WINTERLUDE RYAN COBOURN • SUSAN ENGLISH • KERSTIN HEYMANN • SHILO RATNER • CARLA ROTH As winter rages on, the air still bites and the skies still fall but Bryant Street Gallery’s new exhibition, WINTERLUDE, offers an early glimpse of the Spring yet to come. Bright cheery tones of pink and green interplay amongst more sober blues and lavenders. They break through the cold and grey, offering a gentle warmth and comforting serenity just as the gallery space provides a respite from the elements. WINTERLUDE features new work by the gallery’s long-standing artists, Ryan Cobourn, Susan English, and Shilo Ratner; introduces our newest artist, Carla Roth; and welcomes back Kerstin Heymann. Ryan Cobourn is a prolific and seasoned painter based in New York. He makes abstract gestural paintings inspired by forms of the figure, the landscape, and the garden. His works are embedded with allusions, memories, and references, but they are amorphous, the shapes and brushstrokes giving way to one image and then another. There is a physical, tactile play between the veiling and exposing of forms with creamy, viscous paint, which can feel agitated, tender, and melancholic all at once.
Cobourn has been the recipient of multiple awards and grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Vermont Studio Center Artist Grant. He recently retired from life in Brooklyn, New York after fifteen years. He currently lives on Long Island, New York with his family. Susan English, another New York artist, experiments with color and texture in a minimalist style. She has honed her process over the last decade. She pours tinted polymer onto a panel, which she manipulates until the paint pools and cracks, creating luminous and evocative surfaces. By playing around with slight variations in this system, she explores the possibilities of color, surface, and light. She is particularly interested in the natural variation caused by the polymer drying, mimicking materials in nature like ice or mud. The New York Times has described her work as “sublime” and “buoyant.”
English received an MFA from Hunter College in New York City and a BA from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. She lives and works in Cold Spring, NY. Kerstin Heymann is a German artist based in Berlin. She is known for her abstract botanical paintings, in which meticulously-detailed, realistic depictions of plants melt into loose, flowing brushwork. The result is an exciting back-and-forth as the eye resolves the almost clinical realism with the artist’s improvisation.
Heymann was born in Eutin, Germany. She studied fine art, free graphics, and painting at Muthesius University of Art History & Philosophy, Christian Albrechts University, and Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.
Shilo Ratner is an abstract artist originally from Massachusetts who now works in Connecticut. Her work is strikingly geometric and modern, standing at the intersection of the digital and the metaphysical. She is inspired by the symbols and practices of religions she has encountered on her extensive international travels, which she communicates into a visual language. Notably, she draws upon a dramatic shift in consciousness that she experienced in a rural Brazilian village, and the Buddhist and Hindu temples she visited in Malaysia and Indonesia. Returning to contemporary life between these significant journeys has allowed her to express work that is about the “whole” experience instead of only focusing on one or the other, as her approach embraces various spiritual and cultural experiences through a visual language.
Currently, Ratner lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is an active practicing artist in the New York Metropolitan area. Her works are featured in museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art, Mystic Museum of Art, and the Slater Memorial Museum. The work of Carla Roth, an artist from Marin County, focuses on a wide variety of vessels. The repetition of the objects, with their similarities and slight variations, lends a meditative quality to the pieces. An interior design career of over 30 years has honed her sense for balance and harmony, so the objects have a comforting, well-loved feeling of home. Her studio is in the historic ICB Building in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The light and colors of the bay, which she can see from her studio windows, inspire her every day. Her focus is on common objects, structures, and scenery. Her art is a response to what is happening around her at a moment in time, or recent past.
Ryan Cobourn Fields 06 Oil on paper 40” x 30”
Ryan Cobourn Fields 10 Oil on paper 40” x 30”
Ryan Cobourn January 06 Oil on paper 30” x 22”
Susan English Outland No. 40 Tinted polymer on Dibond panel 40” x 36”
Susan English Outland No. 41 Tinted polymer on Dibond panel 40” x 36”
Kerstin Heymann On Reception Oil on canvas 59” x 59”
Kerstin Heymann Revelation Oil on canvas 57” x 51”
Shilo Ratner Echo acrylic on canvas 40” x 40”
Shilo Ratner Snowbank acrylic on canvas 20” x 20”
Shilo Ratner Shore acrylic on canvas 20” x 20”
Shilo Ratner Inner Guidance acrylic on canvas 40” x 40”
Carla Roth Liberty Display Violet Oil on linen 24” x 24”
Carla Roth Liberty Display Blue Oil on linen 24” x 24”
Carla Roth Liberty Display Green Oil on linen 20” x 30”