WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW
Petra Cortright
March 27 to April 10 2024
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW by Petra Cortright, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Cortright’s new series combines two of her great loves—flowers and the sea—in some of her most aesthetically pristine and philosophically engaging works to date. Front and center in each composition is a single flower which Cortright plucks from her “mother file”—the vast archive of Internet-appropriated images she has been collecting over the years. The flowers, which range from water-lilies to desert plants such as aloe, come from many different regions, biomes, and seasons. They float on hazy backgrounds that read as abstracted seascapes, which she creates by layering together hundreds of semi-transparent washes of digital brush effects and colored gradients. Cortright calls these background layers “veils.” Whether we think of Salome’s seductive Dance of the Seven Veils or the concept in Gnostic mysticism that the true nature of the physical universe is veiled from us by layers of illusion, Cortright’s veils suggest a universe of magical appearances where nothing that meets the eye can ever fully be trusted.
Metaphysical questions abound in Cortright’s art, which perennially tests the boundaries between the virtual and the real while puncturing the veils of painterly illusion. WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW takes these metaphysical investigations a step further. By floating each flower mid-air above a numinous background, the new works reference a vast corpus of sacred and mythological paintings. Dry desert plants appear to be born miraculously from the sea, like the titular goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Other flowers float heavenward on rays of light that seem to stream down from unseen windows in the sky, recalling the many depictions of the Ascension in Renaissance art. Just as Surrealists like Dalí used Renaissance illusionism to create their own dreamlike fantasies, Cortright creates similarly fantastical landscapes using twenty-first century tools. The light sources in these works are intentionally contradictory, representing a combination of drop shadows, stock images, and other digital pre-sets and effects. Her celestial rays of “castle window” light do not change the illumination of the flowers in the foreground, and her trompe-l’oeil drop shadows affirm the flatness of the picture plane. This is a universe of surfaces without physical substance, dimension, or what Heidegger called “the thingness of things.” Yet within Cortright’s virtual universe, there is still great beauty—greater perhaps than that of our ordinary world, since it is not subject to the effects of gravity or time. “Art does not have to obey the laws of physics,” Cortright says. And the works in WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW are gloriously disobedient, basking in a transcendent beauty beyond the material plane.
Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. She recently presented a large-scale video installation on the Münsterplatz at the 2023 edition of Art Basel Parcours. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum; Doota Plaza, Seoul; LIMA, Amsterdam; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh; and Depart Foundation, Los Angeles. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at international venues including the MoMA New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal; New Museum, New York; 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; and SJ01 Biennial, San Jose.
UNFILTERED
Ash Andrews
April 15 - 29, 2024
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present UNFILTERED, its first solo exhibition with Ash Andrews. Andrews’ distinctive approach to gestural abstraction combines compositional risk-taking with an almost casual disregard for perfection, alluding at once to the sprawling geographies of America’s countryside’s, coastlines, and roadways and to the stop-and-start journey of the art-making process itself.
Painting at different speeds and intensities, Andrews juxtaposes airy atmospheric effects and densely textured linework with contractor-style, rolled-on color. She works primarily with unprimed canvas and paper, ripping, tearing, sewing, and taping as she paints to discover unexpected solutions to formal problems while leaving the raw edges and roughness of the process visible in each finished work. Building equally on 60s lyrical abstraction and more recent developments in process-based painting, the bold insouciance of Andrews’ approach to color, form, and mark-making is unmistakably her own. As bustling as a construction zone or as boundless as the open road, the work is always unpremeditated yet infused with a sense of spatial possibility.
Born in Southern California in 1952, Ash Andrews personified the West Coast ethos of freewheeling adventure, riding bareback across the Santa Monica Mountains at the age of thirteen and taking numerous cross-country road trips along Route 66. Following a career in journalism, Andrews dedicated herself full-time to art-making, attending the New York Studio School and the Art Students League of New York. At the Art Students League, she studied under Larry Poons, who encouraged her investigation into free and loose gestural abstraction. Over the past two decades, Andrews has steadily built up a formidable body of work for which she is only belatedly receiving her due recognition. In 2011, Walter Liedtke, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, praised the “confident personality” of her paintings, “in which whimsy and inspired detours tug excitedly at the leash of strong composition.” Andrews has studios in Florida and New York and divides her time between the two states.
People and Place
Serge Attukwei Clottey
September 15 - October 6, 2023
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present People and Place, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the renowned Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey. The tightly curated selection of works in People and Place are all made from upcycled yellow jerrycans, Clottey’s signature material which forms the basis for his innovative, socially-oriented Afrogallonism practice.
The rich variety of yellows in these works are a testament to the material histories of the jerrycans themselves, some of which have become sun-bleached and weathered from decades of use. Originally manufactured to store cooking oil, these containers have been reused by generations of Ghanaians to gather water in the drought-prone country, and today they are even repurposed into chairs and beds. They are part of what Clottey calls the “daily architecture” of West African life.
“The yellow gallons represent struggle,” Clottey says, “but in the Ghanaian flag, yellow represents gold.” He explains that by manipulating the material, he changes its form and value, so the yellow color of the jerrycan, long synonymous with scarcity and lack, acquires new cultural and aesthetic associations. The lucent plastic material with its mottled hues becomes as poetically evocative as gold, and, in the context of Clottey’s art practice, just as precious a resource.
Clottey’s work is informed by weaving traditions from the Ashanti kingdom, which flourished in present-day Ghana until 1901, as well as by the compositional strategies of the early European avant-garde. Like the paintings of Klimt’s “Golden Phase,” Clottey’s Afrogallonism works are tone poems that combine a mosaic-like opulence with a scrupulous attention to craft. In Clottey’s work, however, beauty is only part of the story. The works in People and Place are not “pure abstractions” but reflections of a specific place—Accra, Ghana—and its people, using the language of abstraction to map the social dimensions of life in that city. Titles such as Campaign for Massive and Financial Revolution refer to political strategies and slogans employed by Ghanaian politicians, and Clottey’s use of color blocking reflects how residents in his own neighborhood use colored paint to demarcate space: “I live in Labadi, which is a suburb of Accra, where people express color as a means of communication—good and bad. Families having conflicts use color to divide their property.” In other pieces, such as Compassion Replaces Judgment, Clottey uses squares of negative space to suggest displacement and migration from one part of the city to another.
Rooted in the specificity of local experience, Clottey’s themes have a universal relevance, just as his sophisticated treatment of form, color, and materiality has a global appeal. Attuned to the sociological realities of life in Accra, and employing a visual grammar of stark contrasts and divisions, Clottey’s art nevertheless obtains states of beauty that seem to transcend those divisions. Without forgetting the life of struggle that the jerrycans have represented across generations, and without denying the deep social divisions still present in Accra and around the world, People and Place presents a vision of splendor from an imaginary future when even the humblest of materials may be reborn as gold.
Serge Attukwei Clottey (b. 1985, Accra, Ghana) works in a variety of media including performance, photography, video, painting, drawing, and sculpture. He attended the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Ghana before studying at the Escola Guinard University of Art in Brazil and has completed multiple fellowships abroad.
Clottey has had solo exhibitions at Simon Lee (London, 2023); Desert X (AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 2022); Brigade (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022); Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2020, 2018, and 2016); The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, 2019); Lorenzelli Arte (Milan, 2019); Fabrica Gallery (Brighton, 2019); Jane Lombard Gallery (New York, 2018); Gallery 1957 at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, 2018); Gallery 1957 (Accra, 2016); GNYP Gallery (Berlin, 2016); and Feuer/Mesler (New York, 2015).
Clottey has been included in group exhibitions at Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2023); Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (Vestfossen, Norway, 2019); Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2018 and 2019); Kampnagel Hamburg (Hamburg, 2015); The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, 2015); University Museum of Contemporary Art (Amherst, MA, 2014); and the Goethe-Institut Ghana (Accra, 2011).
His work is in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas); the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakech, Morocco); the Nubuke Foundation (Accra, Ghana); the Seth Dei Foundation (Accra, Ghana); Modern Forms (UK); and The World Bank Collection (Washington D.C.), as well as a number of international private collections. Clottey lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
Logan R. Beitmen
Blue Monsoon
David Benjamin Sherry
February 15 - 29, 2024
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Blue Monsoon by the New Mexico-based artist David Benjamin Sherry. This is Sherry’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. In a suite of paintings that span the colors of the visible spectrum, opposites fuse and binaries are transcended. The earth, the cosmos, and the human body merge into radiant, energistic forms that are sensual but not specifically gendered. Curves, orbs, soft edges, and openings suggest the porous nature of bodies at a microscopic level, or landscapes softened by wind, heat, and monsoon rains.
Echoing the biomorphic abstractions of early desert modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Transcendentalist painters Florence Miller and Agnes Pelton, Sherry’s paintings are the culmination of his ongoing, seventeen-year project of bringing a uniquely mystical, queer sensibility to the landscape traditions of the American West.
After the passing of his closest friend in 2007, Sherry took a road trip to Death Valley, where he made his first landscape photographs while meditating on life and death in the expanded time horizon of the valley’s ancient geology. Back in the studio, experimenting with a color enlarger, he printed these photographs as ultra-saturated monochrome images to evoke the strong emotions he had felt during his journey. The colors, he said, were also influenced by the rainbow palette of experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger and ideas of “queer magick” not traditionally associated with the heroism and hubris of the Western landscape tradition.
“For me, what magick is—personal, queer, mystic magick—is creating the space for my body, my soul, and my mind to come together in one thing. And that one thing is the artwork.”
Sherry eventually moved to New Mexico, where his practice expanded to include photograms and paintings. Because painting is not constrained by verisimilitude, it allows him to express his relationship to the landscape in terms of internal visual memories and transcendental feelings. The shapes in his Blue Monsoon paintings are not harsh and rugged, as the American West is so often represented. Rather, they are soft and receptive, opening what Sherry calls “a space of mental freedom” for himself and for the viewer. Like a long-awaited monsoon shower, the work leaves us cleansed and nourished.
