“10” Exhibition

Anton Kern Gallery

This event has ended.

Anton Kern Gallery presents 10, a group show on the gallery’s third floor featuring ten painters whose work we rate at 11.

Spanning multiple generations, each artist creates intimate works that are immersed in a variety of modes of painting. Historic work from Jeanne Mammen (1890 – 1976, Berlin) and Huguette Caland (b. 1931, Lebanon) form two anchor points between which the eight younger artists’ works can be settled. Mammen, working in Weimar Berlin among the likes of Otto Dix and George Grosz, embraced Realism associated with the avant-garde; “real” not in verisimilitude of depiction, but real in the reference and in the sensation of reality, reflecting on the climate and zeitgeist of her time. The second locus is Huguette Caland, whose soft modernism is charged by sexuality. Her two drawings in the exhibition are playfully erotic, with colorful lines merging to form figures of two faces kissing, while also suggesting that those lines might perhaps nod to other, more highly sexual, bodily connections.

Louise Bonnet, Julie Curtiss, Jackie Gendel, Heidi Hahn, Loie Hollowell, Aliza Nisenbaum, Emily Sunblad, and Alice Tippit pick up among those two reference points and investigate areas of Modernism—Realism, Abstraction, as well as Surrealism and Conceptualism—that may have been previously overlooked. Together, the conversation that emerges among these 10 offers viewers an opportunity to contemplate the possibilities of painting.