Heist Gallery is pleased to present, Quick While Still, a ‘pop-up’ exhibition of large-scale paintings by New York based artists Katherine Bernhardt, Kadar Brock, Mark Gibson, Matt Jones, John Newsom, and Wendy White who will exhibit their works in an exciting, unfinished space. One might even say that the rawness of the space itself is a reflection of the rawness of these artist’s ambitions. Quick While Still offers a chance to see their work stripped of the glamour of the highly polished white cubes of Chelsea.
The opening will take place from 6-9pm on Thursday, January 21st 2010 at 143 Madison (between 31st and 32nd). The exhibition will continue until Sunday, February 21st, and will be open for view from Tuesday through Sunday, 10am to 6pm.
The central theme that runs through Quick While Still deals with the idea of maintaining stillness in action. Each artist uses paint rather loosely, gesturally, in a way that is meant to call attention to the properties of the paint and the act (or action) of painting. There is a responsive/adaptive spirit that centers the show. The paintings on view range from representational and illusionistic to abstract and object-orientated.
“The artists involved in Quick While Still really seem to be showing us a way out of the mess we made of the past decade. After two wars, a failed banking system, the real estate bubble, etc., etc, they seem to be introducing new values, new paradigms. Their work is focused yet restless, considerate yet volatile. I find their energy infectious and their ambition refreshing” says Talia Eisneberg, the owner of Heist Gallery. “Putting up this show in an unfinished space seems to make all the sense in the world – it is time for us to hear from the artists themselves on what and how we need to rebuild.”
Katherine Bernhardt’s Swatch Watch paintings represent a new direction. While her thick, loose and rapid painting handling remains indebted to the destructive forces of Abstract Expressionism, her target has moved from questioning issues of beauty, glamour, and fetish to the fascination with time as object, icon and centeredness. For Bernhardt, the Swatch Watch paintings reposition the outwardness of looking with the inwardness of mediation and yoga. The center of the watch face is the point of contact between the different ‘hands’ or ‘arms’ of time and of body.
Kadar Brock’s new series of work investigates the roots of Abstract Expression and Minimalism to find a common intersection. Working on a large scale, his mostly black, white and silvery gray paintings explore the formal questions of the painting as an object while never losing sense of the surface’s ability to sustain a visual experience. Crucial to Brock’s work is a sort of reduction in the decision making process in order to focus on the singular act of mark-making. To accomplish this, he has recently begun employing a system of chance – rolling a dice – to eliminate the element of chance during the act of painting.
There’s a renewed sense of directness and openness in Mark Gibson’s recent paintings. After taking early morning walks in Prospect Park, Gibson returns to his studio to depict his experience of the landscape once removed. The immediacy and energy of his painting practice speaks to the full engagement of the original experience but also its ability to sustain further experiences. In them there’s an immediacy that’s temporary and an immediacy that’s more abstract and general. By fusing the particular – the succulent rhythm of individual leaves – with the general – that larger lurking feeling of mystery – Gibson examines the frustration of seeing, painting, and remembering.
For the past five years, Matt Jones has worked in four inter-related modes: ghosts, outer-space, inner-space, and energies. Together they form a way for Jones to interact with, critique, negotiate and play with the world around him. His ghosts are ‘portraits’ of the people who have witnessed his development as a person (son, boyfriend, etc.) In his outer-space painting, the bottom third of the picture is a paint speckled version of our universe while the top two thirds of the painting are a highly reflective black gloss, so that the viewer, standing in front of the picture, is literally projected into the great unknown. The silver paint of his inner-space paintings presumably refers to the metal wires of circuit boards. In the same way that these circuits can be re-soldered to establish new ‘connections’, so too does the mind have the ability to alter its synapses during meditation. By linking the idea of self-repair to self-awareness, Jones’s paintings double back on each other by both representing the process as well as guiding the viewer toward it. Jones’s fourth mode, his energy paintings, is celebration of the properties and possibilities of pure painting. After different colors of paint are poured onto plastic laid on the floor, the canvas is placed on top of it. As Jones removes the canvas from the plastic, the movements of his body are recorded in the movement of the paint.
John Newsom continues to explore the natural order as an allegory for the human experience found in Newsom’s earlier work. He vibrantly and energetically incorporates a layered pictorial space, abstract patterning and highly detailed renderings of birds and insects in an exploration of themes of love, hope, courage, and change. Newsom orchestrates complicated canvases, featuring a wide variety of gesture and attention to detail, which contributes to the conveyance of visible energies within the paintings. Newsom integrates various painting methods through his dynamic brushstrokes. The coarse application of paint is both a style and a statement for Newsom, in which the canvas becomes an emotionally charged field of action and the primal material qualities of the paint are fully expressed.
For QWS, Wendy White is presenting a new direction in her work. The visual language she has been developing is still present – multipanel canvases, sooty spray paint blacks, tart tennis-ball yellows, Pepto-Bismol pinks, elements of graffiti and spectacle. Her new paintings are building off the internal dynamics – both intuitively and formally – of the stenciled language within the picture plane by quite literally escaping from it. In “Reform,” we see the reversed R on the left side of the ‘primary’ canvas flowing into an abstracted, supportive and architectural R. In this exciting painting, one is witnessing the transition from the word in the image to the object as word.