David Benjamin Sherry is an internationally acclaimed artist with works in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Saatchi Collection, London, UK; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL; and The Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.
A multi-part installation of Sherry’s art was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York, a survey show organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group presentations, including: The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum (2011), New York Minute at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), Out of Focus at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), Lost Line, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), What is a Photograph? at ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014) Color Fields at MassArt Museum (2015) and Ansel Adams In Our Time, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018).
His work has been featured in many prominent international publications, including Artforum, Aperture Magazine, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. In September 2014, his work was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In the spring of 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Aperture Magazine for the Earth issue.
Sherry received his BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Logan R. Beitmen
Comments on Cosmology
Zak Ové
December 18, 2023 - January 5, 2024
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Comments on Cosmology, a solo exhibition by Zak Ové, featuring a selection of the British-Trinidadian artist’s celebrated fabric collage tondos made from vintage hand-knit doilies, along with a larger-than-life sculpture from his Invisible Man series.
Ové’s doily works, which he terms “granny psychedelia,” were inspired by the multicolored, hand-knit and hand-crocheted home décor that was a ubiquitous feature of the working-class West Indian neighborhoods of his youth. The artist was long fascinated by the shrine-like quality of doily-decorated rooms and how they symbolized the upwardly mobile aspirations of their makers, generations of immigrant women who embraced this European craft tradition as an entrée into the world of middle-class respectability. At the same time, the cosmic shapes and Day-Glo colors they used suggested an inner wellspring of creativity for which these nameless women, whose lives were largely confined to the domestic sphere, would have had few other outlets. “In consideration of the period they were made, between the 1930s and the 80s, and the role of women in the household… some of these felt like acts of rebellion,” Ové says. “They certainly couldn’t dress that way, in terms of the code of mores of their environment, the church, et cetera, but here they were making these out-there things that resemble astrological diagrams in lime green, orange, red, black, and all these far-out colors!”
The visual exuberance of Ové’s doily collages is reminiscent of other Caribbean traditions, including Trinidadian Carnival, or Canboulay, which he participated in from a young age and which his father, the renowned filmmaker Horace Ové, explored in his 1973 documentary film King Carnival. Members of the Ovés’ extended family were active in masquerade and costume making, and one of his uncles sold African religious paraphernalia. “They were very much involved in the Old World culture of Trinidad, and I think for me the epiphany… was the realization that a lot of these Old World cultures needed New World materials.” Ové’s art is a contemporary extension of the longstanding Caribbean practice of infusing European craft materials with elements of African spirituality and aesthetics. By reusing vintage doilies, he continues this cross-cultural and cross-generational conversation.
Also on view is Ové’s Invisible Man sculpture, which belongs to the series The Invisible Men and the Masque of Blackness, which he originally presented as a forty-sculpture site-specific installation for the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2016. Installed in the courtyard of Somerset House, the work referenced Ben Johnson’s notorious play The Masque of Blackness, which was performed for Queen Anne of Denmark in that very courtyard in 1605. The Masque of Blackness depicted exoticized images of Africans and featured the first known use of blackface in European theatre. Ové’s figure, based on a wooden sculpture his father gave him as a child after a trip to Kenya, raises his hands in a gesture of benevolence. With his placid expression and dignified bearing, he stands as a corrective to the distorted images of Africans in Johnson’s play.
Logan R. Beitmen
Beyond the Hedges
Rachel Lee Hovnanian
March 8 - 22, 2024
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Beyond the Hedges, an exhibition of recent paintings by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Bright lime and avocado green hedges interpose themselves between cloudless skies and crystal blue swimming pools, simultaneously disrupting and enlivening scenes of domestic leisure. Hovnanian, who worked as an art director for Madison Avenue ad agencies before becoming a full-time artist, knows well the seductive power of images.
In Beyond the Hedges, she constructs believable scenes from disparate sources, including old advertisements and family photos, bringing together people who never met and compressing timelines and geographies. She amalgamates multiple points-of-view, as Cézanne did in his still-lifes, creating perpetually unsettled compositions which teeter between perfection and dissolution.
Complementing these scenes of domestic life, Hovnanian presents paintings from her Robe series, such as South Beach Robe, Flamingo Pink Robe, and Poison Dart Robe, in which women’s robes are absorbed into various leafy or floral hedges. A direct feminist commentary on Jim Dine’s male robe paintings, Hovnanian’s Robes speak to the historic invisibility of women’s creativity and the undervaluing of labor, such as gardening, which has traditionally been gendered feminine. These works also point to camouflage and concealment as survival strategies, as implied by the use of “hedge” as a verb, which comes from the sixteenth-century phrase “hiding in the hedges.” As much as they sometimes inhibit interconnection, hedges provide spaces of safety and security, and the hedges in Hovnanian’s paintings may be interpreted multiple ways, including as metaphorical sites of creative flourishing.
Beyond the Hedges was inspired, in part, by the strangely alienating effects of the COVID lockdown, which coincided, for Hovnanian, with a geographical change. After spending most of her adult life in New York City, the artist moved into a new home in a Miami neighborhood where tall hedges separated her from her neighbors. The absence of visible people and the visual predominance of perfectly rectilinear hedges could not have felt more different from crowded New York had she crash-landed onto a lunar colony. Because of lockdown, it was impossible for her to meet her new neighbors, or even see them, apart from a few fleeting encounters with socially distanced, masked figures walking their dogs. Although her current series of paintings are not exclusively set in Miami, but rather combine elements from various locales, including Southern California, they capture the beauty and eeriness of her new home and her curiosity about what her unknown neighbors’ lives may be like on the other side of the hedges. Having grown up in a suburb of Houston, Texas, where an unusually high proportion of her classmates’ parents were astronauts, Hovnanian has always found the domestic sphere as fascinating as space travel.
In fact, we may know more about what lies beyond the stars than what happens in our neighbors’ backyards. Visually alluring and mysterious, Beyond the Hedges challenges us to imagine the universes of possibility that exist all around us, just beneath the surfaces of our everyday lives.
Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of modern feminism and new media technologies. In 2022, Hovnanian was selected to participate in the 59th Biennale di Venezia: The Milk of Dreams, where she presented Angel’s Listening (2022). Recently, Hovnanian's Mind the Body (2023) was selected for the 44th La Versiliana Festival: Of the Multiple Identities of the Body in Pietrasanta, Italy, and again for presentation within The Divine Feminine (2023-24) at the Ann Norton Museum and Sculpture Gardens in Palm Beach, Florida.
Over the last decade, Hovnanian’s work has been exhibited at public and private institutions across the globe, including numerous solo presentations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She received her BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and completed postgraduate studies at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Hovnanian currently lives between Miami, New York, and Tuscany.
Logan R. Beitmen
Pull
Danielle Mysliwiec
January 16 - 31, 2023
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Pull, a solo exhibition by Danielle Mysliwiec. Mysliwiec is a contemporary abstract painter who explores the malleable properties of oil paint and the metaphorical potential of abstraction. It was during a 2021 Surf Point Foundation residency in Maine that the artist began creating a series of blue gradients which evolved into the present suite of paintings. They were inspired, in part, by the vastness and ceaseless energy of the ocean as ways of contemplating the nature of change.
Mysliwiec chose a hue of phthalo blue many magnitudes more vibrant than the steely blue-greys of the New England coastline and one that would retain its vibrancy even when tinted with white. More than the look of the ocean, Mysliwiec considered the physics of waves and tides, the process of erosion, and correspondences she saw between the actions of the ocean and her own mark-making process. These porous high-relief paintings, reminiscent of woven textiles, are made by hand-mixing oil paint, then extruding it through a specialized tool. It is a meticulous, physically demanding process, and the paintings in Pull are her largest to date. As she pulls lines of paint through the extruding tool, moving slowly and systematically from the upper left corner of the canvas to the lower right, each mark rises and recedes, replicating in miniature the endless push and pull of waves against the shoreline.
Although Mysliwiec’s work is process-based and systematic, it is also intuitive. She never measures the lengths of her marks, nor the proportions of paint that she mixes, allowing instead for variations in form and color that feel organic, even poetic. When moving from lighter tints to more deeply saturated ones, she deliberately creates moments of transition that stand out when viewed from afar but that are difficult to perceive up close, causing our perception of color to shift according to our relative proximity while reversing the common-sense notion that closer inspection necessarily equates to greater knowledge. Sometimes, clarity only comes with distance. For Mysliwiec, this perceptual shift is a visual metaphor for how we perceive change in our lives. “Even when shocking things happen or a paradigm shift occurs that feels radical and sudden,” she says, “when you reflect on it, you realize it’s been happening in incremental micro-moments that were building toward that moment of realization or visibility.” The paintings in Pull are meditations on change, and the more closely we scrutinize them, the more their mystery deepens.
Danielle Mysliwiec holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Novella Gallery (New York) and Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia) and in group exhibitions at McKenzie Fine Art, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Mixed Greens Gallery, and Transmitter Gallery (New York); Rockelmann & (Berlin); COUNTY (Palm Beach); Heiner Contemporary and Project 4 (Washington, DC); Baer Ridgway Exhibitions and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (San Francisco); and The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC), among others. Her work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Fag City, The Washington Post, B’more Art, and The San Francisco Examiner. Recent awards include a fully-funded residency to the Surf Point Foundation and the Pollack Krasner Fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from the DC Arts and Humanities Commission and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Mysliwiec has also been a contributing writer to The Brooklyn Rail. She sits on the board of Interlude Artist Residency, a residency for parent artists in Livingston, New York.
