos Aires). His works are included in the following collections: National Gallery of Canada, Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museu de Arte do Rio, Brazil, Region Rhône-Alpes, Colección Jumex, Peter Norton Collection, Colección Juan Yarur, Queens Museum, University of Rochester, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, New York City Department of Education, and many private collections.

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Installation images: Marcie Revins

The Future of Silence: When your tongue vanishes

2.27 - 6.28.2020

Angelica Mesiti, Jaye Moon, Jesse Chun, Ji Hye Yeom, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lawrence Lek, Juho Lee & Juseung Lee, Woojin Kim

Curated by Yoonseo Kim

The exhibition The Future of Silence: When your tongue vanishes examines language as spoken and written, as body and mind, as the corporeal and the conceptual, and as systems and cultures. The eight artists explore the phenomena of plunder and extinction of language in the neoliberal society, the relations in understandings and misunderstandings as well as the diversity of nonverbal communications happening outside of letters.

"The Wizard of Oz" by Jaye Moon is commissioned by Nam June Paik Art Center for this exhibition and is inspired by Nam June Paik's "Electronic- Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii" (1974). The artist translated in Korean Braille the excerpts from the movie used initially by Paik and recreated it into a free-standing wall piece with approximately 50,000 toy bricks (Lego, Soho Bricks). Old TV accompanying the work displays the script in Korean and English. "With my work, I expand our scope of perceiving technology and its use in art and provide a more inclusive, more universal means of communication," - says the artist.

The show can be seen by appointment, please contact curator Yoonseo Kim. T 82 (0)31-201-8553 | F 82 (0)31-201-8530 | M 82 (0)10-4780-1020

More info about the show and curator lead virtual tour HERE

Nam June Paik Art Center

10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si

Gyeonggi-do, 17068 Korea

t 82 (0)31-201-8553 | f 82 (0)31-201-8530 | m 82 (0)10-4780-1020

SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York

March 3 - 9, 2020

625 Madison Ave, Room 1108

VIP Opening: March 3, 11 AM - 9 PM

Regular Hours: 11 AM - 8 PM

Tickets

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Preview of the Works

Marisa Newman Projects is delighted to present the inaugural installation of Levan Mindiashvili’s ongoing project “Levani’s Room,” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY.  

Referencing James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) – a seminal book in the history of queer literature, it is a love story between two men, that begins and ends in a rented room. Within this space, David tells his story all the while looking at a reflection of himself, with the window acting as a mirror. 

As the opening paragraph makes it clear, the book is as much about race as it is about desire, colonial history and guilt, class inequality, and supremacy. “Giovanni’s Room” is also the first queer story Mindiashvili read in which he could relate to the protagonist’s fears, and to the personal struggle with imposed cultural structures. After his journey in Argentina first, and now in New York, where he can finally claim a room in Bushwick as his home, Mindiashvili is starting to narrate his own story of becoming, told through the reflections of his culture, history, and experiences. A real-size print of his room on a sheer curtain will become the setting for most of the presentations - “Rooms,” that will entail exhibitions, performances, podcast, communal dinners, and raves. It will culminate in an all-encompassing artist book and an online archive. 

The first iteration, “Home” held at Spring/Break NY, explores the sense of belonging and community, and the role of Brooklyn’s underground rave culture in Mindiashvili’s inclusion of New York’s creative scene. Playfully titled “HOME EP,” a set of 15 “tracks” depict architectural details of Mindiashvili’s apartment along with the logos of underground venues and clubs, parties, and mailing lists, flyers, and other memorabilia. Hand-painted in a liquid mirror on glass and mounted on a steel frame, these objects, though formally situated within the tradition of a two-dimensional image, also act like literal mirrors. As the artist says: “They become a meeting point of the viewer, surrounding and the work itself, a constantly changing and updating archive of the very now.”

The soundscape, co-curated with Arthur Kozlovski, features full sets from the raves that had significant importance for the artist, along with specially created sets and tracks. Full list of contributing artists and a special collaboration with BASEMENT NY will be announced shortly.

“I’m interested in re-contextualizing the ways in which we experience art and rave, and how both languages - cultural ready-mades if you will - can expand into something new,” says Mindiashvili.

*The artist would like to extend a very special Thank You to Eriola Pira for her help in developing the overall concept of “Levani’s Room.”

