Martha Armstrong
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 10 - 5 pm
127 S 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
215 - 665 - 8138
Still Life After Van Schooten And Braque, 22" x 32", Oil On Linen
Elizabeth Geiger: Borrowed Rhythms
Elizabeth Geiger is a lifelong student of painted form and has focused on still life for decades. Geiger’s choice to adopt this subject matter has allowed her approach to representation to steadily advance into new territory, guided by the luminaries of art history.
In Borrowed Rhythms, Geiger has relaxed her fidelity to observed forms and colors. Embarking toward a world that embraces the rhythms, tensions and visual contradictions of Cubism, her new paintings playfully divide up rectangular canvases into simplified shapes. While the objects within the pictures remain nameable, their details and textures have been replaced with flat color or quick notations of pattern. These shifts in emphasis transform...
The Toilette Of Venus, (After Boucher And Morris Louis), 2022, 13" x 19", Digitally Produced Print
Stuart Netsky: Walking Backward Into The Future
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Stuart Netsky’s rich digital paintings and colorful sculptural assemblages in Walking Backward into the Future. Here, Netsky continues his innovative exploration of materials and themes well known from his seminal 1992 ICA exhibition, Time Flies. This earlier work, created during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, courageously explored the intersections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with contemporary domestic life, popular culture, and Western art history. During Netsky’s retrospective in 2006, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Curator Sid Sachs described Netsky as having a practice that, “operates at the nexus of social representation and sculpture, sexual cliché, and self-presentation. Echoing a variety of historical styles such as Pop Art, Pattern and Decoration, and color field, Netsky retains a crisp classical sense of craft and sense of humor that is deadly serious.” His latest work is no exception as Netsky continues with a clear-eyed honesty and queer sensibility.
Kimi Pryor, Liminal, 12" x 9", Oil On Panel
Short & Sweet III: Group Exhibition
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Short & Sweet III, a collection of mini-exhibitions featuring artworks by Graham Cuddy, Henry Murphy, Kimi Pryor, Rhonda Wall and Nasir Young.
Graham Cuddy finds pleasing color and design relationships in his quilt-like paintings. Reminiscent of domestic and functional Folk Art, his handkerchief-sized constructions involve delicately painted color blocks on natural linen, overlaid with distinct hand-stitched patterns of starbursts, grids, and curvilinear lines.
Henry Murphy also takes cues from Folk Art and blends it with American Modernism in his representational paintings. His approach includes references as disparate as Grandma Moses and Fairfield Porter, Bill Trayor and Charles Burchfield. His pictures are sweet, painterly depictions of rural and urban locations.
The city of Philadelphia is Nasir Young’s muse. His paintings are love letters to the many ordinary sights surrounding him, with every pavement crack and graffiti tag carefully represented. Each work is finely painted with care and honesty.
Kimi Pryor and Rhonda Wall each construct universes of their own. Pryor’s paintings conjure dreamlike projections of the subconscious with textured surfaces and foggy forms revealing potentially emotional narratives. Rhonda Wall’s hard-edged, cyberpunk paintings stand in contrast to Pryor’s softly rendered images. While the quizzical works seemingly depict futuristic worlds, Wall creates them in response...
Elizabeth Geiger featured in John Thornton's Elizabeth Geiger, a Perceptual Painter Channels Cubism
Elizabeth Geiger is a superb still life painter and a member of the Perceptual Painters, a group known for working from direct observation. In her current show at Gross McCleaf, Liz is showing work with a distinctly Cubist inflection. I wanted to get to the roots of her apparent switch from perceptual to conceptual painting.
Barbara Sosson featured in John Thornton's Artist Barbara Sosson, Sensuous Shapes and Mimicry
Artist, Designer, and PA Academy Fellowship President Barbara Sosson has a terrific show up at Gross McCleaf during the month of February 2023.
Elizabeth Johnson: Your prints in your current show join radically different images to express the visual overkill of contemporary culture, but it seems that you aren’t entirely critical of the excess, since you revel in it. Do you enjoy scrolling though social media or jumping between cinematic decades via streaming? How does the seam between images function for you? Does it indicate a jump in thought and/or time and function to compress a group of dramatic moments into a whole? Are you aiming to compare several unrelated high points of Western culture? or to express the vastness of cultural experience?
Stuart Netsky: I do revel in excess to express the visual overkill...
Elizabeth Johnson: Your previous still lifes and landscapes were realistic. Your recent paintings use Cubist formats and tropes. What made the change? Are you still doing landscapes? Are you focusing only on interiors for this show?
Liz Geiger: When I started painting, I was wide-eyed and open to anything and everything. Subject matter wasn’t as important as learning how to paint, how to make light and space. I worked only from observation and looked mostly at observational painting, which seemed natural being married to a realist painter. Later, I tackled composition, studying old composition books by the armload from The University of Virginia library. Understanding composition took years....
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Stuart Netsky’s rich digital paintings and colorful sculptural assemblages in Walking Backward into the Future. Here, Netsky continues his innovative exploration of materials and themes well known from his seminal 1992 ICA exhibition, Time Flies. This earlier work, created during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, courageously explored the intersections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with contemporary domestic life, popular culture, and Western art history. During Netsky’s retrospective in 2006, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Curator Sid Sachs described Netsky as having a practice that, “operates at the nexus of social representation and sculpture, sexual cliché, and self-presentation. Echoing a variety of historical styles such as Pop Art, Pattern and Decoration, and color field, Netsky retains a crisp classical sense of craft and sense of humor that is deadly serious.” His latest work is no exception as Netsky continues with a clear-eyed honesty and queer sensibility.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is thrilled to participate in the 20th Annual Palm Beach Show in West Palm Beach, Florida. Our booth will be in the special Contemporary Focus section alongside other internationally known galleries. We can't wait to present a selection of artworks from our beloved Mid-Atlantic artists, and look forward to sharing the Gross McCleaf brand with this new audience!
If you plan to be in West Palm Beach over Presidents' Day Weekend, please EMAIL US (info@grossmccleaf.com) for complimentary tickets!
Elizabeth Johnson: On Gross McCleaf’s website you describe a farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. You write: “The land vibrates with textures, sounds, smells, and crawls with life. Stand in one place too long (to paint a picture, for example) and the dusty straw ground slowly pulls apart . . . revealing the smooth, wet clay beneath.” Did you grow up on a farm? Why the strong bond with dirt and earth? Are you always looking for the basis of things? Or is this feeling a result of standing and working for days on one spot?
Caleb Stoltzfus: My upbringing was suburban. But my dad farmed for much of his life, before I was born, and he comes from a long line of Amish farmers. Farmers often believe, from their experience, they must conquer nature, overcome its dangers...
“I am interested in the way birds’ patterns mimic their environments, creating the beautiful and extreme designs of their plumage… Throughout my long painting career, I have worked on many series that are usually multiple years-long and evolve to and from the real and the ideal.”
- Barbara Sosson
Throughout her career spanning over 50 years, Barbara Sosson has developed stature in the Philadelphia arts community as a painter, designer, and gregarious personality. In Sensuous Shapes & Mimicry, Sosson struts her stuff with a grouping of new oil paintings that combine two wings of her practice: abstraction and representation.
