William King, Annabeth Marks, Annie Pearlman and Rachel Eulena Williams Exhibition

Derek Eller Gallery

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Derek Eller Gallery presents an exhibition of historic sculptures by William King alongside recent paintings by Annabeth Marks, Annie Pearlman and Rachel Eulena Williams. The gallery puts King (1925-2015) in conversation with three young contemporary artists exploring common threads such as soft forms, collapsed space and experiments in support structures.

William King’s figurative sculptures are composed of fabric, sewn and sculpted over wooden or metal armatures. The cartoonish proportions of impossibly long legs or an extraordinarily boxy gait don’t distort the uncannily human weight and posture of these sculptures, but instead, accentuates their realism. Throughout King’s long and prolific career, he developed a perceptive eye for human gestures and an ability to translate those subtleties into biting social commentary. Here, powerful businessmen are reduced to slouching caricatures. Anonymous yet warmly familiar, they are like someone you met at a party but cannot place.

Annabeth Marks constructs, deconstructs, and reconfigures painted canvas pieces and second-hand jackets as a way to approach painting. Throughout these complimentary modes, washes of color structure and build pictorial space, at times forming the illusion of landscape or deep internal space. The jackets are first cut and rearranged in response to their underlying structures and then painted, creating a conversation between interior and exterior space, figurative and abstract imagery, and illusion and physical material. The tension of these dualities and conflicting binaries are the driving forces within these inventive paintings.

Annie Pearlman’s paintings contain imagery inspired by experienced space and hallucinatory memories. Concerned more with portraying a vibe than an exact place, her urban spaces melt into abstract fields, cartoonish zig-zags and spirals of bright, primary colors. Cityscapes and intimate domestic interiors blend together with a playful cubist twist of multiple perspectives. The metropolitan fantasies in this exhibition are hauntingly uninhabited and the absence of figures strikes a contrastingly quiet note to her cacophonous compositions.

Rachel Eulena Williams stitches together canvas shapes into colorful accumulations that inhabit a space between sculpture and painting. Loose swatches of vivid color are combined with paint soaked ropes and threads weaving through these segments both interrupting their planes and holding the work together as a soft support structure. These meandering lines at times suggest a string of pennants and elsewhere share qualities with expressive drawing. The result is dynamic shaped canvases steeped in that forms history with a uniquely scrappy charm and nuance of their own.

William King exhibited work widely both in New York and abroad. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. among others.

Annabeth Marks lives and works in New York. In 2017 Mark’s mounted a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Overduin and Co., Los Angeles, Halsey McKay, East Hampton, CANADA Gallery, New York, and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles. Marks’ collaboration with Eckhaus Latta was included in Greater New York, MoMa PS1 (2015). In 2016, Marks curated the exhibition ‘Doris Staffel’ at White Columns.

Annie Pearlman lives and works in New York and has had recent solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, and Dem Passwords, Los Angeles. She has been included in exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles, Karma, Amangansett and Nicelle Beauchene, New York.

Rachel Eulena Williams lives and works in New York. In 2017 she has had solo exhibitions at The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn and Turn Gallery, New York. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Ceysson & Bénétière, Luxembourg, SomeTime Salon, San Fransisco and Mass Gallery, Austin.