A Summer Exhibition - Part 1 Expressionism
An Online Presentation : July 20 to August 31, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-955260-40-4
Front Cover: James Kelly, Untitled , 1986, Oil on paper, 13.75 x 17”
Title Page: George Hofmann, Red Figure , 2022-24, watercolor and acrylic on Arches paper, 11.5 x 15”
Back Cover: Joe Ramiro Garcia, Can’t Take You Anywhere , 2023, Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel, 15 x 15”
Some Like It Hot
A Summer Exhibition - Part 1 Expressionism
An Online Presentation: July 20 - August 31, 2024
Published by:
David Richard Gallery, LLC, 245 East 124th Street, 11K, New York, NY 10035 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705
Gallery Staff:
DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery
David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers
All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC.
Catalogue: © 2024 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Artworks:
Copyright © Joe Ramiro Garcia
Copyright © Sonia Gechtoff, Artist Enterprise Holdings
Copyright © Nancy Genn
Copyright © Grace Graupe-Pillard
Copyright © George Hofmann
Copyright © James Kelly, Artist Enterprise Holdings
Copyright © Ellen Kozak
Copyright © Claire Seidl
Copyright © Dee Shapiro
Copyright © Martha Szabo Estate
Copyright © Joan Thorne
Copyright © Beate Wheeler Estate
Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
A Summer Exhibition - Part 1 Expressionism
An Online Presentation : July 20 to August 31, 2024
Express Yourself
The subtitle, Expressionism, for this first portion of the multipart summer presentations is an oversimplification used to try and distinguish the artworks between two large categories of art generated by the gallery’s roster of artists. This first part focuses on artworks ranging from abstract compositions using gestural, textured, and painterly approaches of applying medium and pigment to a support, to then incorporating representational elements and figuration to convey emotional content as well as evoking cultural and social messaging. On either end of the spectrum, the artist’s hand and intent is front and center.
The other large category of artistic output to be presented in subsequent exhibitions is Color and Geometry. Artists who produce such artworks utilize color theory, hard edge constructions, geometric shapes and vectors, optical effects, illusory space, and process-driven practices. Generally, these methods imply a more formalist approach focused on the physical aspects of the compositions and less emotional or content driven. In many instances, while the latter artistic output is more formal, many artists still find ways to subtly imbue such compositions with content and commentary. Stay tuned for Some Like it Hot - Part 2.
The Artworks in Part 1: Expressionism:
Part 1 of the summer series, Some Like It Hot, not only references a well-known 1959 movie and 1985 song by The Power Station, but also how artists convey temperature, attitude, and commentary in visual art. Thus, the artworks range from using the formal properties of the warm end of the color spectrum, signifying heat, to the opposite end leveraging iconography and imagery that can be interpreted as flirty or evoking a range of emotions and attitudes around gender, ethnicity, nature and the environment.
The Artists:
A range of processes and media are utilized by the artists in Part 1: Expressionism, as well as evocative imagery. Sonia Gechtoff (1926 – 2018) and George Hofmann (B. 1938) have a shared aesthetic, utilizing bold brush strokes, texture, and color to explore emotions, stories and histories conjured by nature, but more specifically by place and color. Gechtoff pushes the forces of nature, including: smoke, fire, waves, and wind gusts, while Hofmann’s paintings are more personal, introspective, and art historically driven. Hofmann has always enjoyed laying down pigment then excavating and layering more in a sequential, organic process. The resulting residue from the process leaves a process map that characterizes his studio practice. Gechtoff’s paintings are rooted in her earlier Abstract Expressionism paintings from the 1950s as she used the palette knife to make bold, powerful strokes that brought energy, movement, and power to her paintings, hence her ability to conjure the awe and respect of nature in her later career paintings.
Nancy Genn’s (b. 1929) work is painterly with the artist’s hand in every brush stroke and mark as she leverages memory and place. San Francisco, where Genn was born, and the surrounding Bay Area, where she has lived
throughout her career, have inspired and informed her work. Living next to the Pacific Ocean and experiencing the world through expansive vistas and the magical fog provided Genn a unique interpretation of the coastal landscape through the obfuscated views and interplay of light through the fog and on the water. While the natural world and architectural references are apparent, her paintings are abstract and multilayered, both through her process and experiences, both in the Bay Area and her extensive international travels through Europe, Asia, Middle East and South America. Genn’s palettes, imagery and mark making are an amalgam of her lifelong passion observing nature, people, language, and cultures.
Martha Szabo immigrated to New York in 1957 following her terror during Nazi persecution then Soviet control of Hungary, her native homeland. Trained in classic figurative painting, but inspired immensely by Expressionism, Cubism, De Stijl, and Surrealism, Szabo celebrated her new freedom in New York by capturing the extraordinary views from the roof top of her apartment building. Her series of New York cityscapes painted over a four-decade period chronicled the shifts in the formal and historical aspects of paintings, but also the fast-changing skyline with new buildings and skyscrapers popping up yearly in her sanctuary city. Szabo looked right onto the Seagram’s Building. However, the most fascinating aspect of her work was the extensive evolution and persistence of Surrealistic influences in this series of pictures, and her painting more generally. She loved to view the skyline during dusk as the sun was setting, with the soft, reduced sunlight she did not have clear views. Thus, with her perceptions diminished as her imagination ran wild, the plumes of smoke and smokestacks themselves became figures, couples embracing one another, all dancing on the rooftops, and celebrating freedom and life. The rooftop became an endless source of celebration and joy for Szabo, her imagination, and creativity.
