“Between Levels” Exhibition
Hionas Gallery LES
This event has ended.
Hionas Gallery presents Between Levels, a group exhibition featuring new and recent works by Rachel Beach, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Ann Pibal and Joan Waltemath. The multi-media show of painting, sculpture, and photography brings together four extraordinary artists with varying penchants for formalist structure and geometric abstraction. Whether a single work relies more heavily on the clarity of specific forms or captures the more fluid motions of oil or the camera’s aperture, the levity of each exhibited piece is readily apparent.
Rachel Beach’s sculptures of oil and pastel covered plywood are both playful and totemic in their execution, with elementary forms situated in all manners that seem in defiance of gravity. While this act is of course an illusion, the varying shapes that comprise her geometric constructions take responsibility for themselves and lend support to one another, like architectural forms engaged in a shotgun marriage. Rachel Beach is represented by Blackston in the Lower East Side. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
Ariane Lopez-Huici’s signature nude portraiture is romantic and even sympathetic, but never subtle. For her muses she has looked to the obese and the disfigured, and without flourish she has rendered them goddesses and seductresses. For this show, however, the artist contributes a seducing sea- and cityscape of Venice at night, with fractured moonlight bearing down in such a way that makes this scene as vivid as any oil painting. Lopez-Huici is the only artist from Between Levels to have exhibited with Hionas previously, with the solo show Priscille (April 7 – May 5, 2013). The artist lives and works in Paris and New York.
Ann Pibal’s geometric paintings on aluminum panel embody something that is both precise and ineffable, like a mathematical proof that continually expands until it resembles poetry. Within each there is a careful yet incomplete grid, which appears to be either coming together or slowly disbanding. For Between Levels Pibal contributes two opposing works: the first is a muted gold panel on which she has placed a bridge-like structure comprised of a system of horizontal and vertical lines. The second presents a subtle grid of four disjointed white lines which frame a scene of fluid brushstrokes cast across a stark black backdrop. Pibal is a 2013 Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Rappaport Prize. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn and North Bennington, Vermont.
Joan Waltemath’s paintings are a rigorous exercise in joining geometric elements that relate to one another at calculated intervals on the picture plane. Yet unlike the neutrality of a planar grid or diagram, Waltemath gives each of her forms a particular set of characteristics, dark or light, bold and constant or molten and fragmented. It’s the arrangement of these forms that lends her paintings a spatial harmony and depth that is so unexpected. The artist lives and works in New York, is Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and serves as Director of MICA’s L. E. Hoffberger School of Painting.
Media
Schedule
from January 16, 2014 to February 16, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-16 from 18:00 to 20:00