Bienvenu Steinberg & C is pleased to announce Abstract Expressions, an exhibition of seven works by seven artists each of whom expands upon the traditions of gestural abstraction in diverse and individual ways. Just as the founding artists grouped under the heading of Abstract Expressionism presented a broad range of stylistic innovation, the contemporary painters included in the current show demonstrate the range, richness and continued vitality of this significant sector. All the painters featured in the exhibition live and work in New York City but much like the post war generation of artists often identified as the New York School they come from many places and many generations.
In describing her work and process Andrea Belag notes that “color makes space and light come through the paint and emotion comes through as well. There is fear and desire in painting. and that’s addictive.” She rubs, smudges, and scrapes to create translucent, softly luminous surfaces where the brushwork is strikingly visible.
Lydia Dona’s paintings deploy a range of materials and embeds iconic imagery abstracted from automobile parts catalogues, biotechnical manuals and organic illustration. She achieves both spatial depth and muscular vibrancy. Writing about Dona in Hyperallergic John Yau stated: “through her interweaving and range of paint applications, she defers a conclusion regarding painting’s possibilities.”
Douglas Florian’s large-scale collaged paintings merge language with a vivid experience of line, shape, color, texture, and movement in ways and meanings that reveal themselves slowly.The use of collage enables a jostling spatial ambiguity with forms overlapping or abutting, revealing or concealing each other. The
paintings have a raw tactile, textural, and tangible quantity that must be experienced directly.
Max Gimblett’s work is a harmonious postwar synthesis of American and Japanese art, bringing together abstract expressionism, modernism, spiritual abstraction, and Zen calligraphy. In his current practice he experiments with gesture, color, and precious metals. His works draw deeply from concepts of consciousness and enlightenment.
Fabian Marcaccio’s work investigates whether the traditional medium of painting can survive in the digital age. He has used printmaking and transfer techniques to make paintings and became well known in the 1990s for his sculptural manipulations of the two-dimensional surface of canvas. More recently, he has infused his painting process with digital and industrial techniques. The results are environmental works, animations, and “Paintants” that combine digitally manipulated imagery, sculptural forms, and three dimensionally painted surfaces.
Writing about the work of Stephen Pusey, critic Robert C. Morgan stated that the artist “creates a labyrinthine stasis, embedding distant feelings of the universe that appear in the process of suspending opticality. Instead of a vibrating surface, these paintings suggest a woven space through an optical texture that defies finite properties.” The artist himself remarks “I am interested in the concept of signature - literally, as a calligraphic mark …in a broader sense identifying a quantity that may be both personal and universal.
According to Erika Ranee, her recent paintings “express the hums and beats of small worlds writ large. Delicate and brusque marks and sprays are applied in response to external and internal atmospheric rhythms. Like pages from a journal, each artwork is an exercise in pushing paint around to articulate a time capsule on canvas.” Her paintings evoke the passage of time as she builds up color and mark through multiple processes. Her resulting inventions conjurer a complex and beguiling language of visual forms.