Logan R. Beitmen
Future Circuit
Tamara Gonzales
November 5 - 18, 2022
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Future Circuit, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Tamara Gonzales. How we move on the earth: walking, standing, running, dancing, pondering, remembering — steps to get lost, to find oneself, looking down at where our feet are placed. Dizzy? spiral, rollin’, spinning, timelessness, déjà vu, eternity in motion, staying grounded, adapting to the changing landscape on both the macro and micro level. Fate and personal choice.
“For Gonzales, art is a form of healing. These rituals, ceremonies, and initiations unite both body and mind in ways that involve a more intense physical and mental participation, flexibility, and release that we can only imagine. The healing brought about from these experiences, and from her extensive traveling which informs her perception of the world and her place in it, perpetuates a flood of images that provides endless sources of birth and rebirth. Her work is bold, intuitive, and viscerally personal. We can feel the presence of a multi-faceted American culture, uniquely blending diasporic cultures, their knowledge, and their practices into our contemporary and immediate lives.”
The Brooklyn Rail: Tamara Gonzales: Horrible Beauty - Amanda Millet-Sorsa
Tamara Gonzales was born in Madera, CA in 1959 and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Vermont College ADP in Montpelier, VT in 2005 and an Associate in Applied Science, Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY in 1990. Gonzales’s work has been featured in exhibitions such as Orpheus, PS1, Long Island City, NY (2007); 99¢, Jersey City Museum & Victory Hall, Jersey City, NJ (2007); Current/Undercurrent, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (1997); and Cool Girls, PS122, New York, NY (1996). Gonzales is a prominent participant in the community of artist-run spaces and artist-driven projects in New York City, and her work is held in public collections including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. She has been awarded residencies such as Center of Contemporary Art, Andratx, Mallorca, Spain (2012); International Artists Exchange Program, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi, India (2001); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (1999); and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (1997).
Logan R. Beitmen
Tiger Paintings
Kour Pour
February 21 - March 7, 2022
In celebration of 2022, the Year of the Tiger, B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Tiger Paintings, a solo exhibition by Kour Pour. Visually hypnotic and historically astute, Kour Pour’s Tiger Paintings reveal forgotten connections among East Asian, European, and Persian art-making traditions, using the tiger motif to remap our understanding of cross-cultural exchange.
Pour’s strong sense of shape and shadow recalls German Expressionist aesthetics, and his pulsating stripes build upon Bridget Riley’s experiments in perceptual abstraction. The tigers themselves have journeyed across multiple civilizations, copied and modified by innumerable artists, before ending up in this show. In Pour’s X-ray-like vision, they transform once again, their white stripes crackling like lightning in a mysterious mist.
The stylistic diversity of Pour’s tigers is inspired, in part, by minhwa, a Korean folk painting tradition that borrows freely from disparate sources. Korean minhwa artists would sometimes imitate Chinese or Japanese tiger paintings that were themselves derived from Korean originals—an example of cultural transmission coming full circle. But Kour is also interested in how these same East Asian tiger motifs were adopted by Persian miniaturists in the thirteenth century and German Expressionists in the twentieth. Franz Marc and Heinrich Campendonk, for instance, both made woodcuts of tigers in the Japanese ukiyo-e style.
The block printing technique Pour uses for his one-of-a-kind paintings is significantly more strenuous than that of his Japanese and German predecessors. For his largest pieces, he physically crawls across the backs of the canvases while burnishing them with a baren, a traditional Japanese printmaking tool. The sheer physicality of the process creates a mottled, patina-like surface suggestive of mist or fog, but which is the literal imprint of the artist’s own body. Pour compares it to the atmospheric effects prized by Chinese landscape painters, who often strove to depict invisible forces, such as wind.
Rather than placing his Tiger Paintings in any one art-historical lineage, Pour recognizes that the work is a confluence of global traditions that have been interacting with one another for centuries. Astonishingly powerful images in their own right, the Tiger Paintings are also a bridge to history.
A Los Angeles-based artist of Persian and British descent, Kour Pour is known for his meticulously composed artworks which intersect diverse material and aesthetic traditions. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gallery 1957, London, 2022; Wild Garden, a dual-venue presentation at SHRINE and Sargent’s Daughters, NYC, 2021; Familiar Spirits at Kavi Gupta, Chicago 2021; Returnee at The Club, Tokyo, 2019; Manzareh/Keshiki/Landscape at Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, 2019; Abrash at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, 2018; Polypainting at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2018, and GNYP Gallery, Berlin, 2018. Select group exhibitions include A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean at the Orlando Museum of Art; Decoration Never Dies, Anyway at Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, Tokyo, 2017; and Labyrinth(s) at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2016. A solo exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran is forthcoming in 2022.
Logan R. Beitmen
Pan - pan
Rachel Rossin
December 15, 2021 - January 3, 2022
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Pan-pan, a solo exhibition by Rachel Rossin featuring an installation of technologically-augmented paintings from the artist’s acclaimed Hologram-Combine series. Rossin’s Hologram-Combines drop us into a hyper-color wonderland seemingly free of entropy, full of exhilarating movement and light—an imagined utopia of pure visual and kinetic pleasure. Flower petals cascade in front of painted tableaus of blurred sunset colors, saddled horses run on animated loops, hurricanes whir at their center, songbirds fall to the ground—all on an invisible holographic plane one inch above the surface of Rossin’s paintings.
The artist materializes these illusions out of thin air by updating one of the oldest motion picture technologies, the zoetrope, using state-of-the-art virtual reality modeling and LED holograms.
The exhibition includes a sound installation that Rossin made in collaboration with the artist and musician Brendan Sullivan, featuring a lilting and evocative tone poem accompanied by orchestrated field recordings from the Florida Everglades and the musician himself.
The title of the exhibition, Pan-pan, refers to a distress call used in international radio-telecommunications aboard ships and aircraft. The word is derived from the French word “panne”, meaning “breakdown” or “failure” and is used to request for urgent help, acting as a precursor to a mayday, and where the situation is not immediately life-threatening - e.g. “Help, please” rather than “please help!”
As in Rossin’s earlier Lossy pieces, which embraced the accidental beauty created by digital image compression, her new series of Hologram-Combine paintings explore the interplay between real and virtual worlds - working in how “panne” (“failure”) in digital imaging technologies can have an organic beauty of their own. By clipping from a personal virtual reality and visual lexicon Rossin has been developing since she was 8 years old, she brings these spaces to life representing her own metabolic process between the virtual and the real. Rossin’s work in Pan-pan, reflects an ever-growing technological present to us - asking how to better connect to reality-at-large and each other - especially with the murmurs of breakdowns and danger just out of sight.
Rachel Rossin is an artist who lives and works in New York, NY. She was the first fellow in Virtual Reality Research at The New Museum Incubator in 2015. Since then, she has exhibited widely internationally such as K11 in Shanghai, China, The Zabludowicz Collection in London, Kiasma Museum of Art in Helsinki, Finland, HEK Museum of Art in Basel, Switzerland, Pinakothek Museum of Modern Art in Munich, Germany, The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and The Akron Art Museum of Ohio. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The BBC, ArtForum, Wired, CNN among many others. She was a 2017 Forbes ’30 Under 30’ and her work has been the subject of many mini-documentaries such as ART21’s “New York; Close-up,” Bloomberg TV series Art+Tech, National Geographic’s series “Genius.” Her work is in public collections around the world such as The Whitney Museum of Art, The Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently, she is working on a joint-commission to debut in fall of 2022 for The KW Museum of Art in Berlin, Germany and The Whitney Museum of Art in New York, New York.
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Pause
Martine Poppe
April 16 - May 2, 2021
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Pause by Martine Poppe. These recent paintings are based on digital photographs the artist took from airplane windows while flying to and from art exhibitions. They preserve happy accidents of sunlight, cloud iridescence, lens flare, and other moments of evanescent beauty discovered in the quiet, introspective interludes between each departure and arrival.
The exhibition title, Pause, addresses the moments we are in real time being awed by the beauty we see in the moment. Truly taking in the majestic beauty of nature from above. At the same time, Poppe pushes the envelope of photorealism beyond the domain of the literal with measured, scalloped brushwork that allows the paintings to be read as abstract compositions. Many of her titles, such as “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “I Don’t Know If I Could Ever Go Without,” suggest the private thoughts and longings of cloud-gazing travelers. Since she began making the series in 2018, Poppe says that many people have approached her unprompted to show her their own cloud photographs they have taken while traveling. She is fascinated by how such a solitary activity as cloud-gazing from the window seat of an airplane can become a shared experience that connects us to a larger sociality.
Poppe paints on what she calls “the underskirts of the Old Masters,” using the same specialized fabric that conservators use for restoring fragile Renaissance paintings. Although this translucent fabric may appear delicate, it is designed to be strong and durable. By using it as the support for her paintings, Poppe affirms the power of quiet resiliency as an alternative to more overt representations of strength in art. The translucency of the material also mirrors the translucency of the clouds, creating an intriguing relationship between the materiality of the artwork and the immateriality of its subject.
Poppe’s cloudscapes represent a synthesis of many opposites: softness and strength, transience and permanence, the natural and the virtual, photorealism and abstraction. Although grounded in the familiar, they point to moments of beauty that transcend the mundane. They allow for the prospect of shared experience while providing space for solitary contemplation.
