Basie Allen • Penny Arntz • Miguel Arzabe • Kadar Brock • Quentin Curry • Lauren dela Roche • Astrid Dick • Colleen Herman • Huê Thi Hoffmaster • Cody Hoyt • Walter C Jackson • Matt Kleberg • Seffa Klein • Holly Lowen • Mack Ludlow • Holly Ballard Martz • Ryan McMenamy • Virginie Pernot • Ben Pritchard • Toni Ross • Cybele Rowe • Bruce M. Sherman
Smorgasbord is a group exhibition of contemporary artists celebrating variety and difference, both within the individual artworks and in the show at large. It is a cross-generational exhibition, and a playful celebration of life, marking the beginning of the summer season in East Hampton, New York. The artists on view are unafraid to mix and collide referents, mediums, materials, inspirations, and motifs, creating densely layered artworks reflecting a host of life experiences.
Architectural elements and portals define the work of Walter C Jackson (b. 1940) and Matt Kleberg (b. 1985). Jackson is a sculptor whose work combines natural materials—such as wood, sisal and jute fibers—alongside industrial plastic and aluminum. In the 1970s, Jackson was developing the idea of a passageway, a method of inviting the viewer to enter into the work and of creating a portal between concepts of ritual and technology, past and future. Kleberg is a painter whose architectural vocabulary borrows from spatial and ornamental references such as altars, theater sets, and stages. At first appearing flat and graphic, upon closer inspection his paintings reveal wobbly lines, rough edges, and fragments of color formed by layers of paint and oil stick, infusing his work with a kinetic tactility. They are both doorways and barriers, realms humming with potential.
This energy of possibility is also found in the work of painters Colleen Herman (b. 1982), Huê Thi Hoffmaster (b. 1982), and Lauren dela Roche (b. 1983), who all represent the natural world, gardens, flora and fauna. Herman’s blooming abstractions reflect seasonal changes and growth. Pouring, scribbling, and dabbing paint with her fingers, Herman embraces a process that is highly intuitive. These energetic textural interventions contrast with spans of canvas or linen intentionally left bare. Herman has spent time in Oaxaca and Mexico City, and now lives and works between New York City and the Hudson Valley. The artist takes inspiration from the landscapes of all four places, alternatively tranquil, vibrant, and frenetic. Hoffmaster’s paintings reflect his mixed-race, multicultural Vietnamese-American identity. They are made in the studio and are abstracted, calligraphic depictions of flowering branches and thickets, growing amidst atmospheric grounds. The artist has also used studio dropcloths, dotted with paint, as his supports, creating a visual parallel between the abundance of nature and a regenerative artistic practice. This presentation is concurrent with the artist’s solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York City location. Dela Roche’s paintings depict multiplying and echoing views of a nude woman, appearing in dream-like environments amongst butterflies, snakes, and swans. The female form can be read as a symbol of Mother Nature. Dela Roche’s work has deep ties to agriculture and eco-theory, and she uses found and mended cotton feedsack textiles as her painting surfaces.
Ceramic is the medium used by Bruce M. Sherman (b. 1942), Cybele Rowe (b. 1963), Virginie Pernot (b. 1967), and Cody Hoyt (b. 1980). Pernot’s zoomorphic and geometric forms evoke hybrid creatures. The artist terms them “archaeological vessels from the future.” Working in the south of France, the white and red hues of her work reference Mediterranean terracotta. Sherman’s hand-thrown work maintains a delicate balance between humor and reverence; surrealism and tradition; function and beauty, with their flat planes and stylized faces. Hoyt creates angular, faceted vessels of interlocking shapes. The artist layers, cuts, and combines clay to develop dynamic cross-sections and intricately patterned slabs, deriving imagery from natural elements, as well as tiled floors, marquetry, and inlay design traditions. Rowe draws inspiration from nature, Aboriginal art, and the body for her monumental ceramic sculptures. Rowe is influenced by the landscape and climate of Joshua Tree, where has lived and worked since 2016, responding to the energy vortexes she perceives on the land.
