In a culture increasingly driven by speed and scale, my work offers a deliberate counterpoint, unfolding slowly and intentionally. I am unapologetically committed to an approach to image-making that prioritizes touch, care, and attention—features that cannot be rushed. This rhythm reflects my values: tenderness, patience, and a deep engagement with process.
A system of mark-making based on the grid anchors my compositions. The order and stability that the grid provides, however, is continually challenged by the imperfections of human gesture. As I work, the grid wavers, slipping out of alignment, creating tension between control and unpredictability. Fragility, imperfection, and impermanence are constants, echoing the universal tension between our intentions and the inevitable disruptions of life. These truths shape my approach to the act of making.
My materials are simple: inks, gouache, and colored pencil, applied to surfaces including paper, canvas, panel, and architecture. The scale of my work ranges from the intimate—just a few inches—to the monumental, spanning over 400 feet. Despite the precision of the finished images, no digital tools are used in their creation. Every mark is placed by hand, with intention.
As I work, I let go of expectations, allowing the compositions to emerge through accumulation, repetition, and improvisation. The images that result from this approach feel both still and moving, orderly and chaotic, striving toward perfection while wholly imperfect.
Beauty, I believe, resides in the in-between—the space where chaos meets organization.
linn meyers is based in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Phillips Collection, among other institutions. Her paintings and drawings have been acquired by museums including The British Museum, (London) the Amore Pacific Museum of Art, (Seoul) the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (CA) the National Gallery of Art, (DC) the Baltimore Museum of Art, (MD) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA). meyers is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, several DC Commission on the Arts fellowship awards, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She is currently a fellow at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in New York. meyers earned her BFA at The Cooper Union, and an MFA at the California College of the Arts.
In creating feminist and queer sculptures that reference the figure, I combine personal symbols with surrealism. My work has long been influenced by the decorative arts and art nouveau ceramics in particular, which can be seen in the glazes I use. Here the glitter and iridescence of the femme fatale has been transformed into a gender-fluid warrior. The interior mirroring in the work creates a baroque visual onslaught merging body, machine, and architecture. These otherworldly totems address sexuality while incorporating nostalgic space-age imagery. Roberta Smith in her review of “Wild Chambers” at Mother Gallery, writes: “Both artists show an unresolvable tension between the abstract and representational as a main power source in their work. Kunin’s compartmentalized surfaces give glimpses of extruded eyes, mouths and breasts while outbursts of incised drawing add a second level of consciousness. Their effect is both hilarious and primeval.”
The free-standing sculptures combine the abstraction of the body with architecture. “Ultra Green Pavilion” pays homage to Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion, designed in 1914, combined with a feminist twist on the op- art imagery of Victor Vasarely. The back of the form reveals its inner armature, a stage set that is constantly shape-shifting due to its luminous glaze. “Laughing Castle II” and “Laughter” play with Vasarely’s optical illusions, bringing them into three dimensions, while adding a humorous feminist critique.
Julia Kunin lives in Brooklyn, NY, and works frequently in Hungary. She earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.F.A. from The Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her work explores themes of queerness, feminism and the body. Solo exhibitions include Laughing Castles at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY 2025, Dream Machines at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL, 2023, Rainbow Dream Machine at McClain Gallery, Houston, TX 2020 -2021 and Mechanical Ballet at Kate Werble Gallery, NY, NY 2021. Les Guerilleres Sandra Gering Gallery, NY, NY, 2015, Golden Grove, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX, 2013, Nightwood, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY, NY, 2012, Crimson Blossom Deutches Leder Museum, Offenbach, Germany 2002. Two person Exhibitions: Kaleidoscope Eyes, with Mara Held, at McClain Gallery in Houston, TX 2023, Wild Chambers, with Yevgeniya Baras, at Mother Gallery, NY, NY 2022, Against Nature, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, 2007. Recent group Exhibitions include: Painting Deconstructed, Ortega Y Gasset projects, Brooklyn, NY 2024, I’ll Be Your Mirror, Queer Biennial, Detroit, MI 2024, Getting to Ick, Hesse Flatow Gallery, NY, NY, Behind this Mask, Another Mask, curated by Sam Adams at Abigail Ogilvey Gallery, Los Angeles, Queer Clay at AMOCA, LA, 2023, Conversing in Clay, at LACMA, Los Angeles, CA.