Martine Poppe is a Norwegian-born, London-based artist, who received her MFA from the Slade School of Art in 2013. Recent solo and two-person shows include To Be Announced at Buer Gallery, Oslo (2021); Zima Blue, Kristin Hjellegjerde, Berlin (2020); Waiting for Y at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2019); Artmonte Carlo with VI, VII, Monaco (2019); Portraits of trees at Trafo Kunsthall, Norway (2018-2019); and Aphrodite lowers her mirror at Kristin Hjellegjerde Berlin (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Sorgenfri Skulpturpark, Sorgenfri, Oslo, Norway (2020); Art on a postcard, The Allbright, London, United Kingdom (2020); 2084, Cable Factory/Valssaamo, Helsinki (2020), Artist Rooms with Encounter Contemporary at Copeland Gallery; Carousel at Koppel Project Central, London (2019); ALAC, Los Angeles (2019); LISTE, VI, VII, Basel, Switzerland (2018); Slippage: Performative utterances in painting, cur. Lucy von Goetz and Oliver Morris-Jones, Post_Institute, London, United Kingdom (2018); Studio Spring at CCA Andratx, Spain (2018).
Other exhibitions and art fairs include Between the lines, The Women’s Museum and Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway (2018); UNTITLED, San Francisco (2017); Brussels Art Fair (2018 and 2017) and VOLTA (Basel, 2017 and 2016) with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery; S|2 x SF at Sotheby’s (San Francisco, 2015); Sunset© at Hooper Projects, Los Angeles (2015); and New Order II: British Art Today at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2014). Poppe’s works can be found in the collections of the UK Government Art Collection (UK), the Kistefos Museum (Norway), NRK (Norway), the Saatchi Collection (UK), University College London (UK), Oxford University (UK), CCA Andratx (Spain), House of St. Barnabas (UK), and KODE Museums (Norway), among others.
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Black Flowers
Donald Baechler
March 1 - 15, 2021
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Black Flowers by Donald Baechler. Donald Baechler made his first Black Flowers paintings in the mid-1980s, and he has returned to the series several times over the course of his career, allowing it to evolve organically as his practice has evolved. Initially drawn to silhouette-making because it was an art practice, he could maintain in the midst of a hectic travel schedule, Baechler discovered that such pared-down forms on image-free backgrounds also provided a mental and visual reprieve from his image-saturated, full-color works.
“I recognized years ago that sometimes I want to fill the canvas up with imagery, and sometimes I want to empty it out,” he explains. “They are not competing impulses, but necessary counterpoints.” The Black Flowers represent Baechler at his most austere and restrained.
Since 2003, Baechler has been making three-dimensional versions of the Black Flowers in cast bronze, which has made him attentive to sculptural considerations, such as weight, mass, and balance. “Recently I find myself plotting Black Flowers compositions with the bronze foundry on my mind,” he says. Consequently, his painted flowers have taken on a sturdier character. In contrast to the fragility and ephemerality of their subject matter, Baechler’s recent paintings suggest strength, architectonic stability, and permanence.
Baechler modeled some of his early Black Flowers on found images, which he would edit and alter. Inspired by Art brut, Baechler continually works to free himself from stylistic conventions by seeking out and emulating drawings made by people not formally trained in art, cultivating what the art critic Carter Ratcliff once called a “knowing awkwardness” or “deliberate clunkiness” in his shapes and lines. While this practice remains important for Baechler, he has gradually become less reliant on found images as a starting point. In fact, for the paintings in the present exhibition, Baechler has worked almost exclusively from observation, setting up still-lifes of artificial flowers and dried branches in his studio or photographing real flowers in silhouette against his window, then translating those forms into his own idiosyncratic visual language. Whether working from existing images or from direct observation, though, his goal remains constant. As he states: “I am always looking for ways to reinvent the familiar.” The new works mark a significant milestone on his decades-long journey of continuous reinvention.
Donald Baechler rose to prominence in New York in the 1980s when he began exhibiting at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which also represented the artists Joseph Kosuth and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Baechler has had recent solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, NY, The Kunsthalle Basel, and The Museum der Moderne Salzburg. His work has been reviewed frequently in The New York Times by art critics including Roberta Smith, Grace Glueck, Alex Hagwood, Ken Johnson, and Holland Cotter. Baechler’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among other leading institutions worldwide.
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NO END TO NEW BEGINNINGS
Irvin Pascal
February 1 - March 15, 2020
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present NO END TO NEW BEGINNINGS by Irvin Pascal. As a new decade begins, the young, critically acclaimed British artist Irvin Pascal presents a solo exhibition appropriately titled No End to New Beginnings. Taken from the lyrics of a school hymn Pascal sang as a child, the title shuttles us between the realm of autobiographical memory and more universal concerns, such as how, in the artist's words, "the foundations of one's childhood affects the trajectory of their life, and at which point does one discover new beginnings in one's life cycle."
At thirty-two, Pascal has already had "new beginnings" of his own as a budding architect and a professional boxer before ultimately emerging as an important new voice in contemporary art, and his rugged, high-contrast paintings combine the discipline and tenacity of a pugilist with the analytical rigor of an architect. Seemingly abstract, Pascal's compositions often contain figurative and narrative elements, creating a dialogue between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. For instance, the stripes and circles of AJ versus Klitschko, as the title implies, not only constitute an aesthetically pleasing pattern but also the ropes of a boxing ring and the heads of audience members, respectively, from the historic 2017 heavyweight fight.
Pascal's mother is Nigerian, and Nigerian culture—from contemporary fashion, film, and popular dance to traditional textiles—is as much a part of his aesthetic arsenal as Cubist fragmentation, de-constructivist architecture, and other forms of European abstraction. The title of Pascal's large painting, if so doxology, comes from an idiomatic Nigerian expression of joy (similar to "Praise be!"), which he remembers his cousin using in letters to the family. While it is not necessary to recognize such references to appreciate his paintings, Pascal states: "Sometimes the tone of a word, whether understood or not, affects the atmosphere around a work." Pascal also encourages viewers to bring their own memories and associations to his art, noting: "I like to widen the range of interpretations."
Irvin Pascal was named one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries for 2017 and was included in the important group exhibition Talisman in the age of difference, curated by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2018). Last year, he had a major solo exhibition, The Nenaissance, at Niki Cryan in Lagos, Nigeria (2019), and in 2018 he had a solo exhibition at GNYP Gallery, Berlin. Other recent exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Block 336, London (2018) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2017); PIAF, Copeland Gallery, London (2017); The Long Count, Von Goetz Art, London (2017); Atkinson Gallery, Somerset (2018); and BHM, Latham Watkins, London (2017). His work has been reviewed in Forbes, The Art Newspaper, and Wall Street International and is included in outstanding private collections.
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Immaterial
Anne Vieux
April 7 - May 7, 2019
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Immaterial, a solo exhibition by the important emerging Brooklyn-based artist Anne Vieux. Vieux creates nonobjective works that allude to the fluid, morphing, liminal space of the virtual. Her prismatic compositions come from digital experiments making images from scanning holographic paper. The light of the scanner refracts the spectrum of the paper and records a topography of colors and forms. Pushing the limits of the image data through zooming, warping, and drawing on the computer, she then translates these images onto canvas. Vieux’s seductively saturated palettes of purples, pinks, blues, and turquoise colors may evoke vernacular associations such as infrared weather maps, satin, or the swirling patterns found on soap bubbles, but they ultimately reflect the artist’s commitment to a serious and singular vision of abstraction.
In the past, Vieux has layered acrylic paint on top of fabric created using dye sublimation printing. The works in Immaterial, by contrast, are almost entirely hand painted. These gorgeously complex, spectral compositions, while traditionally painted, remain fully immersed in a twenty-first century digital understanding of visuality.
Anne Vieux (b. 1985, Michigan) received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Vieux has had recent solo exhibitions at The Hole (NYC), The Journal Gallery (Brooklyn), and Annka Kultys (London). Her work has been featured in such publications as Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, AQNB, and Mousse Magazine and is included in outstanding private collections.
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Oscillate
Samantha Bittman
May 7 - June 7, 2018
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Oscillate, a solo exhibition of woven paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Samantha Bittman. Samantha Bittman’s works are characterized by their lively geometries, textural surfaces, and the artist’s meticulous attention to craft. Some of the works in Oscillate were produced during a recent 2018 residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where Bittman directly engaged the respective histories of painting and weaving that the Albers represent.
In addition to the Albers Foundation residency, Bittman has been awarded prestigious residencies at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include The Museum of Arts & Design (New York), Ronchini (London), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Morgan Lehman (New York), and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn). In 2012, Bittman received the Artadia Award, and her work has been favorably reviewed in Artforum, New American Paintings, Wall Street International, Hyperallergic, Blouin Artinfo, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other leading art publications.
All of the works in Oscillate begin with graphically-driven textiles that Bittman weaves by hand using a traditional floor loom. Once woven, Bittman stretches the textiles around traditional stretcher bars, then paints select areas with carefully mixed acrylic paints to mimic or invert the colors of the threads beneath—a deceptively simple process that generates bold, oscillating patterns and striking figure-ground reversals. Bittman considers her work along a lineage of artists working with abstraction in both painting and fiber art histories, such as Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Bridget Riley, Sheila Hicks, and Sol LeWitt, complicating traditional hierarchies of “fine art” versus “craft.”
By foregoing readymade canvases in favor of her own laboriously hand-loomed fabrics, Bittman calls attention to the materiality of paintings as objects and to the inherent but often overlooked relationship between pictorial image and woven structure. Her art entices the viewer to slow down, look more deeply, and fully experience the pleasures of texture and symmetry at the micro-level of warp and weft.
C O U N T Y is a contemporary art space at 350 South County Road in Palm Beach, Florida. The gallery features a strong and carefully curated exhibition program that promotes important emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. Oscillate is Bittman’s first solo exhibition at C O U N T Y.
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The Palm Beach Paintings
Liz Markus
February 15 - March 14, 2018
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based painter Liz Markus. Markus is an internationally exhibited artist whose work has been featured in such publications as Vanity Fair, Vogue, Huffington Post, Artforum, and Modern Painters. Recent exhibitions include Maruani Mercier (Brussels), Nathalie Karg Gallery (New York), and Galleri Loyal (Stockholm). Her work has been included in numerous international art fairs, including Art Basel (Miami Beach), NADA (New York), The Dallas Art Fair, and ZONA MACO (Mexico City).