Curated by Helen Beckman

Anne Chu, Beth Edwards, Judith Linhares, Margo Margolis, Alison McGoran, Jennifer Moses, Oona Ratcliffe, Elizabeth Terhune

January 15 - March 8, 2020

“I use my friends . . . as gig-lamps:* there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.” – Virginia Woolf (diary)

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present a show of works of 8 artists selected by the painter Helen Beckman. The artists gathered for this exhibition are a group of women who, over decades, have had a significant impact on her life as an artist. The ongoing conversations generated by these friends - ranging from the esoteric to the practical - have resulted in an enduring legacy of shared experience.

Beckman: “It’s a pleasure for me to visit the sense of history and support I’ve felt among these people, all smart, talented and funny. We share an understanding of the challenges of the tricky and mysterious process of creating something that goes beyond words. We often do this in solitude, but we stand on the shoulders of the sense of community generated by discussions of our visions and what we love. These people have taught me to think and paint differently. I wanted to see their work presented together to generate its own visual conversation.”

The title “Cry of the Dinosaur’s Sister” is meant to evoke thoughts both specific and global, and to emphasize the delight of absurdity.

*The lamps on either side of a gig carriage; a headlamp.

• About the artists

Anne Chu was born in New York City, and worked and lived in New York most of her life. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at 303 Gallery in NYC, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, and Victoria Miro in London. She has been the recipient of many awards and honors. [Anne passed away in 2016.] Anne Chu is a sculptor and painter whose diverse materials delve both into history and into intricate, often animal-populated worlds of her own creation. This sensitive watercolor from her Chinese figures period is an ode to what is both magnificent and personal.

Beth Edwards was born in Alabama, received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Indiana University. She is represented by the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis and the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee. Her work is in numerous public and private collections. She is currently a Professor at the University of Memphis. In two paintings from her Clover series, Beth Edwards paints a subject that is intimate and tapestry-like. The space feels literally “down to earth.” Its calmness is engaging and meditative.

Judith Linhares was born in Pasadena, lived, worked and exhibited in Northern California for many years, and has been based in New York since 1980. Her work has been broadly exhibited and collected. She is represented in New York by PPOW Gallery and in San Francisco by Anglim Gilbert Gallery. Judith Linhares is a painter of wonderful worlds of evocative narratives. The two charming ladies in this work seem to be both liberated and exiled.

Margo Margolis was raised in New Hampshire and educated at Skidmore College and Indiana University. She works and lives in Manhattan. She has exhibited extensively and her work is in many public and private collections. She is currently represented by Beth Urdang Gallery in Boston. She was a Professor at Tyler School of Art from 1972 to 2016. Margo Margolis’ paintings both whisper and shout. This small painting feels like a roman à clef - there are clues everywhere, and a sense of something dynamic unfolding.

Alison McGoran was born in Philadelphia. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and an MFA from Louisiana State University. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Alison McGoran’s work is pensive and articulate. In her painting here, a quiet storm of expert marks creates an engaging, suggestive space.

Jennifer Moses lives and paints in Boston. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, and MFA in painting at Indiana University. She has been included in exhibitions across the country and is currently represented by the Kingston Gallery in Boston. She has been the recipient of many grants and awards. Moses is a Professor of Art at the University of New Hampshire. In her recent flashe and ink series, Jennifer Moses constructs dream-like animated characters that are on the move. In this piece she contrasts the ephemeral and the clunky to reference a figure that seems to be in the act of collecting itself.

Oona Ratcliffe was born in Bolinas California and moved to New York in 1999. She received an MFA from Hunter College in 2003 and currently works and paints in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Ratcliffe’s work has been exhibited nationally and is held in collections world-wide. Oona Ratcliffe’s oozy, brainy compositions traffic in the psychedelic. This painting seems to both explain and mystify with its elegant convulsions.

Elizabeth Terhune was raised in Connecticut, received a BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from Hunter College. She was represented by the former Standpipe Gallery in New York and has shown throughout the United States. Her work is in private collections both in the United States and in Europe. She lives and works in Manhattan. Elizabeth Terhune paints with a direct and dynamic hand and heart. Her painting here conjures a thought expressed by Georgia O’Keeffe -- “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.”

