March Exhibitions: March 7 - March 30
Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat, 10 - 5 pm
Short & Sweet IV
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Short & Sweet IV, a pair of mini-exhibitions featuring works by Marilyn Holsing and Heidi Leitzke. These southeastern Pennsylvania-based painters focus on the investigation and narrative possibilities of botanicals.
Oil and gouache artist Marilyn Holsing depicts anthropomorphized arrangements that convey their distinct personalities through form and gesture. Flowers are posed in precarious positions, emphasizing strength and persistence. Her seemingly corporeal subjects huddle humorously in vulnerable vignettes, some beaming with pride, while others appear to droop in sorrow. Their leaves stretch and strain as they tenaciously grasp onto neighboring stems, reinforcing the growing tangle.
While Holsing’s colors and textures accurately depict the delicate, natural beauty of her plants, there are alluring details throughout that lean into the delightfully grotesque. Thick meaty petals undulate around the stamin like a group of twisting earthworms, and dry stringy tendrils hang from organic growths like curious cilia. Many of the groupings flourish despite being held within tiny wicker baskets and pans, surviving on impossible, sloping hillsides. In addition to a bit of awkwardness, Holsing’s persevering flowers conjure feelings of affinity and compassion. They are the antiheroes of a winding adventure through an immersive paradise.
James Stewart: Place Setting
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Place Setting, a new series of oil paintings by gallery artist, James Stewart. The works in this exhibition highlight Stewart’s acute awareness of group dynamics, interpersonal relationships and the settings in which these affairs unfold. While a few of Stewart’s outdoor scenes reference broad themes from history and well known stories from antiquity, most of the paintings depict intimate, everyday interactions between family and friends, many around the table of a dinner party.
In Place Setting, one can almost hear the clinking of dinnerware over the din of cross-conversations. Though the details remain unclear, animated gesturing and facial expressions reveal the dynamics of the guests’ relationships and the energy of their earnest interactions. They lean into the flickering candlelight to share a drink, a card game, a bite of pie, some music or perhaps an idea.
Elizabeth Johnson: The Cost Of Sleep
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Elizabeth Johnson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Cost of Sleep. This collection showcases a series of oil paintings that blend vivid imagery and robust earth tones into dynamic, swirling compositions. Recognizable objects meld into painterly brushstrokes, only to reemerge as novel, unexpected pictorial elements.
Johnson’s painting process begins by collecting fragments of print media images and patterns. Responding intuitively to these visual sources, she categorizes them as either landscape or figurative imagery, manipulating chosen bits in Photoshop, warping and distorting them into curved shapes. The resulting digital image is printed out and reserved as a source of future inspiration.
In the studio, Johnson mixes a palette of mostly naturalistic colors that are reminiscent of weather, seasons, and a childhood spent on a farm. Mixing varieties of hue, value, and saturation that only oil paint can provide, she has learned that “all colors are useful, the ugliest especially." Pre-preparing images and media allows Johnson to devote her full attention to selecting subjects to paint. She works by trial and error, trying out possible digital images, frequently turning her canvases, and destroying most of what she produces. Permitting drifts of connection and metaphors that might bridge landscape and figural elements within her work, she deliberately avoids definitive narrative. She asserts, “If I feel a story is about to coalesce, I undo what I did and try something else."
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James Stewart featured in John Thornton's film "James Stewart: Place Setting, Paintings Inspired by Georges de la Tour"
Video Description: "James Stewart is a painter who trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In the fall of 2021, I made a movie about his show based on poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. In January of 2022, I made a movie about his monumental painting of the January 6th insurrection. His new show, at Gross McCleaf, is called 'Place Setting'. Inspired by French Old Master Georges de la Tour, this new body of work features a group of Jim’s friends arrayed around a dinner table at night. James Stewart's exhibition will be on display at Gross McCleaf through March 30, 2024.
Simultaneous Choices, Conversation with Elizabeth Johnson
Sharon Garbe: Your whirlwind works have no beginning or end. You put images, which are stand-ins for experience, through a battery of digital ocean waves and vortexes to see how they fare. Then you reclaim the pixels and submit them to a different kind of fluidity. You play with space, time, memory, repetition and change, possibilities, and meaning. Could a subtitle for your show be “We Are an Unfinished Story”?
Elizabeth Johnson: Definitely. Humans have time and hope, and it's logical to pose indefinite, multiple endings. It's also logical to treat photographs as undulating surfaces or sculpture.
If I have anything to add to visual storytelling, it’s that I'm comfortable gathering random, transmuted subjects to make a dreamworld from simultaneous choices.
Elizabeth Johnson featured in John Thornton's Artist Film "The Multi Dimensional Paintings of Elizabeth Johnson"
Video Description: "Elizabeth Johnson is a wonderful painter whose "multi-dimensional" artworks evoke Cubism as well as advanced ideas in physics. She also is a great interviewer of her fellow artists at Gross McCleaf Gallery and other places. I found both Elizabeth herself and her paintings fascinating."