Jardin~with Bushwick Glimpses

Polly Schindler

Jardin:
a botanically themed exhibition of artwork featuring:

- Alexandria Tarver - Amy Lincoln - Bonny Leibowitz - Dan Flanagan - Dana James - Ellen Siebers - Emilia Olsen - Evan Reehl Ryer - Giada Crispiels - Hidenori Ishii - Janice Nowinski - JJ Manford - Kerry Law - Lauren Collings - Liesl Pfeffer - Nick Wildermuth - Polly Shindler - Riad Miah - Ryan Cobourn - Susanna Coffey -

No.4 Studio is pleased to announce the third exhibition of its inaugural season: a botanically-themed exhibition of work by twenty artists. 

Jardín, in the simplest sense, is a show of work that reveals the beauty and delights of the garden and its fruits. It is the garden as a space of desire - a place that is inherently human and at the root of culture. This is not a landscape exhibition, but rather, an examination of the garden motif as a symbol of cultivation. In this sense, it presents art making as parallel: a meditative process of bringing activity to fruition.

The exhibition becomes a garden itself - a curated and cultivated oasis of artwork set against the rapidly transforming industrial landscape where this space for art exists. There is a distinction that separates garden from wilderness: an enclosure or boundary perhaps, but more so, the human hand and effort. The garden is a site of beauty, but, like visual art, is also a site of artifice.

It was thus on a cold and snowy Sunday, January 17th at the closing party.

Susanna Coffey

Who is this wonderful painter? I loved these, their brute physicality and touch, and forgot the lineup of names...

As this post will show, leaf is a wonderful addition to paint...such rich built-in contrast (of course the Italians figured this out long ago).

Susanna Coffey's beautiful rose, on high. The painting is light, showing the delicacy of the flower. 

Really excited about these weirdly realized, brush-mark exploiting patterned plant forms. 

Overview at Jardin

Janice Nowinski - a simply gorgeous painting, so historically resonant, yet fresh, especially the rich darks and the way the figure emerges from it.

Half album cover from the 1960s, half epic history painting~

Riad Miah - watery bubble forms - glazed yet light; the subtle coloration  serves the motif well.

Bonny Liebowitz, who will have a solo in the studio no. 4 space in fall 2016. These are oil on Japanese papers.

Causing a subtle and strange blurring of the paint within a complex space.

Life on Mars: Sideshow on Mars, part of an exchange with Rich Timpiero's Sideshow Gallery. 
The press release states, 
"The painters in our exhibition, who range in age from their twenties to their seventies and come from as far afield as Australia, California, Israel, and Georgia, include Mandy Lyn Ford, Pam Longobardi, Fran O’Neill, Zuska Vaclavik and Etty Yaniv. These artists are exhibiting side-by-side with painters who have been working for years in New York: Lizbeth Mitty, Art Guerra, Rich Timperio, Mary Devincentis, Joyce Yamada and Daniel John Gadd; cross-pollinations of artists with various backgrounds and personal histories that have formed communities around painting. This community of mutual influence is the heart of painting’s resurgence, ongoing renewal, and continuing relevance especially in Brooklyn."Life on Mars link

Daniel John Gadd

Gadd's merger of precious silver leaf with oil is ambitious and I want more! The show as a whole focused on the field as a space and in this case, Gadd exploited the grid of the silver leaf as a loose structure; wonder where he'll take these.

Etty Yaniv - detail

Within the dense, collaged surfaces one traverses spaces of photographs and sketches~linearity compressed physically - really exciting.

Etta Yaniv, the large work as a whole.

Beautiful, densely surfaced work in the side gallery at Life on Mars.

The illumination of the chest in this figure pulled me in, somehow given extra glow with the cold snow outside.

...and then to Sharon Butler at Theodore Arts~

Sharon Butler at Theodore -

Pared down compositions, exerting much more control on smaller substrates. No longer exposed substrates or sweeps of fabric with notations; the notations themselves are becoming more central and morphing into layouts, bringing a text reference. A language more strictly within the confines of painting as we traditionally know it is developing.
NOTE: This weekend is the last weekend of Butler's exhibition~