Nicole Cherubini

September 25 – December 20, 2019

Opening Reception: Friday, October 4th, 6-8 pm

In her current exhibition, stacked, Nicole Cherubini continues to explore the presence and purpose of an object and what it means to occupy a space. With her new works layered to allow for more sections to be dissected and reconfigured, Cherubini creates infinite possibilities for her audience to examine the history and subsequent development of an aesthetic. Cherubini approaches her works as objects and places considered within history and its ability to rework, reform and possibly repair it.

A concurrent solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery will run from November 14 – December 22, 2019.

Nicole Cherubini received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), and MFA from New York University (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), Santa Monica Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) and University Art Museum (Albany, NY). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI), Sculpture Center (Long Island City, NY), Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, such as the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY), the Progressive Collection (Mayfield Village, OH), and Tishman Speyer Collection (New York, NY). She will be the artist in residence at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA) fall 2018. Cherubini lives and works in Hudson, NY.

Special thank you to the University of Albany Art Department and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for their generous support.

Khatia Esartia

July 31 – September 7, 2019

Art is art is art and it is for Sale.

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present Out of the Cave, a site-specific installation by Khatia Esartia. In her second solo exhibition with Marisa Newman Projects, Esartia continues to build on the schematic she developed during her work abroad, as a Visiting Professor at VA[A]DS (Visual Arts, Architecture and Design School) at Free University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Esartia constructs the installation using soft plastic tubes (typically used for hiding wires), black elastic bands (the kind used for undergarments), and somewhat lewd drawings/writings (for wall coverings).

Everything is for sale, with prices as arbitrary as the artist decides.  

Out of the Cave is Esartia’s second solo exhibition with Marisa Newman Projects, after Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen (I have forgotten my umbrella), in 2018.  Esartia received an MA from Christie’s Education, New York, in 2013, and a BFA from SAIC (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) in 2001. In 2019, Esartia was a visiting professor at VA[A]DS, Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia. Same year, she completed a residency program with Ria Keburia Foundation, Kachreti, Georgia, and participated in Oxygen_Tbilisi No Fair, with an interactive sculptural installation titled A.I.T.Y.H.A.S.I.T.O. (Anger Implies That You Have A Stake In The Outcome), which was performed by her students from VA[A]DS. Right before taking the teaching position in Tbilisi, Esartia partook in a group show, Paper Chase, at Marisa Newman Projects, where she presented her watercolor works on paper. Since 2017, she has been involved in an ongoing project Mémoires d'éléphants, with Jean-Paul Sidolle, Nantes, France.  In 2016, her work was included in a group show Paper Plains, at Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin, Germany.  Esartia has participated in group exhibitions; 2015, Forget Me Nots, Bunker, Brooklyn, NY, 2014, Line of Sight, Gallery MC, New York, NY, 2013 Reaching U, New York Palace Hotel, NY and Hort Foundation Auction, New York NY, 2009, Re-Fashion: plastic bag, Em & Co, Los Angeles, CA. 2005, No Speed Bumps! No Seat Belts! ADM Projects, Santa Monica, CA and 2002 RE: CONTEXT, Chicago, IL. Esartia works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Knapsack

Carl E. Hazlewood & Stacy Fisher

curated by Chris Fennell

May 30 - July 26, 2019 
Opening: Thursday, May 30, 6 to 8 P.M.

“I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.” 
W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

The knapsack evokes both the light and the heavy. It emblematizes movement across borders and lands, cultures and languages. It is stripped down, essential, and its bearer perhaps only passing through. It conjures asceticism, freedom, and detachment from the material. The flip side of this corporeal trimming away is the density of what remains. The act of choosing one’s prima materia lends weight to its duty as a provisional avatar for the now. One scans its contents for signs and omens, for the spark of consciousness teased out by the remainder implying the whole, like archaeologists mentally assembling some long-extinct creature from a jawbone or the singular cylindrical bone of a finger. As in any investment (time/thought/emotion/outcomes), disclaimers may apply: “the performance represented is historical,” “past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results,” “investors may not recover the full amount invested.” The knapsack sheds this false valuation in search of things other than beans to count. As Homer says, “The journey is the thing.”

