While diverse in practice, nationality, and medium, the 22 artists whose works comprise New Visions all address their surrounding worlds in their work, both externally and within. These perspectives are channeled through painting, drawing, ceramics, collage, and fabric. In so doing, these artists make sense of past histories, memory, subconscious, and relationships. The multi-generational presentation further speaks to the omnipresence of these explorations in the contemporary discourse.

 

In its presentation, the show aims to draw through lines with initially disparate-seeming works. Philip Pearlstein’s Model on Eames Chair with African Drum and Mask, painted in 2018 when the esteemed American figurative painter was 94 years old, hangs alongside Jeffrey Meris’ textile-based work, corner of which intentionally exposes its aluminum stretcher bar. The leathery browns of Pearlstein’s work take shape in Meris’ rust. While Pearlstein harkens to the quintessential piece of ‘mid-century modern’ furniture, Meris employs tourist market t-shirts from his native Bahamas to question at what cost consumerist capitalism has taken hold globally.

 

Nearby, a suite of works all carry a similar motif: a hand. Besides Philip Pearlstein’s female protagonist, who clasps her hands on each arm of her chair, Sangram Majumdar’s suite of paintings capture hands of varying forms, some intimately familiar and others societally significant. open palm displays the artist’s own hand, replete with his wedding band, which nearly blends into the goldish yellow background. witness, meanwhile, shows a hand upright and mid-ceremony, that of a Supreme Court justice being sworn in to her post. An adjacent hand is imbued with a heavy sense of un-resolve: Gonçalo Preto’s Mr. Knuckles levitates amidst a monochrome background. Here, the digits are lavishly adorned in jewels and gilded rings. Is this regal hand one of memory, or reliquary, or perhaps something more sinister?

 

On the wall opposite, Fauvism takes hold. Whit Harris’ She Won’t Live Some Other Life directly beckons to Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre (1905). A cacophony of color surrounds the lying central figure, but she remains wholly unperturbed, returning the viewer’s gaze while in repose. Frantz Jean-baptiste invites us into his studio in Raffi Kalenderian’s portrait of the fellow artist. One could initially believe Raffi is painting the backdrops of his own paintings onto the conjured studio walls of this work, as Raffi and Frantz share similar palettes in their respective oeuvres. In Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s 12pm, the Havana-born artist takes the swirling colors of Kalenderian and Baptiste and casts them onto an imagined seascape sourced from Piñeiro Bello’s native Caribbean.

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Further pictorial similarities abound in unexpected locations in New Visions. Tom Atton Moore’s hand-tufted textile works originate from the patterns of foliage in the artist’s garden, while Maria Vmier’s ethereal vortexes of colored pencil on paper take as source the natural world and mine the subconscious. It is this subliminal acuity from which Paulina Nolte’s nocturnes and Mary Herbert’s pastel are also drawn.

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Exhibiting Artists: 

Dan Attoe

Tom Atton Moore

Rafael Domenech 

Baris Gokturk

Whit Harris 


Donté Hayes 

Mary Herbert

Jack Irv

Raffi Kalenderian

Jay Kvapil

Sangram Majumdar 

Tommy Malekoff

Max Maslansky 


Jeffery Meris 

Anthony Miler

Paulina Nolte

Philip Pearlstein 

Alejandro Piñero Bello 

Gonçalo Preto 

Michaell Smoler

Kyle Staver

Maria VMier 

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