“River Deep Mountain High” Exhibition

FIERMAN

[Image: Aaron Michael Skolnick "Morning Stroll" (2021) Oil On Linen 36 x 24 in.]

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FIERMAN presents River Deep Mountain High, a two-artist exhibition featuring new work by Elizabeth Glaessner and Aaron Michael Skolnick. Glaessner will present paintings on paper done in gouache, ink, and watercolor, while Skolnick is showing new oil on canvas paintings. The artists conceived of the joint exhibition upon building a deep personal and formal connection. Both Glaessner and Skolnick work intuitively, embedding the human figure within a landscape that both contains and interacts with it.

Elizabeth Glaessner’s compositions emerge primarily from imagination and expand organically; she paints wet on wet in oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and ink to create amorphous scenes of physical and psychosexual ambiguity. Figures meld into one another alongside animals and phantom limbs, engendering a non-hierarchical energy. Translucency as both formal quality and conceptual device permeates her work across substrate, from canvas to silk to paper. In the works exhibited she uses watercolor and gouache to create vague pools of overlapping form.

Aaron Michael Skolnick’s paintings are done, in contrast, primarily from the direct observation of nature, painting plein air. The technique is lushly sensory; oil on linen applied quickly to create a sense of urgent immediacy to the scene, be it a rambunctious floral landscape or a desolate West Texas moon. The figure is primarily absent in Skolnick’s paintings, calling to the fore the artist’s physical presence behind the canvas. His interest in landscape painting stems from exploring outdoor cruising spots, sites of fleeting sexual encounters primarily between men. In the largest painting on view, Morning Stroll, Skolnick paints himself on a wooded path making furtive eye contact with the viewer, lending the entire body of work an erotic charge.

Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984) was born in Palo Alto, CA and grew up in Houston, TX. After receiving her BA from Trinity University in 2006, she moved to New York and completed her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2013. She was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at the New York Academy of Art in 2013, a residency at GlogauAIR, Berlin in 2013 and a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in 2012. She has presented two solo exhibitions with PPOW in 2014 and 2018, and has contributed to group exhibitions throughout North America and Europe. Glaessner was recently included in the group exhibition Les Yeux Clos at Perrotin, Paris, and her work will be featured in Go Figure!?, an online exhibition at Sprüth Magers curated by Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung. Her third solo exhibition at PPOW will open in February 2022.

Aaron Michael Skolnick (b. 1989, Erlanger, KY) lives and works in Houston, TX. He has recently had solo exhibitions at March Gallery, NY; Institute 193 (1B), NY: FIERMAN, NY. Skolnick has participated in group exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary; Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, Louisville; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; September Gallery, Hudson, NY; Danese Corey, NY; Transylvania University, Lexington; Left Field Gallery, Los Osos; New Hampshire Institute of Art, Peterborough, and Berry Campbell Gallery, among others. He graduated with a BFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012. His work is in the permanent collections of The University of Kentucky Art Museum and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.