“Paradise Island” Exhibition
steven harvey fine art projects
This event has ended.
Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003) is the only non-living artist in the exhibition. She is represented by one of the embroideries she made alongside her paintings, titled, “Paradise.” During the 1950s, Beck evolved from abstraction under the mentorship of Phillip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin into figuration. Beck stated, “Art which uses the object for reference involves true abstraction.” As she developed a fluent language, infused with her interests in music, theater, mythology, literature and astrology, she simultaneously developed a group of embroideries, usually depicting the motifs from her paintings. Paradise has a trio of angelic female string players performing under floating angels.
Andrea Belag is an essential NYC abstract painter. For almost 50 years, she has explored the possibilities of making abstract color forms. Although she is from a younger generation than Beck, she also emerged under the tutelage of Phillip Guston. In Belag’s case it was at the NY Studio School, where Guston taught at the end of his life in the early 1970s. As a young painter, Belag displayed the same startling integrity of color form and mark-making that she does now. She completed a stained glass commission for the MTA in the Brooklyn Avenue U station in 2017.
Meghan Brady is a Maine based abstract painter who displays a consistent ease of form. Her casual harmonizing seems to spring from the freedom of her interactions with her young daughters. She is currently working in a large studio making monumental painted paper collages that are related to Matisse in the freshness of her color harmonies. Brady had her first museum exhibition, “Reversible Roles,” at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, ME.
Susanna Coffey is known as a conduit of painterly knowledge and experience. After having a titled teaching position at the Art Institute of Chicago for many years, she has retired into teaching for the Columbia MFA program, all the while making a substantial body of increasingly abstract self-portraiture, along with smaller, direct paintings from life. In her most recent exhibitions at SHFAP, Coffey showed earlier prints and paintings from the 1980s dealing with women in mythology, particularly Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, and a body of paintings depicting artists working in their studios. Her work is included in the collections of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery, and The National Portrait Gallery among others.
Madeline Donahue had her first NYC gallery exhibition with SHFAP in 2019. Donahue explores images of women and children, focusing on the surreal quality and physicality of mother and child relationships. In comic and touching scenes, she mixes a blunt realness with an exaggerated re-envisioning of the maternal role. She has also produced glazed ceramics to accompany her paintings and drawings, all depictive of this rollicking family circus, two of which are included in the current exhibition. Donahue was part of the Every Woman Biennial, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, in New York, NY in 2019.
Angela Dufresne paints yards of multi-layered canvas projecting layer upon layer of animated succubae drenched in color washes. While the core tale is of a lesbian artist reimagining painterly (and show business) history as architecture for her own creation myth, her interest expands in all directions from film history to pop music, to some kind picaresque Americana porn, all infused with a lust for images.
Beth Kaminstein uses glazed ceramic to build a sculptural three dimensional color. In a review of the group exhibition at SHFAP, The Light of Interiors, New York Times critic Roberta Smith attached her glazed ceramics to the tradition of color field painting. Her column in this exhibition uses architectural form in a way that evokes Minoan sculpture, her Mediterranean color awakening a yearning for mythos.
June Leaf is a master draftsman, painter and sculptor. Born in Chicago in 1929, she worked as an artist in Paris by age 18. Her first mentor was Leon Golub, who vouchsafed the seriousness of her work to her mother. Her 2016 exhibition at the Whitney Museum followed her 2015 drawing show at SHFAP. Both exhibitions exposed a complex, personal and idiosyncratic narrative. The figures and machines, dancers and actors are both perplexing and compelling, always morphing from a formal language into visual stories. A figure might emerge from the shape of a spot on the floor. Her images of a ballroom, old sewing machine tables, and stairwells, tell the story of the voyage of her life in art in strongly poetic terms.
While Stephanie Pierce’s work resembles Lichtman’s in their shared imagery of rooms, Pierce’s work is based on long, careful observation. Her paintings of liminal spaces display an optical shimmy from subtle changes of perspective built up by returning to a subject over a prolonged period of time. Time plays an unusual aspect in her work, perhaps related to Pierce’s history with music, having served as a radio DJ in Arkansas and a punk musician.
Erika Ranee is an abstract painter who explores the varieties of colored mark making. In her work from the late 1990s, she used found vernacular racist imagery and text as elements within the abstract forms. The juxtapositions are jarring. Yet it is the process of abstract painting that makes her images live. “Like pages from a journal, each artwork is an exercise in pushing paint around to articulate a time capsule on canvas.”
Giordanne Salley is a young painter with a romantic subject. Lovers in nature. Details of hands, watches, and glasses submerged and reflected in water. Salley has taken the trope of the painter in nature and expanded it for the modern moment. Her paintings possess a surprising opticality. “Nude bodies merge with tree trunks; arms are extended like branches,” wrote Martha Schwendener in the NY Times in 2017.
Emilie Stark–Menneg is a young painter from Maine who mixes tactility and a complex approach to surface within her vibrant imagination. In “Volcano Face,” her application of paint has an exquisite variety. With collage-like elements integrated into delicate transparencies in what seems almost like a storybook image, she overlays children’s book illustration with a freshness of facture that seems to push whimsy into something altogether new.
In her pictures of children in incongruous interactions, Philemona Williamson explores “the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment.” Her work is included in the collections of The Montclair Art Museum; The Kalamazoo Art Institute; The Mint Museum of Art; Smith College Museum of Art; Hampton University Museum and the Sheldon Art Museum. In 2017, she had an exhibition entitled, “Metaphorical Narratives” at the Montclair Art Museum.
Michele Zalopany became known in the 1980s when her noir-ish oversized drawings appeared almost as stills from unknown movies. Their velvety surfaces were elegant and strange, like paintings of an invented pictography. Michele Zalopany’s work is included in over twenty-five permanent international collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Eli Broad Collection, the USB collection, the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Institute, and others.
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Schedule
from February 17, 2021 to March 20, 2021