Martha Armstrong
GALLERY HOURS:
Wednesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm
You Don't Always Know, 40" x 40", Acrylic On Panel
Val Rossman: Unexpected Interference
Spontaneous bursts of gestural expression meet carefully planned and executed drafting in Val Rossman’s new body of abstract works. Unexpected Interference features two varieties of exploration from Rossman’s multi-faceted painting practice of layered geometric compositions and energetically marked, achromatic configurations. Each variation of Rossman’s approach combines elements of chance and moments of orchestration, both of which are fundamental to her pursuits. Rossman finds her works to be analogous to life’s common challenges, and it is in the tension created by these opposing strategies where Rossman’s work flourishes and meaning is found.
Rossman’s studio is a carefully organized laboratory for creative delivery. Cups of pre-mixed colors await their use, and different sections of the studio are reserved for specific processes. Surprisingly, Rossman does not devise a specific “plan” for each work. Rather, she begins by “marring” the clean areas of a surface with a gestural stroke, scribbles, colors, or lines. What follows is a dance of balancing the unexpected and unrehearsed with calculated intention. Rossman often spins the painting on its side while working, upending gravity and expanding the many possibilities at hand. The result is a harmonious and tasteful arrangement of painted actions.
Board Gourds, 40" x 60", Pastel On Paper
Penelope Harris: Fully Assembled
The true beauty of Penelope Harris’ work is in the wonder of things. In Fully Assembled, the artist builds upon her celebrated career of vibrant and meticulously rendered artworks with a new collection of paintings and drawings created in Harris’ favorite media including gouache, oil paint, pastel, and charcoal. Despite the range of media, each piece shares Harris’ signature attention to detail. Her curiously chosen groupings offer surprises and endlessly delightful discoveries that engage further beyond their elegant presentations.
Although stylistic trends have shifted throughout her decades-long practice, Harris has faithfully developed her observational still life motif. In this current body of work, Harris offers a more reserved presentation versus the busy patterning of her earlier paintings – favoring elegance over drama.
Emily Steinberg, Twin, 20" x 26", Oil On Canvas
Residential Tourist
Guest curators Elizabeth Johnson, Celia Reisman and Emily Steinberg present Residential Tourist, a group exhibition of artists from the greater Philadelphia area that considers voyeurism a tonic for isolation, interrupted socializing, and deferred travel.
Residential Tourist collects probing views of everyday living spaces, in the form of painting, drawing, sculpture and video. Details such as lighting, furnishing, layout, clutter, vehicles, gardens, sidewalks, and yards emanate humble nobility in the context of a prolonged pandemic since boredom with one’s own quarters renders other people’s homes potent and magnetic. Residential Tourist welcomes viewers to explore novel spaces and peer through windows, around corners, past fences and over gates with the same ease that we browse posts on social media and real estate sites, and the same thirst for ambience that tags along during Zoom meetings.
Benjamin Passione & Mickayel Thurin featured in John Thornton's Family of Artists, Ben Passione, Mickayel Thurin, and the Legendary Maurice
Artists Ben Passione and Mickayel Thurin are a young couple trying to raise their son Maurice through one of the most difficult periods in memory. I got a chance to film both of their recent exhibitions and talk to, and film them, at their home in North Philadelphia.
Michael Gallagher featured in John Thornton’s Beauty and Consolation, The Art of Michael Gallagher
America and the world have been suffering through a prolonged and miserable darkness, and Michael Gallagher’s paintings of joy, color and light bring hope to all who witness them. And they align with my own favorite aesthetic, a perfection of idealized forms and shapes, with an abraded and disfiguring surface. It’s the human need for perfect beauty, stymied by the limiting realities of this world. The irony being the beauty is made more poignant through the world’s grinding sorrows.
Scott Noel featured in John Thornton's Scott Noel On Portrait Painting
Scott Noel is an alchemist. By hand and mind he transforms the physical substance of oil paint into a poetic expression of lived experience. His paintings of people are as honest as they are humane. They are art and they are life.
Spontaneous bursts of gestural expression meet carefully planned and executed drafting in Val Rossman’s new body of abstract works. Unexpected Interference features two varieties of exploration from Rossman’s multi-faceted painting practice of layered geometric compositions and energetically marked, achromatic configurations. Each variation of Rossman’s approach combines elements of chance and moments of orchestration, both of which are fundamental to her pursuits. Rossman finds her works to be analogous to life’s common challenges, and it is in the tension created by these opposing strategies where Rossman’s work flourishes and meaning is found...
Amy Brady: Please tell me about your latest series, Ardens Mundi. What does that title stand for, and how does the exhibition speak to the climate crisis?
Maureen Drdak: Ardens Mundi is Latin for Burning Worlds. The series presents the many faces of global warming as it manifests across the planet, with each work presenting a distinct cataclysmic phenomenon. The title also refers to the transmutational power of burning in the spiritual sense, in that humanity has agency—humanity can choose to purify itself from its worst addictions. The series is reflective of my long study and work in the Himalayan country of Nepal, a country and region where the conversation between spirit and matter is of long and particular intensity—and of special relevance to our rapidly heating planet.
“…the idea that a shape/form can occupy multiple spatial conditions and potential readings keeps me engaged in both making and looking… a Duck/Rabbit thing, rooted in the complexities and pleasure of perception.”
-Michael Gallagher
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present, INFINITION, a solo exhibition of bold and colorful abstractions by Michael Gallagher.
Enigmatic, delightfully playful and bold, Gallagher’s new works at first appear as accomplished abstractions that reference modernist forms. Painted biomorphic shapes swirl around the surface, producing a centrifugal force generated from the center of the painting outward. Texture and varied paint application break the solidity of flat planes of color creating implied space in the composition. The shapes then alternately poke into those spaces and push out, shifting the relationship between what is considered the figure and what is the ground.
“I think everything is in there: events, people I know, stories, architecture, music…I’m a big believer in coincidence, synchronicity, and numerology: it’s all about how things get funneled and filtered into a linear, transcendent expression.”
-Thomas Paul Raggio
Gross McCleaf is pleased to exhibit a new body of hard-edged abstractions by Thomas Paul Raggio in his first solo show with the gallery. This exhibition, titled In the Valley, features Raggio’s signature combination of carefully organized lines and stripes, meticulously painted in acrylic. While non-objective, the painted bars create harmonious color vibrations that ripple across each canvas. Crisscrossing diagonals offer geometry, movement, and balance...
“I have a longing for a certain beauty that’s hard to describe, but it’s usually associated with summer colors. My desire for this summertime feeling seems inexhaustible, and though I’ve been trying for many years, I don’t feel like I am ever really satisfied.”
- Kurt Moyer
For over a decade, Kurt Moyer’s work has combined his love of nature with his reverence for art history. Born in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Moyer spent much of his youth exploring the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. Moyer now resides in rural New York near Rochester where he spends his time plein air painting from the beginning of spring until late fall. These passions converge in Moyer’s new abstract paintings on view at Gross McCleaf...
In “Deaf Republic,” allegoric poems that rail against violence and military oppression, Ilya Kaminsky created a young deaf martyr and a community that protested with sign language.
The collection of poems, published in 2019, is a story that is meaningful not just for the Eastern European country that Kaminsky envisioned, but also for any oppressed place.
The American figurative painter James Stewart, who lives in western Pennsylvania, envisioned “Deaf Republic” taking place in Weimar, Germany, and created a body of paintings to reflect and illustrate the poems...