Carl E. Hazlewood, MacDowell Fellow, holds a BFA (with honors) from Pratt, and an MA from Hunter College. Recent residencies and fellowships include The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France, The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, the NARS Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. His works have been exhibited at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Knockdown Center, Dieu Donné, Abrons Arts Center, and Long Island University, among others, and have been written about in BOMB Magazine, NY Times, and Hyperallergic.

Stacy Fisher holds a BFA from Ohio State University. Her recent residencies include Chautauqua School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Edward Albee Foundation, and LMCC Process Space. Her works have been exhibited at Andrew Edlin Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 106 Green, Sardine, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Regina Rex, and Cleopatra’s, among others, and have been written about in The New York Times and Artforum.com.

April 5 – May 24, 2019

Marisa Newman Projects presents an exhibition of new large photographs by Mark Woods: Et in Arcadia ego.

The show gets its title from words written on a tomb in Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds. Their meaning, literally "and in Arcadia I," depends on whether they're meant by a person in the tomb or by Death itself. This ambivalence echoes another one: Landscape as a representational form has a long history of showing nature become history and history become nature. Woods's new pictures engage this dialectic via intimate allegories of mortality, commitment, and ecology.

An alternate title could be Setting. All of these pictures were shot within an hour of sunset, and all of them depict settings of another kind, too: small, contained spaces where experiences seem to have happened or about to happen; vacancies depicted absorptively by Woods so as to invite empathy and entry.

Mark Woods is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Art museums owning his works in their permanent collections include Yale University Art Gallery; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Arizona State University Art Museum. He has received artist's fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the NYU/Tisch School American Photography Institute. His photographs (in most cases his commercial photographs) are published in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Frieze, The New York Times, Flash Art, W Magazine, BOMB, T Magazine (The New York Times Style Magazine), Architectural Digest, Art Review, The Gentlewoman, Condé Nast Traveler, TimeOut New York, The Brooklyn Rail, Tema Celeste, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and many others. He has an M.F.A. degree in Photography from Arizona State University and an A.B. degree in Philosophy from Harvard College.

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.

 JAYE MOON

THIN RED LINE

November 15th, 2018– February 2nd, 2019

Opening reception: Thursday November 15th, 6 - 8PM

Marisa Newman Projects is proud to present Thin Red Line, a site-specific installation by New York-based artist, Jaye Moon.

The term "Thin Red Line (Of Courage)" is used to express respect for firefighters who have died on the job. When firefighters protect others’ lives, the last ounce of courage that is deeply embedded in the soul to overcome fear is called a thin red line. “Thin Red Line” originated as a military action in the battle of British troops in 1854 in the Crimean War (featured in Robert Gibb’s painting The Thin Red Line, 1881 oil painting). In 1962, James Jones used the term as the title for his novel about American infantry soldiers fighting in Guadalcanal during World War II.  The novel was adapted to screen twice, and Jaye Moon has used the later, 1998 film adaptation by Terence Malik as an inspiration for the installation at Marisa Newman Projects.

Jaye Moon created Thin Red Line as a floor installation using minimal abstract language. The artist reinterpreted the script of the film into English Braille, translating the language and image into a form that is neither visible nor audible. Having herself experienced the threshold of death due to cancer in recent years, Moon found that the process of battling the disease was surrounded by silence and the silence was sometimes harder to take on than the fight itself.

The entire floor of the gallery space is covered with 56,576 pieces of plastic tiles creating camouflage patterns. Since the floor is constructed using delicate materials, the audience will cautiously walk on the installation with an uneasy feeling of fragility, suggestive of walking amongst landmines. To get to the thin red line, walking through landmines is unavoidable. The work suggests that the audience search within themselves for answers, even though they are limited as War and Death are inescapable truths of human existence.

Jaye Moon was born in 1963 in Seoul, Korea. Moon received an MFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 1994. Selected solo exhibitions include Build Up, Hanmi Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2017), All in the Game: The Art of Jaye Moon, Brick Lane, Seoul, Korea (2015) and Playthings in Modernism, Gallery MoMo, Tokyo, Japan (2015). Breaking the Code, Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York, NY (2012), Modern Living, Max Estrella Gallery, Madrid, Spain (2007). Selected group exhibitions include The Discovery of Space, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi Do, Korea (2016) and The Shade of Time, Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2014). She won the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist Fellowship, and AHL Foundation Grant. She participated in the CJ Art Studio Residency in Korea, Fountainhead Residency and BRIC/Rotunda Gallery Video Residency in the US. Her work was reviewed in Art in America and Artforum.com, and she was selected as a top ten artist in NADA Art Fair in Miami in 2012. Moon lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

We would like to thank Sohobricks for their sponsorship of the exhibition.