Throughout nearly all six decades of Beate Wheeler’s (1932 – 2017) career, her paintings were about color and form, the influences of nature, and her feelings and emotions towards these topics. One can feel her energy and passion in the thousands of intentional and individual marks of pigment, each one deliberate to create stunning arrays of color and passages of pattern, forms, and abstract imagery. Wheeler made specific marks, she did not scrub the canvas in a brushy back and forth or agitated manner. She made distinct marks, echoing the profound influences on her work by Impressionistic masters with their bold use of color as well as the subtle and elegant exploration of hues in Milton Resnick’s work, with whom she studied under in the 1950s in Berkeley, California. Wheeler had an intuition about color, she understood color adjacency and the interaction of hues in compositions, how the colors could meld and from a distance mix in the viewer’s eye allowing them to see something different than when close and dissecting each hue in their respective shapes and placements. Wheeler’s color sensibility made her paintings dynamic, vibrant, almost alive and very distinct in appearance. Hence, the strong feeling that they are derived from nature and her keen ability to observe the subtle interplay of color in the natural world.
James Kelly (1913 – 2003) was championed by the important curator Walter Hopps who also founded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957. Hopps was drawn to Kelly’s innovation and diverse art making that was not easily pigeonholed. Kelly’s geometric roots began during Late Modernism. Then, captivated by Abstract
Expressionism in San Francisco, he pushed gestures and marks to Pop-inspired commentary and figural references through the 1960s and his subsequent move to New York. The 70s saw a recurrence of geometry in his brief post-minimalist works. However, missing the freedom of the gesture and color, Kelly returned to the gesture, leveraging color, and sculpting impasto surfaces. Humor and a dose of cynicism are a recognizable hallmark of Kelly’s later artworks, at least for those “in the know” and who knew him well.
Throughout Dee Shapiro’s (b. 1936) six-decade career, her work has largely focused on two main trajectories. First and formally, her work utilizes patterning, painting, and collaging with an emphasis on color and geometry to generate her imagery and compositions. Second and conceptually, her artworks mostly subvert the male gaze and objectification of women by presenting the female body through pattern and emphasizing biological functions versus the fleshy desires. Her most current works revisit and re-present the classical female nudes throughout art history. Shapiro does not present them as muses in the amorous and physically desirous way as the original male painters, but rather as everyday women with their own identity and not particularly engaging with the viewer.
The paintings of Joe Ramiro Garcia (b. 1966) are narrative, derived from current events and inspired by art historical figures, while the imagery and palettes reference personal memories and emotions. Initially, the paintings appear Pop-inspired and a collaging of everyday, somewhat banal and, often, appropriated images. However, the paintings are highly technical in that they also incorporate a complex printing process to introduce certain imagery that provides not only layers of color and detail, but also content as a referent and/or memory trigger. The medium for the image transfer process is paint, not ink, so that every layer and detail in the composition is painted.
The environment and an activism through emotional and artistic expression using color, abstracted imagery, and the illusion of depth and movement through painting is a common thread with the artworks of Grace Graupe-Pillard (b. 1941) and Ellen Kozak (b. New York City). Both artists focus on the beauty and vitality of nature. Graupe-Pillard emphasizes the landscape with a spotlight on the disruption and displacement of inhabitants (humans, animals, other wildlife) due to extreme weather and fires resulting from extreme climate change. Kozak focuses on the necessity as well as the beauty and serenity of flowing rivers by specifically leveraging memory and the anguish of loss if they are destroyed by manmade development, abuses, and pollution.
Claire Seidl (b. 1951) Seidl’s paintings on paper are a slow read (as are her paintings on canvas or linen) with layers of values, the presence of lines combined with brush marks, washes and swaths of subtle color—all take a while to capture and absorb. The paintings are full of binaries: thick and thin, translucent and opaque, fine lines and wide brush strokes, figure and ground, light and dark, neutral and darker palettes. This combination of binaries and Seidl’s organic process, combining the previous additions with the next, adds to the mystery of her paintings that rely largely on the subtle differences in grey tones and dilute color washes to distinguish between the various marks and strokes on the supports. This quality also relates to her interest in black and white photography, in particular, images taken at night. The lower the level of light, the lower the contrast, and therefore, the values of a range of colors become closer and similar, which, in turn, makes the distinction between shapes and forms less obvious. The imagery in the photos informs her paintings and influences the often-neutral palettes, putting an emphasis on the
painting process and resulting shapes to generate the compositions.
Joan Thorne (b. 1943) is an expressionistic painter all the way through, exuding passion with each gesture and layering intense emotions with every color choice. She was influenced by late Abstract Expressionism in the late 1960s and 70s during her studies and early career as well as the influences of many other overlapping forms of expressionism: from Art Informel, Art Brut, and German Expressionism. It is also interesting to note that shapes in Thorne’s paintings are not grounded, they float and are independent structures. There are no horizon lines or landscape references. Her interest in mysticism is probably more at play than any strong reference to Surrealism or geometry and Modernism. The point in noting the ungrounding of the shapes and forms is that Thorne’s paintings are pure abstractions, emerging out of her interpretation of art historical movements as well as her memories, dreams, travels, and life experiences including psychological and transcendent experiences inspired by movies, poetry and synesthesia.
By David Eichholtz
July 24, 2024, New York
Gechtoff Untitled , 1985
See For Your Self , 2018 Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel
12 x 15”
Nancy Genn Seadrift , 1984
paper embossed
Combustion , 2020
George Hofmann Daytime Meteor, 2022
on linen mounted to panel 18 x 24”
Ink on paper
x 22” - Framed size - 37” x 29.5” x 1.25”
My Reclining Nude , 2020 Mixed media on paper 24 x 39” - Framed size - 30 x 43”
