Martha Armstrong
Kati Gegenheimer: Stars Align
Sterling Shaw: Unreliable Narrator
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Ed Bing Lee: Festivity
July 1 - 31, 2021
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 10 - 5 pm
APPOINTMENTS ARE ENCOURAGED BUT NOT REQUIRED
Stars Align
40" x 32"
Oil And Acrylic On Canvas
Kati Gegenheimer: Stars Align
“I was here.
You were here.
I am here. You are here.
Stars aligned.
Stars align."
In her paintings, Kati Gegenheimer uses color, pattern, decoration, and symbolism as ways to express love, ritual, and radical sentimentality. Her sensitivity to touch and brushwork on the canvas as a love letter to being present in a moment; asking us to slow down to see the everyday magic that we often only glance out of the corner of our eye - a shimmer, a twinkle, a cloud passing in the blue sky, a butterfly hovering to look at you. Gegenheimer emphasizes this need to be present in the moment. She writes:
“Time stopped when you entered the room.
You are here for a reason, at this very moment.
Some would say it is luck, others would say it was meant to be.”
The title of the show, Stars Align is particularly appropriate since the works in this exhibition were made in the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 - shortly after Gegenheimer moved back to Philadelphia, just as the pandemic was coming to an end and at the time the opportunity for Gegenheimer’s first solo exhibition came together. It was important to the artist that this inaugural show took place in Philadelphia, given her personal history in the city. The artist says, “In nature, stars don’t really align but in a metaphorical sense, situations do come together like magic. When this happens, and you can recognize it, it can be like music, it can be like a painting. When the elements come together harmoniously, they can transform into something completely new.”
Alight
48" x 54"
Acrylic, Charcoal And Chalk On Paper
Sterling Shaw: Unreliable Narrator
Bible stories, nursery rhymes, and references to mythology intermingle in Sterling Shaw’s dream-like narratives. While his approach to surface and media is varied, Shaw’s dedication to storytelling is apparent throughout the entire body of work. In many cases, the protagonists find themselves swept into mysterious situations and settings, as forces of nature factor into the stories. Shaw’s larger-than-life figures inhabit and stride through their environments like giant deities; however, they are deities with human flaws. Not wanting to be strictly allegorical, Shaw seeks a reaction to his subject matter that invokes a shifting interpretation depending on the individual associations made by each viewer.
Shaw says, “My early life was overflowing with wonderful strong women. Women are the ‘heroes’ in my life: my support, my teachers, my wise counselors, my advocates…The women in my paintings are deities - major, minor, lesser, semi and demi, similar to the gods of ancient Greece. The divine figures of my paintings usually have their faces covered, as a viewer may only be permitted to see her face with her permission.”
Popcorn I (Detail)
10" x 8" x 8"
Synthetic Raffia, Ribbons, And Polyester Shoe Lacing
Ed Bing Lee: Festivity
Ed Bing Lee’s intricate, knotted sculptures are elegant, humorous, and festive. Gross McCleaf is pleased to exhibit a grouping of work from several series created over the course of the last 17 years. Some from the “Delectable Series” playfully depict food, while works from the “Chawan” series appear as functional objects, bowls, and cups - chawan literally meaning “tea bowl” in Chinese. While Lee constructs each object in detail, the work immediately presents as soft, threaded sculpture rather than trompe l’oeil or facsimile. Challenging our expectations about the world, the artist plays with textures in ways that are reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s “soft sculptures”.
Drawn by the immediacy of the process and the satisfaction of an art form that is reliant on meticulous handwork, Lee has perfected his painstaking knotting practice over a career spanning more than 40 years. The artist constructs each sculpture out of thousands of tiny knots from various kinds of thread, ribbon, and lacing. To create shapes, Lee alters the tension of the thread, changes the style of knot, or selects a different material. Lee likens the additive nature of his process to the painting style of pointillism, most known through the works of George Seurat who created painted forms through the repetition of small, dot-like brushstrokes.
We Invite You to Virtually Preview GMG's July Exhibitions!
CLICK HERE to Watch the Video
Email info@grossmccleaf.com for details & availability. Enjoy!