Marisa Newman Projects is proud to present NO’ANO’A, an installation of new paintings, prints, and sculptures by Tahiti and New York based artist Alexander Lee.

Throughout his multi-disciplinary work, Lee explores the historical and cultural makeup of Tahiti, dissecting, collapsing and reshuffling its narratives and signs, questioning how one might see the world and emit signs outward from a place already loaded with projected clichés. For NO’ANO’A, he tackles the specter of Paul Gauguin and the legacy of French colonial history and nuclear experiments to produce a body of work that obliquely tells of one’s searching and yearning for a paradise lost amidst an irradiated world.

Lee made a series of paintings juxtaposing the motif of breadfruit leaves onto colorfield underpaintings that reference Gauguin but also Warhol, Frankenthaler, Johns, O’Keeffe, DeFeo, Newman, and even Baldessari (among others). The breadfruit itself is a recurring theme in Lee’s work. Its importance to the region is immeasurable: from a Tahitian legend that tells of a man transforming his body into a breadfruit tree to save his starving family, to Joseph Banks transplanting it to the Caribbean islands to feed English slaves, as portrayed by Marlon Brando in The Mutiny on the Bounty, from its uses in Polynesian textiles patterns, to the idea of a tree transplanted for sustenance and its ability to grow in a contaminated environment. The leaf is a living sign.

No’ano’a means fragrant in Tahitian language. It is also the title Gauguin used for the travel journal he kept during his first trip to Tahiti, and which he edited to contextualize the works he had made while there (it was never published while he was alive). Lee reverses the gesture and comes to NYC to paint images from Tahiti, by literally installing his paintings inside a landscape. This small and condensed mise en abîme presentation turns the project space into an environment where the subject of the paintings are leaves, the viewer becomes the figure, and the paintings are fragrant. NO’ANO’A.

Alexander Lee was born in Stockton, CA, and grew-up on the island of Tahiti, French Polynesia. He earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000), his MFA from Columbia University (2002), and MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2004). Lee has exhibited extensively in the USA and internationally. In 2017, his work TE ATUA VAHINE MANA RA O PERE (The Great Goddess Pere) - L’Aube où les fauves viennent se désaltérer a multi-room installation collapsing the narratives or Pere and the many nuclear tests in the Pacific was part of the 1st Honolulu Biennale; Te fanau’a ‘una’una na te Tumu: THE SENTINELS, a continuous wall painting covering 4500 m2 of the MHKA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp was presented during A Temporary Futures Institute; and ME-TI’A - An Island Standing, a video work, was commissioned and presented by TBA21 / Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Wien and is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Croatia. Most recently, Alexander Lee drew the new brandmark for Air Tahiti Nui, the international airline of Tahiti, in collaboration with Future Brand. It was launched in 2018.

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present Khatia Esartia’s Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen (I have forgotten my umbrella). The exhibition title refers to a note found isolated in quotation marks among Friedrich Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscript Nachlass. While different interpretations have been put forward to explain the oddly placed sentence, most scholars prefer Jacques Derrida’s idea that Nietzsche's inscription is open to any number of meanings. The title of Esartia's show is thus at once, a misdirection, a ploy to bait the viewers into searching for the one element that should be missing in the presented works, and an affirmation that all works can be open to more than one reading. Each of the paintings in the exhibition addresses the possible meanings behind Nietzsche’s note, using humorous settings and absurd landscapes to reflect on the human condition. In Descend, a fantastical battle of sorts takes place on a 10-foot-tall work on wallpaper. The painting's protagonist is a small child, who finds herself throughout the exhibition thrust into bizarre situations - in Descend she appears to be attempting to fly. This attempt to connect in spirit with a bird-like creature who has the ability to fly is so desperate that it reads as comical. Having forgotten her umbrella, which can signify safety and shelter from metaphorical trouble, the child finds herself in trouble. Here the missing umbrella can be interpreted as a symbol of danger.

Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen features a monumental wallpaper painting installation, gouache works on panel, and a suite of watercolor works on vellum. Esartia’s practice draws from the artist’s watercolor study with Afrikaans artist Rika Van der Walt. Watercolor has played a significant role in the development of modern art. Both Van Gogh and Cézanne praised it for its expressive space and airiness, yet it has stayed in the shadows of other media. Perhaps one of the more challenging materials to control, watercolor’s unforgiving nature and the inherent physicality that is created by its tendency to dry very quickly have been strong influences in the artist’s practice. In Descend the use of the natural color of the wallpaper and seemingly free-flowing paint that is controlled by the artist’s brush create harmonious movement and light in an unnatural landscape --with or without the umbrella.

Khatia Esartia (b.1978) works and lives in New York. She received her MA from Christie’s Education and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present From Blue, new paintings by Helen Beckman. The exhibition title is a reference to the underpainting in blue gouache that Helen Beckman lays down prior to commencing an oil painting. The gouache markings pool and disperse on the gesso surface, creating an opportunity to incorporate or veil its presence with the subsequent addition of oil paint layers. In the finished painting, the blue can play a major role or can almost disappear. Sometimes an imprimatura (a layer of varnish) seals the gouache; other times the velvety surface of the water medium is left to define an area. Similar to Odilon Redon’s quixotic landscape Beckman’s landscapes create an illusion of a real place through an accumulation of marks and suggestive gestures thus subverting traditional pastoral spaces to the point of abstraction.

Beckman spent a few years in the 90's working exclusively with ultramarine blue gouache on a project of primate portraits. These works dealt in liminal times of day and played with ideas of anthropomorphism. When Beckman returned to oil painting, she imported the mood of the blue washes and marks as an underpinning for the worlds created in these paintings.

The work in From Blue is described by the artist as "transmogrified landscapes." We are drawn in by a sense of a specific space, but the threads of that story are cut and re-tied in the process of painting. Each painting coheres at a different density. Beckman states "I prefer a painting to be held together by mysterious rather than obvious forces." Beckman's forms and narratives often sidestep easy definition, but they are definitely born from a love of painterly painting.

Helen Beckman (b.1960) works and lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Indiana University in 1986.

March 29 – May 11, 2018

In the current exhibition, Line Drawn through Sentimental Journeys, Adler Guerrier returns to depicting locations of New York City, specifically the ones of Central Park. Focusing on the textures and the makeup of the park, Guerrier highlights the complex nature of idealized public spaces.

New York City has been a long-standing part of Guerrier’s practice. In his piece, Untitled (Flâneur nyc-mia) 1999–2001, the photographs record Guerrier’s unobtrusive presence in both cities’ airports and mass transit systems. The exploration of these transportation hubs as space where all of society interacts, is analogous to his current survey of Central Park, which Frederick Law Olmstead referred to as a "people's park" i.e.a place where all New Yorkers could partake openly in activities within a green space.

Through images of rocks, trees, and flowers, Guerrier traces the remnants of sentiments found in landscape as it concerns to race, to place and to the role of the artist in sharing narratives. These photographs position the park as the setting for a multitude of public display. Sentiment as it exists in the public realm takes on various journeys, and this body of work offers a proposal to lay claim to a notion of public space.

Adler Guerrier was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and lives and works in Miami, FL where he received his BFA from New World School of the Arts. Current exhibitions of the artist’s work include Adler Guerrier: Conditions and Forms for black Longevity at California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA and The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Recent exhibitions include In-visibilité Ostentatoire at Foundation Clement, Martinique, France; Barnes Foundation “Person of the Crowd: Contemporary Art of Flânerie”. Guerrier’s works can be found in public collections including ICA Miami, PAMM Miami, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Andalusia 
February 1 – March 17, 2018

"Feathers circle the trees, longing to land"

Carolyn Carr is a multimedia artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work addresses the struggle to establish personal identity and a coming to terms with southern heritage. Through a slow making process, Carr deliberately creates objects - paintings, artist books, pinhole cameras, short films, or clay sculptures, hand built or on the wheel - by reenacting cultural traditions common to domestic life. Through these meditations, Carr aptly reconsiders the responsibility of her rich history and legacy. These issues are not exclusive to the South, many grapple with them, but the Southern States have been the battleground. Through her work Carr hopes to articulate these histories and relationships in an effort to initiate reconciliation.