Liz Markus is known for her stylish, figurative paintings on unprimed canvas that employ dreamily languorous brushwork, controlled drips, and stain painting effects reminiscent of the mid-century experiments of the lyrical abstraction and color field movements. Markus often appropriates from American popular culture, and past portrait subjects have ranged from Jacqueline Kennedy to CZ Guest to Anita Ekberg. Histories, memories, and half-forgotten images seep into one another in Markus’s work, just as her colors drip and recombine to form beautiful moments of abstraction. The artist is available for private commissions.
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Wave
Ry David Bradley; Petra Cortright; Josh Reames; Joe Reihsen; Rachel Rossin; Kasper Sonne
April 15 - May 28, 2017
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Wave, a group show of works by Ry David Bradley, Petra Cortright, Josh Reames, Joe Reihsen, Rachel Rossin and Kasper Sonne. Wave will feature artists that are exploring and experimenting with new means and modalities of art making. The exhibition is curated by Dalton D. Freed and will run from April 15th - May 28th 2017.
RY DAVID BRADLEY
Ry David Bradley received his MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts of the University of Melbourne. He lives and works in London and New York and has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, Basel, Berlin, and Sydney. His works are held in good public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he has been reviewed in such publications as ‘Elephant,’ ‘Artnet,’ ‘Artspace,’ ‘Vault Magazine,’ ‘Blouin Artinfo,’ and ‘The Huffington Post.’
PETRA CORTRIGHT
Petra Cortright is an internationally exhibited artist who lives and works in LA. She studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and the California College of the Arts. The art critic (and editor of ‘Elephant’ magazine) Charlotte Jansen has called Petra Cortright “the Monet of the 21st Century.” Cortright’s works have been featured in the Venice Biennale and are included in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
JOSH REAMES
Josh Reames is a Brooklyn-based artist who received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been reviewed in Artnews, Artslant, Artcritical, Hyperallergic, Artspace, and New American Paintings (where he was a juror’s pick), and he exhibits internationally.
JOE REIHSEN
Joe Reihsen is a Los Angeles-based artist with an MFA from UC Santa Barbara. His work has been featured at top art fairs, including UNTITLED Miami, NADA New York, and New York’s Armory Show. In a review for ‘Modern Painters,’ Ed Schad compares the tactile, human quality of Reihsen’s richly layered “skins” of paint to the sculptures of Eva Hesse, writing that Reihsen brings “warmth and humanity” to post-digital art just as Hesse brought warmth and humanity to Minimalism.
RACHEL ROSSIN
Rachel Rossin is a New York-based multimedia and installation artist who combines traditional art-making techniques with new technologies to explore the boundaries between hyperreal and embodied space. Martha Schwendener of ‘The New York Times’ calls her work “exhilarating,” and Rossin has also been positively reviewed in ‘Artforum’ and listed on ‘Forbes’ Magazine’s “30 Under 30” list of important artists whose careers are on the rise. She has had solo exhibitions in Miami and New York, and in 2015-2016 she received a Fellowship in Virtual Reality from the New Museum in New York.
KASPER SONNE
Kasper Sonne is a Danish-born contemporary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Sonne has been reviewed in ‘Artforum,’ ‘Flash Art,’ ‘Modern Painters,’ and ‘Art in America,’ and he has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, Basel, and Milan. Sonne’s work is in important public collections, including the David Roberts Arts Foundation in London, Fubon Art Foundation in Taiwan, and the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark.
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FLORA
Donald Baechler Ross Bleckner Andre Butzer Petra Cortright Marc Handelman John Newsom Rachel Rossin Julian Schnabel and Brian Willmont
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Flora, an exhibition of paintings by nine stylistically diverse contemporary artists: Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, André Butzer, Petra Cortright, Marc Handelman, John Newsom, Rachel Rossin, Julian Schnabel, and Brian Willmont. The artists were chosen for their idiosyncratic approaches to floral and plant motifs, which reflect the multiplicity of their worldviews and artistic practices. The result is an aesthetically and intellectually adventurous “flower show” that’s not about flowers.
For several artists, the term flora communicates a strong idea of place. Rachel Rossin, the New Museum in New York’s first-ever Virtual Reality Fellow, has made what she describes as “plein air paintings of virtual flowers” for the exhibition. To create the initial computer models from which she paints, Rossin inputs the unique light qualities and atmospheric conditions of her hometown of West Palm Beach, Florida, into the 3-D modeling software, infusing her fictive, virtual flowers with a memory of rootedness.
The geographical connections—or disconnections—between plant and place are even more apparent in the works of Julian Schnabel and Marc Handelman. In Schnabel’s Port of Lisbon, from the Neo-Expressionist maestro’s Navigation series, purple and crimson oil paint meanders across a vintage map of Lisbon, Portugal. The colors evoke the bougainvillea flowers that blossom throughout the capital city, while the roving lines suggest imaginary journeys that exceed the limits of cartography. Marc Handelman’s Towards a Form of Voluntary Dispossession (for Édouard Glissant) is a series of delicate, luminous watercolor and mixed media paintings inspired by the tropical orchid motifs of 19th century Luminist painter Martin Johnson Heade. Through his use of repetition, Handelman reveals the artifice behind Heade’s apparent naturalism, while at the same time discovering luxuriant pleasures blooming in his untamable backgrounds.
Petra Cortright builds layers of pixelated brushstrokes into billowing clouds of floral extravagance in her one-of-a-kind digital paintings. Cortright foregrounds the technological futurism of her flowers by means of cutting-edge printing methods that allow her to compose with contrasting lusters, from matte to glossy, on anodized aluminum supports. Brian Willmont, on the other hand, uses meticulously handcrafted stenciling and airbrush techniques to make his icy cool paintings of poppies. Like Cortright, Willmont approaches the concept of flora from a post-natural perspective: his wavelike effects mimic Photoshop distortion filters, and the lush purple and amber gradients with which he fills his poppy flower silhouettes suggest retro-futurist sunglass tints.
If Cortright and Willmont dramatize our distance from the natural world, John Newsom’s Meadow Paintings provide an opportunity for us to reconnect. In each painting, Newsom employs subtle optical effects that convey the cosmic grandeur of a sunflower or the mysterious sensation of petals dematerializing in the wind. His titles, such as Tender Certainty, Within a Moment, and Origin of Light, signal that there are metaphysical subtleties at play. The Meadow Paintings encourage us to slip beneath the surface into a world of magic and enchantment.
Other Flora artists use the flower motif as a stand-in for the human subject or the inner self. Ross Bleckner’s motion-blurred flowers that dissolve into fields of shimmering light feel like human bodies on the verge of transfiguration or suspended in the timelessness of a lover’s memory. André Butzer’s rows of thumbprint-sized, primary-color marks on sketchbook paper, meanwhile, suggest pointillist landscapes that have been reduced to a zero-degree level of color and pattern. While Butzer’s paintings on paper eschew Bleckner’s romanticism, their handmade quality and intimate scale lends them an existential pathos. Similarly, Donald Baechler is attracted to the charm and pathos of naïve drawings, and the flower paintings Baechler made for Flora use sophisticated compositional and color strategies to elevate his source material to a state of stoic nobility without losing the awkwardness that makes them so human.
The nine artists in Flora have developed very different strategies for incorporating floral motifs into artworks that feel exciting and relevant in the twenty-first century. By placing these artists in conversation, Flora allows us to draw intriguing connections among their respective works and marvel at the breadth of poetic expression, stylistic innovation, and philosophical insight that nature inspires.
SHANGRI-LA
John Newsom
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Shangri-La, an exhibition of recent oil paintings of flora and fauna by renowned New York artist John Newsom. Newsom's works are included in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Hammer Museum, among other important public and private collections.
Shangri-La takes its title from the mythical Himalayan utopia imagined by the early twentieth-century British novelist James Hilton. Inspired by his joy at the birth of his first daughter, Ruby, John Newsom offers his own visions of earthly paradise in this series of abundant compositions infused with tenderness, wonder, and an almost transcendental calm. In the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, Phoebe Hoban writes: "It is that transcendental calm that Newsom has channeled into lovely, delicately patterned paintings whose essential prettiness belies their intense visual complexity and underlying formal rigor." The works in Shangri-La are boldly and unapologetically beautiful. Their beauty transports the viewer to a pure land of the imagination, far removed from today's global threats and uncertainties, where the dream of a blissful, jubilant, and harmonious world can still be nurtured and cultivated.
A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
GARDEN PARTY
Joe Andoe, Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, John Newsom and Enoc Perez
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to announce the opening of ‘GARDEN PARTY,’ curated by gallery artist John Newsom. The exhibition focuses on the theme of pastoral nature, highlighting motifs of flora and fauna found within the work of five distinguished New York based painters including Joe Andoe, Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, John Newsom, and Enoc Perez.
Inspired by nature and the physical process of painting itself, each one of these notable artists presents a unique and highly individualized representation of the natural world. The structure and style of the paintings included in 'GARDEN PARTY’ vary in scale and scenery. Joe Andoe paints windblown sunflowers along with atmospheric bouquets of elegant blossoms using color and light. Donald Baechler paints stark silhouettes of sturdy tulips in an elegant suite of small canvases and works on paper which focus on composition, weight, and measure. Also of note is a newly completed large-scale collage painting of Baechler's, rendering linear flowers painted upon grounds of color and texture. Ross Bleckner offers deeply symbolic imagery in all-over compositions of hummingbirds alongside paintings containing languid assortments of flowers embedded within seductive surfaces of paint. John Newsom presents a monumental 10-foot vista painting comprised of vibrant parrots and hibiscuses. In his abstract paintings of active and bulbous forms that recall lyrical impressions of a rural tropical locale, Enoc Perez juxtaposes strong figural elements in a seemingly improvised manner.