Toni Ross (b. 1957), Penny Arntz (b. 1942), and Miguel Arzabe (b. 1975) each utilize fiber to create draped and wall works. Ross works with traditional craft mediums to address themes of distress and unity, integrating texture and natural patterns within her abstractions. Arzabe is a Bolivian-American artist who deconstructs colorful drawings and paintings into strips of material which he incorporates in woven surfaces. Arzabe considers his practice a reverse-engineering of source imagery, which includes European modernist painting as well as the craft techniques and cultural motifs of his Andean heritage. Arntz's early-career fiber works are exemplary of the studio craft legacy of 1970s art. Living and working in Santa Barbara, CA, Arntz and her family travelled during summers throughout the West, camping in national parks and experiencing nature and regional art. Arntz, an avid birder, often incorporated feathers into her textiles, shaped over fiberglass supports, which seem to float on the wall. They can be displayed either with their tassels radiating outward from the central form or hanging down, like a bird in flight or at rest.
Layered abstract painting, incorporating various material processes, characterize the work of Ben Pritchard (b. 1970), Seffa Klein (b. 1996), Kadar Brock (b. 1980), Basie Allen (b. 1989), Astrid Dick (b. 1972), and Quentin Curry (b. 1972). Curry layers stone dust and paint to create highly textured compositions with areas of three-dimensional relief. Drawing upon natural forms such as leaves and rocks, Curry’s paintings and sculptures suggest a reinterpretation of ancient pictographs. Allen is a poet and painter who mines his experiences living in urban and rural spaces. Through a process of layering text, paint, collage, and transfer, Allen mimics the dimensional chaos of a city or natural landscape. Brock layers multiple compositions atop one another, which become merged through continued erasure and reworking of the surface. He mimics the quality of weathered cloth or aged fresco, with surfaces that are worn, abraded, cracked, and torn. Dick uses alternate materials and supports to create a patterned painting world characterized by its directness and merging of “high and low.” Canvases may be completely covered in glitter, while other paintings layer oil on top of foam or crushed glass. Pritchard paints thickly-impastoed abstractions combining interlocking geometric shapes with organic forms and drips. Pritchard sees his paintings—defined by gritty accumulations of color—as reflections of layered memory. Klein is a French-American artist whose work is grounded in the intersection of science, aesthetics, and meditation. She paints in acrylic on heat-resistant woven glass canvas and applies a plaster bas-relief, forming a skeletal structure, before gilding the surface with molten bismuth metal.
Ryan McMenamy (b. 1973) and Holly Lowen (b. 1987) each make figurative paintings that reference commercial photography and fashion. Lowen’s recent paintings are set on the tennis court. She views the sport as a study in controlled aggression and social performance. The sterile uniformity of the all-white attire, the isolated confines of the court, and the tension veiled beneath polite decorum evoke themes of repression and release. McMenamy paints seated male figures in graphite and gouache on natural wood panels, enhancing the negative space of the wood grain with soft shadows to suggest subtle topographies of the body. The artist also draws upon his extensive career as a fashion illustrator and designer in explorations of the relationship between fashion and image.
Mack Ludlow (b. 1991) and Holly Ballard Martz (b. 1965) create multimedia sculptures from a variety of found materials. Ludlow’s recent series of work is inspired by farms near his home in southern Ontario, Canada, populated by horses and junk sculptures. He centers the equestrian form—both recognizable in its simplicity and compositionally sophisticated—and references folk and outsider art through his incorporation of found and industrial materials. Through the transformation of familiar objects, Martz challenges societal norms and power structures. Faded textiles—including vintage quilts and redressed canvas punching bags—become symbolic of changing bodies, and their tendency to warp, sag, and wrinkle. Martz’s punching bag works are intricately beaded and embroidered, colliding surfaces that connote violent touch with decorative traditions.