NYAB Event - “Subliminal Shifts” Exhibition

“Subliminal Shifts” Exhibition

Tracy Williams Ltd.

This event has ended.

Tracy Williams Ltd. presents, Subliminal Shifts, a group exhibition of five exceptional painters. This presentation unveils an assemblage of artists living and working in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, all of who predominantly practice an abstract idiom, investigating paint through a lens that is entirely distinct.

New Zealand born and New York based Martin Basher presents his signature flawlessly gradated stripe oil paintings, referencing our subliminal desire for objects and designs commonly found in advertising. Basher transfixes the viewer through each adroit brush stroke, confronting our vision, and further our psyche, with a spatial landscape emanating sheer intrigue.

Also based in New York, Ellen Berkenblit’s work delves into a universe vying with jovial palettes and menacing undercurrents. A rough figurative contour emerges out of densely colorful atmospheres, appearing emotionally charged yet void of any explicit narrative. Exuberantly visceral and sensitively fluid, her paintings explode with a sense of beguiling escapism.

Chicago based Samantha Bittman creates vibrating paintings with bold primary hues amongst monochromatic silhouettes. Using a loom to intricately weave unique, underlying geometric systems or topographical patterns, Bittman then paints over the interlaced textile, emulating optically textural and palpable paintings.

For over four decades, the French painter Bernard Frize has been celebrated for his brilliantly colorful and architectural paradigm paintings. Frize employs a predetermined practice, yet also gladly welcomes the unexpected, whether it be paint’s physical properties or the laws of nature influencing the final outcome. Consistent in his techniques and somewhat cyclical motifs, there is also something transferable and transmissible as one notices delicate shifts in color, scale, and array.

Norwegian born and Berlin based Olav Christopher Jenssen has been reinventing and revitalizing painting for over thirty years. At times densely layered and organically webbed, other pieces employ a warm sawtooth motif. Throughout his various series, one discovers Jenssen’s exploration of painting’s paradoxical abilities- to be both whimsically spontaneous and deliberately structured.
Combining gestural expressions, geometric configurations, and vigorous palettes, together these pieces fluctuate in color, light, scale and perspective. This interplay ultimately transcends the viewer into an alternate visual realm where various worlds collide and the landscape appears both seamlessly fixed and in perpetual flux.