‘GARDEN PARTY’ offers the viewer an opportunity to celebrate nature’s joy and beauty through the bold engagement and poignant reflection of this masterful group of painters.
A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Heaven
Paul Kneale
March 28 - April 14, 2023
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Heaven, a solo exhibition by Paul Kneale. Paul Kneale’s abstract digital paintings are the result of his intentional, artistic misuses of flatbed scanners, which he collects. Kneale leaves his scanner lids open, facing an empty ceiling, and performs successive low-res and ultra-high-res scans of “nothing.” Because some of these scans take over an hour to complete, they end up capturing the changing atmospheric and lighting conditions in his studio. They also tend to overload the machines’ internal processors, leading to wildly unnatural color outputs and moiré effects from what he calls “the ragged edge of the visual zone.”
Kneale’s digital scans represent complex interpretive processes that are much more akin to abstract painting than photography. As he explains, “There’s no forensic trace of light like there is burned into an old piece of film. If film photography is like cutting and keeping a lock of someone’s hair, then all digital images are like commissioning a hollywood costume designer to create a wig, carefully crafted to look like what you remember that person’s hair to look like. It’s a simulation, a stageplay.”
In Heaven, Kneale considers the metaphysical implications of his practice. If taken ironically, the exhibition offers a critique of the utopian dreams promoted by techno-futurists and by fashion brands that trade on aspirational consumer desires. “Heaven is a lot of things,” he says. “It’s a concept. It’s a commodity, a threat, a carrot on a stick, an escape plan, the reason people built the pyramids and the Vatican. It’s a new clothing line by Marc Jacobs. It’s kind of everything and nothing at the same time.” False promises of transcendence are everywhere today, Kneale says, even in soaps called “ocean breeze” that smell like toxic chemicals. Such denatured experiences are emblematic of what he terms “the new abject,” and they inform his aesthetic, from the ultra-saturated lavender hues of Easily Perfect All Your Memories to the rainbow-colored glitch effects of Do You Want to Come Over and Shoot Content.
Although the notion of transcendence has become debased in consumer culture, there is an inherent beauty to Kneale’s work that pushes against his own critique, and the way he questions the nature of representation places him philosophically in the company of Rothko and other mid-century abstract artists who were deeply invested in the concept of the sublime. “I think all the questions posed by that work are still relevant,” he says. “I just do it with contemporary tools.” Is Kneale’s work a simulation of transcendence or a means to transcend the simulation? Depending on one’s perspective, Heaven may not be ironic at all but a fully attainable aesthetic experience.
Paul Kneale received his MFA in 2011 from the Slade School of Fine Art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: High Anxiety, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Project 1049, Curated by Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti, Gstaad; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Michael Armitage, Paul Kneale and Tabor Robak, ARTUNER at Palazzo Capris, Turin; Free Software, Import Gallery, Berlin; New Abject Launch, David Roberts Foundation, London; SEO & Co., Tank TV, London (2014); Pleasure Principles, Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris; /b/ random, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Young London, V22 Gallery, London. He has taught at the Zurich University of Art and has contributed theoretical articles to leading publications such as Frieze and Spike, and has recently explored the potential of leading artist-organized projects with Fondation Galeries Lafayette and LUMA Foundation. Kneale’s works are also included in the Rubell Collection, LVH collection, and Versace.
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Blue Veils
Sam Messenger
December 8 - 24, 2022
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Blue Veils, a solo exhibition by Sam Messenger. Messenger’s Blue Veil paintings are composed according to the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical formula behind the Golden Spiral pattern in nature and art. Messenger paints outward from the center of each piece in successively expanding grids of triangles. Since he paints freehand without the use of rulers or straight edges, the natural variance of the artist’s touch softens and bends the underlying mathematical structure, producing diaphanous waveforms that feel sumptuous and organic.
Titles of individual works, such as Veil for Rampion and Veil from Spell, come from the Brothers Grimm. Although the Blue Veil paintings are not narrative or representational in any conventional sense, these titles allow us to imagine them as portals to enchanted lands or as metaphors for the weaving of tales. Messenger encourages multiple interpretative frameworks, from math to myth, without privileging one over another. No matter how we approach them, the Blue Veils series remains fundamentally ineffable and abstract.
The blue backgrounds, which resemble cosmic clouds, are made using chance procedures of flooding and evaporation. These techniques are inspired in part by Eastern Orthodox methods of floating pigments on wet substrates to reenact the formation of the universe. Messenger selects his blue pigments for their permanence, granular characteristics, and degrees of opacity, and the patterns formed by their interaction are as beautiful and unpredictable as the billowing nebulae from which stars are born. In his backgrounds and foregrounds alike, Messenger balances poetry and precision, letting geometric structures and the chemistry of materials accede to lyrical expression.
Sam Messenger is a British artist whose work is included in the permanent collections of The British Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; RISD Museum; Williams College Museum of Art; and numerous significant private collections. He has participated in the Armory Show in New York, The Seattle Art Fair, and UNTITLED Miami Beach, and his work has been exhibited at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Current exhibitions include Art on Paper Since 1960 at the British Museum and Line into Space at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with forthcoming 2023 solo exhibitions at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, and Davidson Gallery in New York. He lives and works in a 150-year-old converted church in Somerset, England.
Logan R. Beitmen
Classical Elements
John Newsom & Raymond Pettibon
March 15 - 30, 2022
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y is pleased to present Classical Elements, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom. Classical Elements is inspired by earth, air, water, fire, and aether, the five basic substances which Aristotle believed produced all others. For this exhibition, Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom have both pared down their art to its most elemental level.
Pettibon, whose immersive installations sometimes contain hundreds of individual works on paper, has restricted himself to just five. And Newsom, who typically works at a monumental scale, has chosen to paint on two-foot wooden panels as an homage to medieval icon paintings. Resolutely understated, the ten works in Classical Elements invite us to approach closely and contemplate them acutely.
Raymond Pettibon is an “enigmatic, fantastically erudite artist,” as Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his New Yorker review. For this show, Pettibon pairs intriguingly ambiguous images, representing each element, with texts appropriated from such sources as the Book of Exodus and Henry James. “I go to great lengths to distill the Word into a scant few lines,” says Pettibon. Austere in presentation, the works lend themselves to multiple interpretations and benefit from a very slow read.
Similarly, John Newsom’s compositions, which use pattern and texture as metaphor, benefit from sustained visual engagement. At first glance, his paintings appear naturalistic, but the longer we spend with them, the more we begin to notice their subtle surrealism. A falcon’s beak transforms into gold. The curl of a chameleon’s tail creates a portal to the stars. Taking Aristotle’s elements as his point of departure, Newsom finds supernatural wonderment in the natural world.
Classical Elements is a nuanced meditation on the elements of nature and art by two artists who want us to slow down and discover our own ideas through the generative process of looking and reading. Two artists, five elements, infinite meanings.
John Newsom is an American artist best known for combining multiple techniques of formal painting strategies on large-scale canvases featuring dynamic spectacles of the natural world. In 2022, Newsom was the subject of a major retrospective, John Newsom: Nature’s Course, which is currently on view at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, OK, near where the artist grew up. Other early-career survey exhibitions of his work have been presented at notable institutions, including The Richard J. Massey Foundation for the Arts and Sciences in New York, 2011-2012, as well as MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, in 2015. Newsom has exhibited extensively in The United States and Europe, as well as Japan. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and The New York Times. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hammer Museum, The San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, The Neuberger Museum of Art, The R.I.S.D. Museum, and The Yale University Art Gallery. In a 2015 monograph of Newsom’s paintings, the art critic Barry Schwabsky writes: “Beneath his thick and sensuous painted renderings of flora and fauna is a grappling with the giants of abstraction.” Newsom lives and works in New York.
Raymond Pettibon’s influential oeuvre engages a wide spectrum of American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture, among other sources. Pettibon’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2019-2020. Daumier – Pettibon, a significant presentation of Pettibon’s art paired with the work of the renowned nineteenth-century artist, was presented at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland, in 2019. A Pen of All Work, a major solo exhibition of Pettibon’s work featuring more than seven hundred drawings from the 1960s to the present, was on view in 2017 at the New Museum, marking the artist’s first museum survey in New York. Prominent venues that have held solo exhibitions of the artist’s work include the Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia (2015); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California (2005); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Additionally, Pettibon has been a part of the Istanbul Biennial (2011); Liverpool Biennial (2010); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2010 and 2004); Venice Biennale (2007 and 1999); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004, 1997, 1993, and 1991); and documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2002). Museum collections that hold works by the artist include the Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Pettibon lives and works in New York.
Logan R. Beitmen
Get Well Soon
Petra Collins
February 1 - 15, 2022
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Get Well Soon, a solo exhibition by Petra Collins. One of the most influential photographers of her generation, Collins uses her prodigious narrative imagination to create stylized and seductive dream worlds, which she invests with the potency of lived experience. Mixing elements of fantasy and autobiography, she explores the complexities of self-image in the age of social media, often turning her empathetic lens on the lives of young women as they negotiate their public and private personas.
For her latest exhibition, Get Well Soon, Collins conjures the marvelous and the surreal through photographs, neon pieces, and a smartphone-inspired film installation featuring two women in an ordinary suburban home who are undergoing a supernatural transformation. With make-up and prosthetics, Collins prematurely ages her models, turning them into uncanny avatars of themselves. Meanwhile, a glowing white orb appears in their midst, and viewers are left to ponder its origins and whether it is the source of their strange metamorphosis. The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a tweet by Paris Hilton—“Jealousy is a disease… get well soon”—which Collins has also fabricated as a neon wall piece for the exhibition. Although couched in irony, the phrase “get well soon” holds a deeper meaning for the artist, who struggled with body dysmorphia while modeling as a teenager and who now, at the age of twenty-nine, faces the familiar problem of how to mature and evolve in a culture that too often prizes youth over experience. The models in Get Well Soon grapple with the toxicity of social media and the need for self-care in the face of their looming adulthood. Collins explores these themes with a mixture of humor, sincerity, and a highly accomplished cinematic eye for atmospheric beauty. Rather than steering viewers toward a definitive conclusion, her images play with narrative ambiguity and encourage multiple readings from the personal to the poetic.