Kunin was a Fulbright Scholar to Hungary in 2013. In 2010 She received a Trust for Mutual Understanding grant to Hungary. In 2008 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a residency at Art Omi. In 2007 she received the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Artist Residency. Fellowships include: The MacDowell Colony, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, CEC Artslink grant to The Republic of Georgia, Artist Residency in Wiesbaden, Germany, Yaddo, The Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, The Core Program in Houston, TX, and Skowhegan. Julia Kunin currently has a series of ceramic lamps at Ralph Pucci International. She is has written artist interviews for Two Coats of Paint. She is also a member of the board of FIAR, The LGBTQ Fire Island artist residency. Her work was recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, and by The Museum of Art and Design, in New York, NY. Her work was reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, October 2022, “Yevgeniya Baras and Julia Kunin at Mother Gallery.”
Elegy (2024)As Tears Go By (2025)Apocalypse IV (2022)Divine Justice (2025)Fire Next Time (2025)Days of Awe (2023)Countryside Trimurti (2024)Elephant of the Clouds (2024)Dreamer (2025)Pastorale (2024)In the Dark (2025)Kali Unleashed (2024)Daydream (2025)Storm Surge (2023)Treehouse (2022)Voyage Out (2025)
—click on any image to enlarge—
Artist’s Statement
My newest paintings focus on apocalypses, fables, fantastic landscapes, and reveries. My paintings echo their sources while also addressing contemporary issues such as climate change, displacement, floods, and fire. These paintings translate mythological imagery from a diverse array of sources, examining how visual culture unfolds across centuries and contexts including deities from India. These mythical figures are placed in composite imaginary landscapes and mixed with playful abstracted imagery. A comparative mythology emerges as visual motifs repeat across canvases, prompting unexpected connections. In other paintings, I have created fantastical landscapes with transformative symbolic trees and wonderlands. In these paintings, the visionary and dreamlike imagery is explored with intense and vivid color and with a riot of linear and eccentrically shaped gestures: there are many textured layers of oil paint. My canvases are always meant to be materially present with vivid strokes, colors,and graphics. I keep my painting surfaces alive with active brush marks, color, collage, textures, and patterns; the surfaces are not polished to the point of illusion. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, my paintings pay homage to our individual and collective pasts while also confronting our present.
Susan Bee is an artist, book artist and editor. She has had eleven solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC. She has had solo shows at many other venues and her work has been included in many group shows. In 2024, Bee’s “Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023” was at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA. The show was accompanied by a 68-page full-color catalog with essays by curator Johanna Drucker, John Yau, and Raphael Rubinstein. Bee’s artwork and artist’s books are in many public and private collections and have been reviewed in numerous publications. She has published eighteen artist’s books included collaborations with Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, and Jerome Rothenberg. Her bookwork, including her unique and editioned leporellos, is represented by Central Booking and Granary Books. Bee was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues with Mira Schor from 1986-2016 and M/E/A/N/I/N/G:An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke University Press, 2000). Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive are at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. She has a BA from Barnard College and a MA in Art from Hunter College. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014.
Chasing the Deer (2022)Mirage in the Hills (2025)Couple (2022)Ram Bearer (2023)Bull Riding at Sea (2022)Gazelle with Frieze of Gazelles (2022)Golden Deer with Bird (2022)Winged Animal with Headdress (2023)Woman and Bull (2022)Woman Riding Bull with Waves (2023)Walking Ibex with Vessel (2025)Madonna (2023)White Horse (2025)Double Ibex (2025)
—click on any image to enlarge—
Artist’s Statement
For the past 17 years I have been making sculptures that reference ancient art and are constructed mainly from recycled plastic bottles.
My influences include ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern votive figures, tomb models, animal sculptures, vessels, and hybrid animal/vessel sculptures. I love these works for their visual beauty and mystery, for their visceral connection to the past, and for their timeless themes that depict a common humanity across cultures. Through these pieces, I learn about the history, customs, and religious practices of the past while marveling at the beautiful forms and exquisite skills of these artist ancestors.
In my studio, with equal parts reverence and play, I reinterpret these ancient works using recycled plastic bottles. I collect, cut into pieces, and glue the found convex and concave parts into new sculpture. Some of my pieces are a close facsimile of the ancient works, while others evolve through the process of making and take on a form of their own.
Building my sculptures is slow—I construct, cut away, and remake my pieces until the forms feel right and seem to embody an inner life. I then coat the pieces with glaze-like layers of resins, polymers, paint, mica, and glass powders to alter the color of the plastic, vary the levels of transparency and opacity, and emphasize or obscure the original material. At first glance, my work might look like glass or ceramic, yet upon closer inspection, a logo, a familiar embossed pattern, or an expiration date reveals the actual plastic material.
