EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE: HANSEN | HART | KUPFERSCHMIDT | MOHAMEDI | PECIS | ZHANG
For the reimagined format of NADA Miami, Halsey McKay presents all new work by Elias Hansen, Denise Kupferschmidt, Maysha Mohamedi, Hilary Pecis and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang on view at the gallery from November 24 – December 31, and an offsite presentation of Joseph Hart at Marinaro Gallery in NYC from December 1 – 6.
Onsite: ELIAS HANSEN, DENISE KUPFERSCHMIDT, MAYSHA MOHAMEDI, HILARY PECIS, MIRANDA FENGYUAN ZHANG
79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY | info@halseymckay.com | 631. 604. 5770
Gallery Hours: Friday & Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment | Face masks are required for entry
With emphasis on bold color, pattern and flatness Kupferschmidt, Mohamedi, Pecis and Zhang extrapolate their everyday experience into vibrating compositions. Hansen’s hand blown glass and light sculptures seem to have emerged from the worlds of the surrounding wall works. Each artist finds solace in the repetition of their daily routines amidst the chronic uncertainty of our times.
Elias Hansen’s Light Sculptures are a dedication to the simple idea of creating an object that glows with light and pulls you in. These singular glass and light works are a meditation on materials and forms that Hansen has been experimenting with for the last decade. Pared down to their most basic moment, these are the things that keep him going, the reason he keeps returning to the studio and turning the lights on. He uses these objects to calm and invite us to “reset our own perspective and find a way to deal with the harshness of life”.
Denise Kupferschmidt’s Day Night Repeat paintings depict the cycle of the sun as it fades in and out of her urban environment. She uses painting this repetition, the comfort of a routine, the stability of a normalized existence to speak to current collective feelings of sadness and loss. Kupferschmidt cites science journalist Zoë Schlanger writings on ‘Solastalgia’ (a word coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the feeling of ‘the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory’). Her paintings depict ‘watching the earthly elements of home morph into something that feels remote, while we stay put’.
Maysha Mohamedi sources her color palette for each painting from images in the 1972, multi-volume Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking. Published by the staple women’s magazine Family Circle, the cookbooks embody a dominant strain of 20th-century American domesticity and visual culture. Sweeping shapes of color are extracted from hues of vegetables and fruits in the illustrated recipes. Atop these washes the artist applies sporadic and repeating line work, drawing across the canvas with a lyrical intensity. The gestural, thin marks at times resemble the calligraphic script of Farsi, the artist’s native tongue; she often turns to her Persian-English Dictionary as an associative guide for mark making.
Hilary Pecis uses her surroundings as inspiration and paints outtakes from snapshots of dinner parties, friends’ homes, gardens, collections and libraries. Each are granted saturated life in visually stunning, modest memorials. The process of translating these photographs into paintings allows Pecis the opportunity to meditate on the specific moment and memory captured, helping her to create sincere translations of her own experiences. These are portraits without figures through which we glean an understanding of the artist herself.
In Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s work, the material goes first, then come the ideas. She follows the lead of her wool and cotton thread, giving its path mystical enlightenment. Every piece is woven or knit in a trance-like state, where she gets lost in a land of colors, chosen to fit the feeling of a night in the desert or an afternoon on a lake. Figures reveal themselves with each stitch, driving her representations. Then she stretches her knittings and weavings on frames, creating the flatness of a canvas. A humble thread becomes pure color matter and doing so, ennobling the thread using the common language of knitting and weaving.
Offsite: JOSEPH HART AT MARINARO GALLERY | 1 Oliver Street, New York, NY | info@marinaro.biz | 212-989-7700
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11:00 – 6:00 | Sunday 12:00 – 6:00 | Please make an appointment here | Face masks required for entry
In Joseph Hart’s work disjointed and over-sized sheets of paper are casually laid down on the floor allowing him to labor from above and walk through, on and around each primordial picture plane. With a flexible aesthetic strategy in mind, a graphite crayon in one hand and a handful of batter-like acrylic paint in the other, he intuitively scrawls out wayward gestures and line work, applying and smearing paint, then ripping out, re-orienting and replacing entire sections of the surface. In turn, problematic areas of one painting become zones of triumph in another. This system of upcycling is tweaked and fine-tuned, resulting in an aggregated harmony that sways between contrasting sensations: deliberate but chaotic, rageful and generous, awkward yet bizarrely graceful. Through these dualities, Hart’s work is balanced but also a little off, aware of its imperfections and allowed to operate on multiple emotional plains. His paintings act as allegories for the complexities of life.
The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), is pleased to present NADA Miami, the organization’s annual flagship art fair, in a reimagined format to take place December 1–5, 2020.
The 18th edition of the fair will showcase an international series of presentations from a diverse roster of 47 NADA Members and 27 first-time exhibitors for a total of 97 galleries from 44 cities, both in gallery spaces and online. The fair will feature gallery hubs in multiple cities, including New York and Los Angeles, with collective presentations in Tokyo, Warsaw, and Riga.
NADA Miami remains dedicated to celebrating rising talents from around the globe. Visitors of the 2020 fair will be invited to experience gallery presentations in person in their local city, and discover the best of contemporary art online through a newly-designed digital platform. Accompanying the fair, the virtual programming series will continue to showcase conversations and performances from the defining voices of contemporary art and culture.