Lise Soskolne “The Work”

Mishkin Gallery (Baruch College)

This event has ended.

“The Mishkin Gallery presents The Work, an exhibition of paintings by Lise Soskolne unfolding in two chapters. The first opens on Friday, May 17, 6 to 8 pm and closes on June 21; the second opens on Monday, June 24, 6 to 8 pm and closes on July 12.

For most of the past two decades, Soskolne’s painting practice has been undertaken without a viewing public and concurrent with her work as an administrator and labor organizer in New York’s nonprofit arts sector. The Work, her first public solo exhibition in New York since 2001, brings together more than thirty paintings made between 1999 and 2016. Most have never before been shown or have not been on view since their initial presentation.

The Work’s first chapter triangulates themes related to time, labor, and gender in a series of paintings that alternate between the faithful application of paint with brushes and the use of tools intended to obliterate the painter’s mark. Documenting the stylistic range of Soskolne’s earlier work and tendency to engage her subjects with sardonic humor, chapter one sets the stage for Bethenny, the exhibition’s second iteration. In a tightly focused series of fourteen densely worked paintings made between 2011 and 2016, Bethenny pictures a sedated moon surrounded by his attendant hallucinations and doubles as a portrait of the distinctly American capacity for self-delusion.

Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1971, Lise Soskolne has lived and worked in New York since the late 1990s. She is a co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and has been its core organizer since 2012. W.A.G.E. is a New York–based activist organization whose mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract their labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy. Her work has been exhibited at Artists Space (NY), Diorama (Oslo), The Middler (NY), Modern Culture (NY), Or Gallery (Vancouver), Rodney Graham Studio (Vancouver), and White Columns (NY).

The Work has been curated by Alaina Claire Feldman, the director of the Mishkin Gallery. Baruch College and the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts and Sciences generously provide support for this exhibition.”