When I think about Kati Gegenheimer’s work, I think about time, and I think about my friends.
I also think about handfuls of glistening jewels, about orchestral swells and technicolor sunsets, about melodrama and rooms of secret treasure, about dayglow candy from another dimension. I think about golden flickering candlelight in a 1950s Disney cartoon burning out of the darkness. I think about the moment between confetti exploding into the air and when it begins to descend, stretched out into infinity. I think about what it means to give someone something beautiful...
Rocks, Trees, and Gardens: Paintings by Lois Dodd and Ying Li will open this Saturday and Sunday, July 10-11 from 1-5 pm, at Rosy End Post, 18 South Street, Greenport, NY. The exhibition will run for three weekends, through July 24-25.
Lois and Ying long have focused their paintings on the natural world. Close friends, they occasionally have journeyed together to paint side by side. During long careers, each artist has developed a style of painting that is uniquely her own, but their styles could hardly be more different. This show is an opportunity to see the work of two painters who use paint in radically different ways.
Painting is meant to be seen, not talked about. Painters are drawn to things, not concepts or doctrines. What counts is what is in front of them, the very thing itself—whether an object or a vista—not an idea about the thing. For a painter, the only ideas that count are pictorial ones. Matters of fact are primary. These include the material facts of paint, the cookery of getting it right, manipulation of brushes and color chords—all physical, earth-bound matters. Fairfield Porter was blunt: “An art that finds ideas more real than things is attractive to the unemployed intellectual.”
Max Mason considers himself a landscape painter — it’s just that many of those landscapes feature immaculately cut grass and bases arranged in a diamond shape 90 feet apart.
The Philadelphia-area artist will display some of his baseball-themed work in the exhibition “Making the Game,” which opens Sunday at the Butler Institute of American Art.
Youngstown, OH, May 18, 2021 – The Butler Institute of American Art at 524 Wick Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio is delighted to announce the opening of an exhibition of baseball paintings just in time for summer. Max Mason: Painting the Game will open Sunday, June 13, 2021 at 12:00pm in the museum’s Giffuni Gallery on the second floor, where the artist will present a gallery talk at 2:00pm. The exhibition will be on view through September 5, 2021. Admission to The Butler and Max Mason’s gallery talk are free.
The paintings of Max Mason are impressive on a variety of levels. He is a masterful draughtsman who can lay down paint in the manner of the old masters. Staying with the magical theme of baseball he presents a virtual clinic on composition and color usage. In a museum filled with exquisite paintings, the works of Max Mason more than hold their own. The Butler is delighted to present this outstanding exhibition of the work of Max Mason.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Rebekah Callaghan and Claire Kincade, and Pet Show, a group exhibition featuring the work of Joan Becker, Su A Chae, Eileen Goodman, Morgan Hobbs, Katie Hubbell, Darla Jackson, Christina Leone, Joseph Lozano, Douglas Martenson, Scott Noel, Bethann Parker, Frank Trefny, and Ted Walsh.
Rebekah Callaghan met the unique challenges of this past year by turning inward, moving away from observation and focusing more on her process and feelings. Callaghan scaled up the plant-based imagery. She played with color and pattern to fit the mood of the painting rather than limiting herself to a faithful adherence to the original source. . .
Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia represents noteworthy marine artists such as Douglas Martenson. “The coast of Maine is a natural wonder,” says Martenson. “The rocks along the shore are weather-beaten, wounded but enduring. I love the tides and where I go each summer, they vary by 9 feet. At high tide, only the sun-bleached caps of the boulders are visible. As the water recedes, the entire boulder appears, as if a large whale has emerged from the watery depths.
“The ocean is mesmerizing,” Martenson says, “and there is something that draws us to the shore; the waves crashing and the smell of the salt air. Collecting these paintings allows one to bring some of these sensations home.
Claire Kincade invites us to share in the experience of the objects she surrounds herself with and that she arranges in her still life paintings.
Light pours through living room windows, emphasizing the form of objects while they express themselves more quietly in the subdued light of a basement. The arrangement of objects in unexpected locations and lighting conditions causes the viewer not only to appreciate the whole but to slowly contemplate them as individual objects and how they relate to the space they occupy.