Petra Collins is a Canadian-born artist who has been working as a professional photographer since the age of fifteen. Her innovative use of gel filters and pastel colors set the stylistic tone for editorial and fashion photography throughout the 2010’s. An acclaimed filmmaker, as well, Collins recently received a Grammy nomination for Best Music Video (2022) and is currently working on her first feature-length narrative film. In 2017, she presented a performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, titled Petra Collins: In Search of Us, with collaborator Madelyne Beckles. She has published seven photography books in the past seven years: Fairytales (2021), Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is? (2020), OMG, I’m Being Killed (2019), Six by XX (2018), Petra Collins: Coming of Age (2017), Babe (2015), and Discharge (2015). She has had solo booths at leading art fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, CONTACT Photography Festival (Toronto, Canada), and Uncontaminated Art Festival (Oslo, Norway). Recent solo exhibitions include Praz-Delavallade Gallery (Paris, France), BASE Cultural Center (Milan, Italy), and Evergold (San Francisco, CA). In addition, she has curated several exhibitions: Gynolandscape and PussyPat (New York, NY), Strange Magic (Los Angeles, CA), Literally Bye at Art Basel Miami Beach, and Comforter at SFAQ Project Space (San Francisco, CA). Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, I.D., Dazed & Confused, NY Magazine, Elle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Purple, Interview, and Vice. She is the founder of The Ardorous, an art collective that promotes creative collaboration and visibility for young women artists.
Logan R. Beitmen
If You Know How to Get Here, Come
Tomo Campbell
November 19 - December 1, 2021
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Tomo Campbell’s solo exhibition If You Know How to Get Here, Come. London-based artist Tomo Campbell’s new paintings traverse realms of history and myth by way of the English countryside. Medieval unicorns, classical Greek leopard-riders, members of an aristocratic hunting party, and figures transported from the paintings of Bruegel and Rubens find themselves wandering together through fluctuating landscapes of multihued paint. The figures are classical and archetypal, and they appear to be engaged in an epic quest. But where is the “here” they are passing through, and how does one reach it? The title, If You Know How to Get Here, Come, is playfully ambiguous, promising inclusion without offering directions. We may enter the paintings, but we must find our own way.
Much like the great masterpieces of Rococo art, these paintings are full of visual games. Campbell delights in juxtaposing opposite painting processes—fast versus slow, translucent versus opaque—to heighten the spatial ambiguity and dreamlike atmosphere of his scenes. He stretches and warps space like de Kooning and toys with foreground/background reversals in the manner of ukiyo-e Japanese masters. And like a pleasantly recurring dream, each painting in the exhibition represents a unique reimagining of familiar motifs. Campbell may zoom in on an image from the background of one piece and bring it to the foreground of another. Colors may reappear in conspicuous new combinations. Campbell’s mythical creatures and heroes play hide-and-seek with the viewer as they duck in and out of abstraction. The conceptual and narrative openness of each work allows viewers to create their own stories and discover their own meanings through the open-ended journey of looking.
Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong (2022) and Cob Gallery, London (2020). Previous solo exhibitions include Cob Gallery, London (2018) and Gallery Voltaire, Melbourne (2017). Campbell has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and fairs including UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami (2021); Veil, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2018); Dallas Art Fair, Texas, USA (2017); Palm Tree Gallery, London (2015); Rushgrove House, London (2012); and Motion Gallery, London (2010). His work has been reviewed in Wall Street International, Frieze, PAPER, i-D, and Financial Times, and is included in significant private collections. Campbell was awarded the first artist in residence place at the English National Ballet, which he participated in between 2012-2013.
Logan R. Beitmen
Spiced Diamond Pool Earn 4x Points
Petra Cortright
March 15 - 31, 2021
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Spiced Diamond Pool Earn 4x Points by Petra Cortright. Petra Cortright grew up on the water in Santa Barbara, California, and has always been enthralled by the vastness of the ocean and by the extraordinary colors of the coastal light. Her latest Seascapes pieces are twenty-first-century odes to the sea that combine the expressive potential of lyrical painting with digital photomontage techniques.
Cortright’s Seascapes use Internet-sourced photographs of rocky coastlines and grids inspired by classic fill patterns from photo editing software. By overlapping these images and grids at multiple scales, the artist achieves astonishing illusions of texture and depth. Cortright then paints with custom digital brush tools, often pulling the colors of the background images into the foreground, as if the clouds and waves and rocks themselves were as malleable and blendable as paint. Debunking the stereotype of digital artworks as cold and unfeeling, Cortright’s Seascapes are full of passion and vitality, and they represent a visually and emotionally complex engagement with the natural world.
Cortright’s energetic brushstrokes suggest the physical exhilaration of swimming in a choppy surf, as well as the contradictory feelings of restless joy and tranquility that her ocean scenes call forth. Over the years, Cortright has learned to use computer processing lag to generate specific distortions in her brushstrokes and to use those distortions expressively. “I like to leave some edges and artifacts, especially digital artifacts,” she says. “For it to be an interesting build of a world, and to keep some sense of humanity, or the artist’s hand or touch, I have to leave those traces.” By composing with intentionally imperfect, processed, and distorted elements, Cortright also allows her painterly virtuosity to shine. Her compositions are the artifacts and traces of performances as complex and dynamic as the sea itself.
Cortright’s early Internet-based video pieces, such as VVEBCAM (2007), now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, had a visual simplicity and deadpan wit that was reminiscent of the work of Bruce Nauman and John Baldessari. Since then, Cortright’s work has become increasingly complex, visually and emotionally, and she has found herself engaging with the natural world with greater sincerity and directness. The Seascapes in the present exhibition are some of the artist’s most technically accomplished and expressive works to date.
Petra Cortright is a prominent American digital painter. Selected exhibitions include: “.paint,” MCA, Chicago, IL (2020), “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “I Was Raised On the Internet,” MCA Chicago, IL; Nahmad Projects, London, UK (solo) (both 2018); Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinberg, Russia; 1301PE, Los Angeles, CA (solo); City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (solo) (all 2017); Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco, CA (solo) (2018 and 2016); "Electronic Superhighway,” Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Carl Kostyál, London, UK (solo) (both 2016); Foxy Production, New York, NY (solo) (2017 and 2015); The Metabolic Age, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; “On YouTube. Kunst und Playlists aus 10 Jahren,” Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; “Im Inneren der Stadt,” Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; Depart Foundation, Los Angeles (solo) (all 2015); Société, Berlin, Germany (solo) (2016 and 2014); Frieze Film, London, UK; 12th Bienniale de Lyon, France (both 2013); Preteen Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (solo) (2011), and the Venice Bienniale, Italy (2009).
Cortright’s works are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Péréz Museum, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MOCA Los Angeles; Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology; MOTI, Breda, in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MCA Chicago; Kadist Foundation, Paris, San Francisco; BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; MOCA Los Angeles; and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, New York.
Logan R. Beitmen
Peace & Love
Wendy White
December 1 - 20, 2020
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Peace & Love by Wendy White. Wendy White encourages us to reconsider our ideas about what belongs in an artwork, and she does so by evoking memories of adolescent belonging and exclusion. In what ways do our own judgments of taste mirror the sort of judgments that high school cliques pass on non-members? White's faux wood-grain backgrounds and sgraffito-like foregrounds evoke the classic American high school milieu by suggesting desks into which various symbols and messages have been inscribed.
One such message, on Bored (2020), reads "I don't even go here," a reference to a line in the Tina Fey-directed film Mean Girls (2004) about high school cliques, which later inspired an internet meme. Interpreted differently, White's use of the phrase "I don't even go here" represents a playful anthropomorphizing of the painting itself, where one cluster of marks appears to self-consciously doubt its own place within the larger composition. Do standardized symbols of rainbows, hearts, and clouds "belong" in sophisticated formal compositions? Why should they belong any less than a splotch of paint or an abstract brushstroke, elements which, arguably, have become equally clichéd by their overuse? "There are no new marks," White says, "only new combinations." By recontextualizing marks and symbols associated with American youth culture, White encourages us to consider the emotional and psychological drives that such marks and symbols satisfy: the drive to affirm one's existence, to declare one's love, to be remembered, and to belong.
Although memories of adolescence may be our entry point into these works, the drives to belong and to be remembered are not the exclusive property of adolescence. They transcend age, just as they transcend time, place, and culture. The palm trees in White's Three Palms (Tami + Gina) (2020), for instance, are copied from petroglyphs that Native Hawaiian migrants to Salt Lake City, Utah, painted on the side of Salt Mountain over one-hundred years ago. Although the nearby town they built became a ghost town after th
Speculations
Sarah Meyohas
December 1, 2019 - January 15, 2020
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Speculations, a solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed new media artist Sarah Meyohas, who is exhibiting in Florida for the first time. Does art reflect life or does life reflect art? In Meyohas's photo-based Speculations series, art reflects itself in an infinite loop. Meyohas uses two-way mirrors and hidden cameras—but no Photoshopping or digital manipulation of any kind—to generate spellbinding mise en abymes. The endless, concentric repetition of mirrors within mirrors within mirrors gives the appearance of structural infinity—a proverbial stairway to heaven composed of endless Joseph Albers squares. Any object that the artist places between the mirrors is instantly transfigured, becoming "art" by dint of its infinite reduplication. Ordinary rose petals or sprigs of wildflowers become transcendental tunnels of color, cascading in full bloom toward eternity's vanishing point. Within their self-contained system, the flowers remain forever young, bursting with color and vitality.