Conceptually, I’m interested in our understanding of ancient works and cultures, our shifting notions of value, and the environmental impact of our contemporary throwaway culture. Formally, my interest is in transforming unlikely materials into compelling sculptures through the exploration of structure, form, scale, texture, and color.
Shari Mendelson is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn and Schoharie County, New York. She has been the recipient of four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2017, 2011, 1997, and 1987), a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant (2017) and a Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2024). She has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation, as well as a visiting artist at UrbanGlass, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Toledo Museum of Art, and Pilchuck School of Glass.
Solo exhibitions include Fahrenheit Madrid, Madrid Spain, (2023-24) Tibor de Nagy, NYC (2023, 2020), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY (2025, 2022), The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2019), The Agnes Varis Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (2018), Todd Merrill Studio, NYC (2067/17), John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2013) and Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (1997) among others. She has been included in numerous 2 person and group exhibitions including a 2-person show at the Eckert Art Gallery at Millersville University, Millersville, PA, and a 4-person show at Make Hauser & Wirth, LA, CA both in 2024.
Mendelson’s work is in the permanent collection of the following museum collections: The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, AU. Her work is also in many other public and private collections.
Her work has been featured in publications including in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Forward, the Los Angeles Times, Glass Quarterly, and others.
Mendelson received an MFA from the State University at New Paltz and a BFA from Arizona State University. She has taught at many schools including Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, The Maryland Institute College of Art, New York University, and The Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
Horse Head Nebula (2014-23)Pink Tara (2012-25)Strangelove 2001 (2018)Some Breathe Iron (2016) The 1965 (2022)Blue Medicine (2022) (In memoriam Jack Whitten)Path Language (2024)Remembrance 3 (2022)Channels and Drops I (2022)Channels and Drops II (2022)Channels and Drops (Egyptian) (2022)He Fell Into a Wild Fox Body for Five Hundred Lifetimes (2016-21) Horse of Orange (2014-24)
—click on any image to enlarge—
Artist’s Statement
I like it when my paintings make me feel like I am not alone in the room, when a painting shows me a new code to play with. I begin with a pair of colors which might derive from a painting of a Tantric deity or a cereal box from the 1960’s. I paint lines as if I am following tributaries I’ve never seen before but seem familiar. Within the lines are sometimes stars. Or, I place tiny obstacles in the path to shift the scale and throw the lines off the trail on purpose. At those junctures, the lines become inflamed and secrete larger shapes. I try to see a syntax forming within the composition and make the whole thing rhyme with itself. Rhyming is the key.
In the composition of the painting, circulation is everything. Like water bubbling with air, blood effervesces into thoughts in the brain, flesh eventually transfigures; ashes and dust disperse and magnetize the mists exhaled by trees. Clouds fill and fall as rain into rivers flowing on and on, their journey destined for your teacup. I’d like my painting to be like offering you that cup of tea.
Sharon Horvath grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to New York City to attend The Cooper Union. She lived abroad in Rome (MFA, Tyler School of Art) and Amsterdam, and currently works in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Andes, NY. Horvath is Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY, and was inducted into the National Academy Museum in 2016. She received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India in 2013-14. Other distinctions include a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman award, and a Painting Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Horvath has had numerous solo exhibitions with Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Lori Bookstein Projects, Victoria Munroe Fine Art, and Pierogi Gallery in New York City, as well as the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton, New York.
My paintings are never based on a preparatory sketch or plan. I usually begin with quickly painted shapes, lines, or a configuration. It’s a casual, energetic start and a proposition to contend with. Once I’m locked in, I try to sharpen my focus without extinguishing the life of the nascent image. If I suspend judgement and maintain an open, playful attitude, unexpected pathways emerge, and I can find my way forward.
When I too quickly feel a sense of satisfaction and control, I get suspicious that I’m trading on what I already know; not discovering. When this happens, I need to kill the lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view. It takes a surprising number of adjustments in color and composition along with layering, blotting, scraping, and sanding to arrive at a resolution. It’s the interplay between physicality and thought that makes a painting real.
David Hornung is a painter and collage artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the US and UK. As an educator, he has served on the faculties of The Rhode Island School of Design, Indiana University, Skidmore College, Pratt Institute, and Adelphi University. He is the author of Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (Laurence King Pub Ltd.), a color theory and practice textbook that has been translated into six languages and is used in art schools and private studios around the world. He shows at the J.J. Murphy Gallery in NYC, Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock New York, Pulp Gallery in Holyoke Ma., and Cynthia Winings Gallery at Blue Hill, Maine.