The current exhibition was completed during an artist residency at Andalusia, the family homestead of author Flannery O’Connor, in Baldwin County, Georgia. While in residence Carr constructed a series of abstract narratives to illustrate the conflicts she sees as inherent to southern life. Carr deliberately references the rich literature, O’Connor, William Faulkner, or Carson McCullers, of her native south in her conflicting themes of love versus hate, freedom versus enslavement, good versus evil, or life versus death.

Carr (b. 1966) received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. Carr’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Asia and Europe including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; BIG POND Artworks, Munich, Germany; Artists Space, New York, NY; 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA. Carr’s work has been critically received and reviewed in numerous publications. In addition to her studio practice, Carr sits on the boards of the Forward Arts Foundation, the Fulton County Arts Council, and the Cherokee Garden Library, advocating for fellow artists. Carr lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, and Western North Carolina.

Gallery hours for this exhibition will be Wednesday through Friday, 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Mary Obering’s paintings are best characterized as geometric abstractions. Since the late 1970s she’s worked almost exclusively with egg tempera and gold leaf on gessoed panel, like the early
Renaissance masters.

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view works the artist made using this old master technique to explore the universe in all of its complexity. To create the series, Obering borrowed from scientific journals she was studying at the time, particularly the linear renderings that illustrated experiments with particle collisions. These minimalist geometric forms appealed to her visual sensibilities and the results were more like wall sculptures imbued with all the beauty found in a religious altarpiece, what Holland Cotter called an imperial elegance when he wrote about the
work in a review of Obering’s exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery in the late 1980s.
Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received a BA in Experimental Psychology at Hollins College and an MA in Behavioral Science studying under B.F. Skinner at
Harvard. In 1970 she received an MFA from the University of Denver. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1971. Her work has been exhibited in the US and in Italy where she also keepsan active studio in Puglia. Her paintings are in the permanent collection of major institutions, among them; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Detroit
Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

 In sometimes random, Lynne Golob Gelfman presents new paintings from the thru series. Lynne started to work on the series that began as grid paintings in 1960s in New York City. When she moved to Miami in the 70's, the change of her studio (location) influenced her practice greatly. While continuing to work on the grid canvases, she felt that the palate and rigidity clashed with the tropical light of the beach city. Musing on the new found color and texture, which she discovered by chance while noting the bleached out color on the reverse side of a canvas, Lynne decided to follow thru with this new direction. This chance change in perspective allowed a more fluidly color permeated abstraction to bring Lynne's grids onto the thru series.

Her work is in many public and private collections as well as in the permanent collections of museums, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Norton Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Gelfman has taught art at FIU, University of Miami, Miami Dade College, Metropolitan Museum and Art Center and MOCA North Miami. For the last 15 years, she has developed art projects with inner-city children at the Barnyard, Coconut Grove.

For her new project Blue Hour, Adriana Farmiga presents a site-specific installation comprised of oil-on-panel diptychs and a freestanding plywood sculpture. At the core of the project is the notion of liminality: the state of being in between, or of being neither/nor. Through the visual language of sunsets and urban construction, dualities and oppositions break open, giving way to a tempered and unresolved balance of possibilities.  

Gerben Mulder

Gijs Van Lith

Bram Braam

May 18th – July 8th, 2017

Broers van een andere moeder.

Chris Fennell

Black and Blue

February 23rd – April 1st, 2017

“As for a mantra, I wrote down an Emily Dickinson line from the poem Ghosts on a folded piece of paper I have been carrying around in my pocket:

‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’

Being haunted is one of the essential components of being human, maybe. At least for artists.”

Chris Fennell

Bow Down Mister, collaborative installation with works by Meg Cranston and Thaddeus Strode

Meg Cranston, Adler Guerrier, and Basim Magdy

Noritoshi Hirakawa performance, featuring original score by Raz Mesinai and clothing by Thomas Chen/ Emmanuelle NYC.

Dancers: Ariane Bernier, Lisa Clementi, Carlye Eckert, Pavel Machuca.

Adler Guerrier

Adler Guerrier, Basim Magdy, Gerben Mulder, and Meg Cranston

Basim Magdy and Chris Fennell