The title, Speculations, is a play on the idea of "specular" or mirrored relations, as well as a reference to "speculation" in the art market. "Reflections are often used as a metaphor," Meyohas states, "because value is always created through exchange." For Meyohas, who studied Economics at the Wharton School before receiving her MFA from Yale, the mirrors represent the mutually supportive institutions of art galleries, collections, publications, and auction houses that increase the cultural and financial capital of the artworks that circulate within their closed networks. Meyohas is also the first artist to have created a fully realized financial instrument as a work of art: an art-backed currency called "Bitchcoin," which functions both as a tongue-in-cheek social commentary and as a legitimate investment vehicle and Bitcoin alternative. In the grand tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Meyohas's art exposes the "smoke and mirrors" of art world mystification, revealing how value is created and sustained. Knowing the tricks, however, does not diminish the impact of their magic, and her Speculations photographs are particularly sumptuous and enticing.
Sarah Meyohas works at the forefront of new media. Her studio practice encompasses film, virtual and augmented reality, performance art, sculpture, and photography. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Red Bull Arts New York and 303 Gallery. In the past two months, she has also exhibited at the Barbican Curve in London (with Trevor Paglen), the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, the New Museum in New York, and Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai. She has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, ArtForum, and The Atlantic and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She has been named in Forbes Magazine's "30 under 30" list. Her Cloud of Petals exhibition at Red Bull Arts NY had over 12,000 visitors and 12.5 million social impressions in three months, making it the best-attended exhibition in the program's history.
Logan R. Beitmen
Delft Blue
Corey Mason
December 1 - 30, 2018
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Corey Mason. Mason is an emerging artist from Raleigh, North Carolina, whose expressive linework has been likened to that of Twombly, Matisse, and Picasso. His paintings have recently attracted the notice of important curators in New York, London, and Berlin, and in April of 2019, the artist will have a solo booth at Art Cologne, one of the oldest and most prestigious contemporary art fairs in the world.
Corey Mason’s most recent body of work, Delft Blue, which he created for his current solo exhibition, consists of freehand gestural paintings made with Prussian Blue pigment on reverse-primed canvases. Mason’s confident linework and his halo-like layers of intentional smudges and fingerprints present an insistent tactility and immediacy that recalls the Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain. Mason’s motifs, which include pottery, coins, flowers, fish, and fruit, are both local and global. They suggest the intimacy and comfort of domestic spaces while simultaneously pointing to larger histories of trans-Atlantic trade, migration, and cross-cultural influence.
Mason, who grew up in Texas and conducted research in Northern Mexico, has an abiding interest in Mexican folk art, icons, and Spanish-influenced pottery. His own family, which has roots in Northern and Central Europe, used Delftware in their home, and the rich design vocabulary and subtle blue colors of those everyday household objects left an equally lasting impression on him. Mason’s deceptively simple, elemental visual language allows him to translate images of time-bound objects—whether European Delftware or Mesoamerican pottery—into jazzy, off-kilter improvisations that transcend the specificity of time and place. Old things become new again and known things become marvelous under the spell of Mason’s offhand elegance, which animates his playful yet expertly balanced compositions.
Mason re-enchants the familiar with his freeform bending of line, shape, and form and with the felt presence of the artist’s inimitable hand. The works in Delft Blue are not illustrations but dances of sensation linking past and future, memory and fantasy, the personal and the universal.
Logan R. Beitmen
Desert Flower
John Phillip Abbott
April 5 - May 6, 2018
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present Desert Flower, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by John Phillip Abbott. John Phillip Abbott is an important emerging artist who’s vibrant, pulsating, text-based paintings operate in the conceptual space between legibility and abstraction. Abbott’s large, geometric letters, which reference the Minimalist grid, are sometimes interrupted and partly camouflaged by layers of stripe patterns and expressive plumes of airbrushed paint. The words become stand-ins for the objects or places they describe, and the colors and patterns add layers of synaesthetic associations.
Much of Abbott’s work has a personal, diaristic quality, and the Desert Flower paintings are inspired, in part, by the desert town of Silver City, New Mexico, where Abbott lives and works. The painting Wild Horse, for instance, refers to a particular vista in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, but it also carries associations, for Abbott, of the ultrarunner known as Caballo Blanco (“White Horse”) who died in the Gila Wilderness, as well as the horse paintings of fellow New Mexican artist Susan Rothenberg. Very Large Array refers simultaneously to the array of mark-making techniques Abbott uses to create his composition, the large array of stars visible in the New Mexican desert, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s three acres of high-tech radio telescopes (known as the Very Large Array) built in New Mexico to observe the stars. Despite such geographically specific references, Abbott leaves the ultimate meanings of his paintings intentionally open-ended, encouraging viewers to connect with his words, colors, and compositions in light of their own personal histories and experiences.
John Phillip Abbott has had solo exhibitions in Geneva, New York, and Chicago. His work has been featured in The New York Times, New American Paintings, and other prominent publications.
Logan R. Beitmen
UPGRADE
Ry David Bradley
November 18 - December 14, 2017
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to present UPGRADE, a solo exhibition by Ry David Bradley. Bradley, a leading post-Internet artist, received his MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2013. His recent solo exhibitions include The Hole (New York and Basel), Brand New Gallery (Milan), Evelyn Yard (London and Cologne), Neumeister Bar-Am (Berlin), Galerie Derouillon (Paris), PM/AM (London), Bill Brady Gallery (Kansas City), and Tristian Koenig (Sydney and Melbourne). Bradley’s work has been featured in such publications as Frieze, Wired, Blouin Artinfo, Elephant, ARTnews, Artnet, Artspace, Wall Street International, Vault, Arteviste, and The Huffington Post.
For UPGRADE, Ry David Bradley presents a body of digital paintings vibrating with color, which have been heat-pressed into ultrasuede fabric and sprinkled with holographic glitter. The works resemble saturated photographs that have been blurred beyond recognition or Instagram images from the immediate future that are still in the process of loading. At the bottom of each digital painting is a deliberately stretched and pixilated “free app store style” banner ad, whose content comes inexplicably from a pre-digital universe. Juxtaposed against the hyperreality of Bradley’s digital paintings, the banners, which include vintage comic book ads from the 1950s and 60s, advertise a world that no longer exists. UPGRADE reminds the viewer that even as we stand on the cutting edge of technology and culture, watching a new world come into focus, a small piece of history is always present even in the most contemporary things today.
Logan R. Beitmen
Small Painting
John Phillip Abbott; Samantha Bittman; Tyler Brandon; Michael Dotson; Sarah Faux; Ruth Freeman; Pam Glick; Charlotte Hallberg; Justine Hill; Pamela Jorden; Stephen Maine; Allison Miller; Danielle Mysliwiec; Dana Powell; Jason Stopa; Jennifer Sullivan; Anne Vieux; Wendy White; Brian Willmont
February 10 – March 6, 2017
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is pleased to announce a group show of paintings by John Phillip Abbott, Samantha Bittman, Tyler Brandon, Michael Dotson, Sarah Faux, Ruth Freeman, Pam Glick, Charlotte Hallberg, Justine Hill, Pamela Jorden, Stephen Maine, Allison Miller, Danielle Mysliwiec, Dana Powell, Jason Stopa, Jennifer Sullivan, Anne Vieux, Wendy White, and Brian Willmont. Small Painting is organized by Dalton D. Freed and will run from February 10th – March 6th, 2017.
Small paintings have a rich and celebrated past, contextualizing scale and shunning the grandiose visual statement in favor of a more intimate pictorial reading. Historically, artists tend to return to the more ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ as society becomes more destabilized, diffused, or complex. Small works entice the viewer to engage, approach, and enter physical proximity, exchanging the sometimes quick-thrill visual experience of the larger canvas for a more nuanced and measured seeing. ‘Acute’ vision replaces ‘peripheral’, and an active engagement with image and object occurs, not just image at a distance.
Logan R. Beitmen
THE COLOR OF LIGHT
Ross Bleckner and Eric Freeman
B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery is honored to present The Color of Light, a two-person exhibition featuring recent paintings by Ross Bleckner and Eric Freeman. Bleckner and Freeman have known each other for twenty-five years and share a deep interest in the psychological aspects of painting and in the capacity of light and color to evoke feelings of the sublime. Their canvases radiate a quiet power and act as portals to realms of pure sensation.
Ross Bleckner is a highly influential New York artist whose dreamlike paintings hover between representation and abstraction and explore issues of loss, change, memory, and the fleeting beauty of life. In 1995, Bleckner was the youngest artist to be honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, and today his works can be found in major public and private collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bleckner’s philanthropic efforts include serving as president of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), a non-profit community-based AIDS research and treatment education center. More recently, he has been working with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Northern Uganda to help rehabilitate and raise money for ex-child soldiers, and in May of 2009, Bleckner became the first fine artist to be awarded the title of Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations.
Eric Freeman is an internationally exhibited, mid-career artist known for his vibrant visual meditations on light and color. A Bomb Magazine critic once praised Freeman’s works as “Mark Rothko paintings… with the volume turned way up,” and his paintings’ luminous intensity has also earned favorable comparisons to the work of Light and Space artists, such as James Turrell and Dan Flavin. Using oil paint alone, Freeman is able to achieve truly transcendental effects. The artist David Salle has written that Eric Freeman’s paintings “have the luminosity associated with a solar event, the energy of an explosion” but at the same time “a delicacy, a softness… that convinces us to lower our guard.”
Ross Bleckner has previously exhibited with B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y Gallery in the 2017 exhibition Garden Party. This is Eric Freeman’s first time exhibiting at B R I N T Z + C O U N T Y gallery.