I grew up in a strict religious environment where patriarchal control was cloaked in devotion. That embodied experience of power—how it shapes belief, space, and behavior—continues to inform my sculpture. I work in bronze, a material historically tied to permanence, reverence, and authority. I also work against it, covering it in silver nitrate patinas that shimmer like futuristic machinery.
My figures reference classical form and monumental symmetry, yet they erupt with open mouths, unruly hair, and rear ends. These contradictions—between the ideal and the absurd, the sacred and the playful—disrupt the traditional language of power. I’m interested in how sculpture can both replicate and resist control and how touch, humor, and eros can challenge forms that once demanded reverence.
Ultimately, I see sculpture as a site where control and vulnerability collide—a space to question who holds power, how it operates, and what happens when we interrupt it.
Sarah Peters lives and works in Queens, NY. She is a recipient of awards and residencies including the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, John Michael Kohler Artist Residency, WI; New York Foundation for the Arts; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and The Sharpe-Wallentas Studio Program.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain (2022); Zidoun Bossuyt, Luxembourg (2020); NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY (2019); Howards Gallery, Athens, GA (2019); Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT (2019); Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (2018); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2017); Eleven Rivington, New York, NY (2015); 4 AM, New York, NY (2015); Bodyrite at Asya Geisberg, New York, NY (2014); and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2013).
Group exhibitions include Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstractions from the Permanent Collection and Beyond, Kansas City, MO (2024); Full Disclosure, Selections from the Thomas Sewall Collection, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND (2024); Vessel, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2024); Destiny’s Glitch, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; High Contrast, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York, NY (2019); No Patience for Monuments, Perrotin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2019) Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); and Rodin and the Contemporary Figurative Tradition, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2017), among others.
Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from The University of Pennsylvania and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
My recent paintings explore a range of imagery from my imagination that is partly drawn from memory yet grounded in the experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes. The result sits resolutely in the fertile border between landscape and abstraction.
I spent a lot of time as a child in the East End of Long Island surrounded by open farmland. The empty farm field sits in my mind as a place like the space in the painting; the painting becomes a field where I can grow strange natural forms that suggest trees or weather. The term dream logic feels apt where there are elements, forms or light that feel familiar to the viewer, but things verge on the surreal. I aim for a degree of ambiguity that resists easy naming. My paintings often embody a kind of euphoria, yet I am at once celebrating the beauty of the natural world while we still have it and expressing melancholy at its destruction in our hands.
I want people to see the paint in front of them as opposed to an illusion that feels set and closed. Openness and mutability are also how imagery appears in memory, where things aren’t fixed and bordered, and I have honed a language that reflects this fluidity and playfulness. My fears about the perilous climate seep in to inform the work but are not broadcast in obvious ways. The paintings combine investigative lines and floods of color to create imaginary landscapes that suggest nature off kilter.
I start from ink and watercolor drawings that I approach like a stream of consciousness writing exercise. When I make the drawings, I am thinking as much about how the lines narrate the picture as I am about evoking the light and atmosphere of a specific environment. I create images in the space of the picture rather than attempting realism. Because I work with continuous line making in the drawings, the resulting language verges on cartoon-like, with a plasticity that has been called “as if Milton Avery painted the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.”
I work from a hovering, aerial vantage point, picturing the paper as an empty field where I can draw in the dirt with lines that move around the field and then start upwards towards an area that is like a sky, scooping volumes of air with a looping line. I then make small scale oil paintings that attempt to capture the freshness and immediacy of the watercolors, and the way unexpected, unnamable colors flow into each other. I remain open to the ways oil paint is different and change things as I go. From these smaller works, I select some to create larger paintings. I do this all freehand, so each size has different challenges to overcome, and showing some of that struggle is important to me. I want to arrive at a place that is hard won and alive.
Elizabeth Hazan is a New York based visual artist. Her imaginary landscape paintings mix gestural topography with elements of modernist abstraction. The work depicts a version of nature off-kilter, evoking a charged atmosphere, familiar to the viewer yet verging on the surreal.
Hazan was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has twice been a resident of Yaddo and received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Recent solo shows include Under the Sun, HESSE FLATOW, NY; Sundown, Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, NY; High Noon, Duck Creek Art Center, Springs, NY; Body to Land, (two person) Turn Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Recent group shows include Even in Arcadia There I Am at HESSE FLATOW, NY; Blue Hour at Phillips, NY; Mercury Rising, at Bookstein Projects, NY: Trodden Path; HESSE FLATOW East, Amagansett NY; Psychedelic Landscape, Eric Firestone Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper. She serves as the founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY.
