Jane Freilicher, Mira Dancy, and Daniel Heidkamp Exhibition

Derek Eller Gallery

[Image: Jane Freilicher "Window on the West Village" (1999) oil on linen, 24 x 28 in.]

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Derek Eller Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Jane Freilicher, Mira Dancy, and Daniel Heidkamp. Freilicher’s historic paintings will be hung in conversation with new work by contemporary artists Dancy and Heidkamp, in a show which highlights common interests: improvisation, painting as a window, studio as subject, and the desire to interact with and, at times, reinvent the New York cityscape.

From the 1950s until her death in 2014, Jane Freilicher painted images of the countryside and the city as seen from her studios in Watermill and Manhattan, New York. Along with her peers Fairfeild Porter and Larry Rivers, her paintings utilized expressionist technique but were in direct opposition to the heroic abstraction that was in vogue when she began her career. The gallery will exhibit paintings from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s depicting the view from her lower Fifth Avenue studio window. This body of work documents the changing skyline of lower Manhattan, albeit imprecisely; Freilicher admittedly would reinvent things when the paintings needed it. In a 2009 interview, poet and fellow New York School member John Ashbery described her work as “inviting the spectator to share her discovering of how impossible it is really to get anything down”. As a result of this process the subject of these paintings seems less the city and more a celebration of intuitive image making or the sanctuary of the studio.

Reflections are consistent throughout Mira Dancy’s work. Images are layered either on the canvas or through plexiglass, shower curtains, or other translucent screens. Storefront windows inspire imagery of neon signs, street advertisements, and women reflected back into the retail spaces designed to entice them. In this show Dancy’s canvas and paper paintings show a kaleidoscope of street views, signage, figures and representations of her own paintings to a dizzying effect.

In Daniel Heidkamp’s observational paintings his immediate surroundings offer a framework for stylistic, technical and, at times, narrative improvisation. The paintings in this exhibition depict views through windows in New York City hotel rooms as well as in his Brooklyn studio. The paintings do not purport to be indexes of these spaces. Rather, embellishments are added and the skyline is adjusted for compositional effect and “Easter Egg” surprises as varied as a Mike Kelly sculpture or a ballet class are invented.

Jane Freilicher’s paintings are included in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her work has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1955, 1972, and 1995. In 2005 she won the American Academy of Arts and Letter’s Gold Medal in Painting.

Mira Dancy has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Chapter NY, New York, and Galerie Hussenot, Paris. She was included in the 2015 Greater New York at MoMA PS1, and in 2016 mounted her first museum solo exhibition “Future Woman” at the Yuz Foundation, Shanghai, China.

Daniel Heidkamp’s has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden, Half Gallery, New York, The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn and Pace Prints, New York. He has recently been included in group exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery, London, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, and his work will included in a group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June of 2017.