Anna Schachte and Ryan Steadman Exhibition

Safe Gallery

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Anna Schachte’s painterly gestures run free across her installation of new images. This body of work is hung in a uniform delineated mode that wraps around the gallery walls in a rapid fire manner. Within this organization, each individual piece has an autonomous framework dictated by a letter of the alphabet. Over the past few years Schachte has been developing her own lexicon of symbols. These icons appear and reappear on her canvases, interlaced among alpha numeric characters. Repetition of fluttering eyes, moving limbs, and celestial bodies are reoccurring components of the individual works. As a result, landscape, figure, and abstraction unite under one form. The adjacent letters resist the creation of words, instead addressing the speed of language itself. This celebration of rhythm and dance is reinforced throughout each painting via the sheer movement and bravado of pigment and brush stroke. Each work aims to be an exclamation and offering of exuberance.

By contrast, the paintings of Ryan Steadman present a glimpse into a world of stillness. Steadman paints each intimately sized work as an object, specifically rendering trompe l’oeil books. Upon close inspection, the weathered marks and illusion of pages are all fabricated by the artist. The perception of the paintings oscillates between abstraction and reality; the surfaces are rendered to describe real objects in space while simultaneously serving as an exploration of composition and color theory. Viewed en masse, the work becomes a meditation on that which can be viewed from the outside versus what remains to be ingested internally. The symbol of a book serves as a vessel in which floating rectangles, color fields, and bold shapes reside. The expansive spaces made within these miniature realms can be taken in slowly and cumulatively over time as if taking in pages of text. A few of the works are a compilation of paintings gathered and toppled together in balance but on the verge of collapse. These precarious piles of paintings further push the historical boundaries of writing and painting. Steadman’s work links the relic qualities of both painting and books, leaving one to ponder the transmission of language in our present-day culture.

Anna Schachte is a contemporary artist who makes paintings. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and in solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, and Charleston, SC. She earned a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design and MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and enjoyed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others. In 2010, she helped found Regina Rex, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective in NYC. A native of Charleston, SC and long time resident of Brooklyn, NY, Anna now resides in Los Angeles, CA.

Ryan Steadman makes canvases that resemble both paintings and books (and exist as both images and objects) in order to explore the significance of outmoded media. He has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at Pablo’s Birthday, Karma, and Envoy Enterprises in New York, NY, and group exhibitions at Van Doren Waxter in New York, NY, Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY, and others. He has written about art for Cultured Magazine, Artforum.com, Modern Painters, and The New York Observer. He also periodically curates exhibitions, including the show “RE(a)D” at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York, NY, and “Trust Issues” at Ronchini Gallery in London, UK. He has a two-person exhibition opening at Safe Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, in November 2017.