Already at a speed that would burn us alive (2024)Crystal Spawn (2024)Celestial Dusk (2023)From One Cell Evolving (2024)Discount Medicines (2024)Electro-brain-net II (2024)I look in the mirror and I see nothing (2024)I Can See For Miles (2023)More Yellow in Organic Areas (2024)Sorcerer (2024)Other Lumens Begin (2024)My Mind Split Open (2024)The Bogus Man II (2023)Turning in a Light (2024)We are not even asleep and it is here (2024)We Were All Afraid of the Earth (2024)The Whole Moment of the Earth (2024)Weekly and Monthly Hazards (2024)
—click on any image to enlarge—
Artist’s Statement
I began making paintings again in 2022 after several years of working exclusively on paper. A lot of the same motifs I use in drawings show up in the paintings – strange sculptural architectural shapes, maps, diagrams, constellations, the body, molecular structure. I try my best not to dwell on why I am drawn to the imagery in these works, especially in the early stages of a painting. Too much clarity of purpose, for me, means I am closing off possible avenues of discovery. The titles (which always come after, when I have one foot in the real world) offer clues to the viewer and to myself, but they are only suggested guideposts. I would rather allow the imagery to keep regenerating itself. My goal has always been to make a thing that buzzes and vibrates with a sort of mysterious energy.
I once had a teacher who asked me what I thought about when I was painting. Back then I had no idea how to answer. Right now I’m thinking about making a line straight, but not too straight. I’m thinking the paint is not gliding on the way I want it to, it’s too thin or too thick. I’m wondering if this line is like an illustration, but I’m not even sure what that really means. I’m trying to keep things loose, but then I tighten up. I want spontaneity without sloppiness. I want effort to show, but not too much effort. I want it to look like I care a lot (I do) and I’m working really hard (I am), but like it is flowing out of me with the greatest of ease (it’s not.) I hope to be working on that for a long time – the clock is ticking.
Steve Greene was born in 1955 and grew up in a small farming town in Arkansas. He moved to New York City in 1978, where he studied at Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in illustration. Greene has had eight solo shows, including four at FROSCH & CO in New York since 2013. His work has been exhibited at SCOPE Basel in Switzerland, The Drawing Center, Art in General, The Alternative Museum, and Adam Baumgold Fine Art in NY, The Brooklyn Museum, Pierogi 2000 in Brooklyn, and other venues, and is represented by numerous corporate and private collections. His work has been reviewed by Two Coats of Paint, The Paris Review, and JJ Murphy. Since 2019 he has lived and worked in the Farmington Valley in Connecticut.
The Weeping Time (2024)Fisher of Men (2024)Rubble (2024)Miracle (2024)Mouth of Hell (2024)Cherry Tree (2024)Death (2024)Lazarus (2024)Kermit’s Coup (2024)As Equals (2024)This is Us (2024)Eyes on Lake Street (2024)
—click on any image to enlarge—
Artist’s Statement
I see my work as history painting, promoting the obscure, the forgotten, and the common knowledge. My life has been full of tribulations which I look at as initiations. For every hardship I have endured, my art has grown with me. My father went to prison for murder when I was eight years old. Although losing my dad was rough, he left me a book on military history and one on art that started my infatuation with both and served as a means of connection with my pops and provided material for a deeper connection with my mom. Similarly, art was a bastion of light after I returned from Iraq, helping me deal with my guilt about the war.
This work comes from my personal experience, but is not entirely personal. I tell stories that reflect my story but are in dialogue with the wider world, where myth gives voice to the underbelly, the lumpen in tandem displaying the familiar and grandiose. My work tethers together seemingly opposing ideas as I connect the personal, the historical and the political. I am painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction. I occupy my pictures with characters who serve as archetypes in conjunction with memory and self-exploration in order to reflect on the absurdity, malleability, and monumentality of history.
Gregory Rick was born in 1981 and grew up in South Minneapolis. Rick received his BFA from CCA, and is currently pursuing his MFA in art practice at Stanford University. Developing a historical imagination and a fondness for drawing stories, Rick collapses history while
confronting personal trauma. Rick’s works exist as reflections of his personal experience while being in dialogue with the wider world. Rick has received the Combat Infantry Badge, the Yamaguchi printmaking award, the Nathan Oliveira fellowship, the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, the Artadia Award, the Daedalus award, and the SFMOMA SECA Award, and has shown in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally.
