Andrew Reed Gallery announces Push and Pull, a group exhibition of twelve artists whose works span the past fifty years. 

The title of the show takes its name from Hans Hofmann’s manifesto on abstraction of nearly a century ago. In the late 1930s, in a series of widely attended lectures in Greenwich Village, Hofmann demonstrated how to “push a plane in the surface or to pull it from the surface. We must create pictorial space,” he declared. The artists in the present exhibition continue this lineage of exploring the fine counterbalance of rendering a cohesive composition while working with abstract forms, within painting, printing, and sculpture. 

Sarah McRae Morton’s The Gleaners feels markedly Impressionistic, yet here, a polyptych thereby creates a multitude of inverses and reflections across the panels. The forms of people in the fields, with a townscape in the distance, are distinct in the upper panels. In the inverted panels, this pastoral scene morphs into impasto, cross-hatching, and daubs of paint. The reeds and rust-covered foliage in Madeline Peckenpaugh’s painting Side by Side envelop the viewer, with the artist advancing upon the gestural abstraction of predecessors such as Gerhard Richter. 

Mark-making becomes a focal point within the works of Venice Biennale artists Eddie Martinez and Chico Da Silva. Martinez’s ‘butterfly’ motif defines itself within the intricacies of the artist’s brushwork and layering. Indeed, the artist has referred to his studio process as a ‘boxing match’, a physically taxing affair. And for the Brazilian self-taught artist Chico da Silva, the riotously colorful forms of animals, both real and imagined, are the result of a hypnotic arrangement of line and color. As the New York Times observed from a recent solo exhibition of da Silva’s work: “His stylized menagerie of dragons, serpents, fish and fowl, rendered in dizzying pointillist constellations, proliferated over the next few years”, coinciding with the date of the painting – 1970 – on view in Push and Pull.

Bethany Czarnecki’s works “build upon her repertoire of transcendentally ambiguous, yet unmistakably female forms, in saturated, polychromatic hues. Her paintings incorporate jewel tones and magnified bending shapes to create immersive sensory experiences, explor[ing] the evocative relationships between light and shadow while conjuring a unique sense of place.” (Massey Klein) Meanwhile, Veronika Hilger’s trio of paintings in the exhibition are the culmination of a meditative studio practice, with nocturne-like scenes laden with amorphous shapes indicative of the artist’s preferred time of day. The meticulous perforations within Maria VMier’s monumental diptych Body and Institution [SAND] allow light to emanate from within, magnifying the effect of the ribbons of color dancing across the work. VMier’s painting builds off of her multihyphenate practice encompassing linguistics and printmaking.

Claire’s Lindner’s ceramics take on voluptuous forms steeped in nature, with a spongy texture which feels anathema to the ceramic medium. These works, with their lively color gradients, are Lindner’s rendition of a world not dissimilar from our own, evocative of fungi, sea moss, and roots. Eli Ping’s Monocarp, a sinewy sculpture, stands nearly 9 feet high. ‘Monocarp’ describes a plant that bears fruit once and dies. Ping’s process entails him suspending a canvas on the wall, weighing it down to elongate the material. He then dips the fabric in a calcifying liquid, allowing it to gradually harden into a free-standing form. Ping’s work speaks to the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, while also suggestive of humanoid figures caught in embrace.