Eminence Grise Editions is pleased to announce the publication of a significant body of new works by the renowned painter Deborah Brown. Among these remarkable editions is a suite entitled Voyager, which is comprised of one image editioned in six different ways. Another image, Death Maiden, has also been produced in six color variants using Chine-collé. This work is offered individually with only three examples of each version. Danae and Zeus, a third image produced in a single color way, is offered in an edition of 18 examples. All of the works were printed by master printer Marjorie Van Dyke of VanDeb editions.

Deborah brown has commented about the work to which these prints relate:

“My images come from my imagination. Women, stripped of their protective and identifying clothing, navigate a familiar landscape as if in a dream. Female protagonists occupy a variety of spaces–climbing cliffs, paddling canoes and inhabiting treehouses–far from the quotidian activities of civilization. Their nudity makes them seem simultaneously vulnerable and powerful, as if they have returned to elemental or archaic origins. The presence of canine companions implies a departure or exile from a domestic setting, as well as an unseen threat that might require their protective services. The compositions and their implied narratives sometimes suggest contemporary re-enactments of myths from antiquity and the Bible commonly found in the canon of Western Art. My decision to remove the male characters implies a new gender order in which the female characters appear unrestricted by assumptions of female vulnerability and dependence on male actors for their legitimacy. In this body of work, I revisit themes explored by male artists, subverting expectations and readings of familiar Western images while changing the dynamic of the male gaze.”

Eminence Grise Editions is pleased to announce the publication of three woodcuts by Jill Moser. These new editions relate directly to an extraordinary series of collages that the artist undertook in 2020. According to Moser, woodcut as a process has a strong affinity to collage. in her extensive career as a printmaker, these images are the first that employ woodcutting exclusively.

The prepublication price for the suite of three woodcuts in $2,400. Individual images are available for $1,200 each. This offer is subject to prior sale.

Ellie Pyle paints from observation indirectly. Ideas drawn from both the transitory and the immediate refer to landscape, interior and virtual spaces, after doubling back and distilling themselves abstractly. Articulating experienced optical stimuli through the prism of her material vocabulary, a sensibility emerges and points toward  the possibilities for Art to be found  in all aspects of visual  experience. In this lobby she presents a painting, a diptych and a septych. She has always wanted to make lobby paintings.

This year Michael Steinberg and Eminence Grise Editions will be exhibiting the work of Derrick Adams, Iona Rozeal Brown, Melissa Brown, Lauren Comito, Yevgeniy Fiks, Sean Mellyn, Sandrine Guerin, Alex Haas, Fred Wilson, and a selection of rare American Pop Artist prints.

November 3-6, 2016

Schedule

Thursday, 11/3, 6 -9pm (First Viewing and VIP Ticket holders)

Friday, 11/4, 11am – 7pm (Free)

Saturday, 11/5, 11am – 7pm (Free)

Saturday, 11/5, 11am – 7pm (Free)

The Tunnel
269 11th Avenue
(bet. 27th and 28th Streets)

SHRINE is excited to present Summer Flats, a group exhibition celebrating a very simple concept: artists who work within the confines of traditionally 2-dimensional media. Summer is the perfect time for embracing a playful, relaxed mindset, and these artists, while not lacking intent or potency, all create works that embrace this open spirit. 

Working in multiple layers of pastel, Kyle Breitenbach explores what at first appear to be traditional icons and images; however, his process of applying and then carefully removing pigment on linen creates an atmospheric surface with a vibrant history of content and color. Also working in multiple layers, Marcus Jahmal and Sadie Laska use nontraditional methods of painting to create work that is completely unique and also instantly recognizable as their own. Jahmal paints on both sides of artist-prepared plexiglass to create images that seem to edge towards the mundane (a lizard on a branch, botanical leaves, a sunset with ship), but which are instantly electrified by his intuitive and sure-handed application of paint. Similarly, Laska deftly incorporates everyday objects and unexpected recycled materials such as paper cups, cardboard and work gloves into her hand cut, object-shaped paintings that are then camouflaged by layers of paint and spray-painted outlines. The resulting images hover between realism and the cartoon.

Mason Saltarrelli takes a more straightforward approach to mark making. His quiet, and usually abstract, drawings are on large sheets of collaged paper that has been carefully stained and treated. These hazy, vintage-looking backdrops are exceptionally rich and provide an extremely interesting setting for his automatic drawing style. Scott Zieher produces a slightly more straightforward form of collage work by completely limiting himself to found imagery and materials to express himself on paper. Relying on sourced images from magazines, books and postcards, Zieher has put together an incredibly cohesive body of work that resonates with an energy the original source material was not capable of expressing.

Rounding out the show are three artists who respond to the world around them in very different ways: Melissa Brown, Maria Calandra and Ellie Pyle. Melissa Brown’s latest series of paintings on aluminum are pop meditations on the complex and often banal nature of contemporary times. Her use of lottery ticket scratch-off paint, airbrushed acrylic and oil creates hyper-stylized renderings of car interiors, computer screens, landscapes and icons of pop culture. Coming from a very different point, Maria Calandra uses graphite to render collectors’ homes, studios and other interior spaces. Departing slightly from her well known series, Pencil in the Studio, where she visits artists’ studios to document their workspace and in process pieces, this group of work revolves around book collections and collectors’ living spaces. Also taking from her direct line of sight, Ellie Pyle appropriates imagery from the world around her, primarily signs and symbols that she crosses paths with daily here in NYC- a shopping bag emblem, MTA signage, the Wise Potato Chip truck, app icons from her telephone. Pyle then dramatically alters the context of the originating image through cropping the initial forms and adding a rugged texture to the surface of her paintings with multiple layers of glitter, which further removes the her work from its starting point.

Shrine is located in New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood just two blocks from the East Broadway F Train stop.

March 3–6, 2016

Schedule

Friday, March 4, 11am-7pm

Saturday, March 5, 11am-7pm

Sunday, March 6, 12-6pm

Pier 36, Downtown Manhattan
299 South Street
New York, NY 10002
Booth P2

[fair website]

Represented Artists

Derrick Adams

Lauren Comito

Yevgeniy Fiks

Sandrine Guerin

Commenting on these paintings Rucker states, "This work is a continuation of my exploration of construction methods and material, in particular the wooden sheet material OSB (oriented strand board) the most inexpensive and commonly used construction sheathing available. This series of paintings reference construction shed or fences that typically surround work sites, and the paint used to cover them, "safety blue".

Chris Rucker is originally from Connecticut, received a BFA from university of Connecticut in sculpture. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1996. He is a partner in a design and build company, his furniture design is represented by industry gallery in Los Angeles.

Michael Steinberg Fine Art, in conjunction with 33 Orchard, presents Archival Impulse, Ayana V Jackson’s first solo exhibition in New York. Opening on November 13th, and running through December 21st, 2014, the exhibition features works produced between 2011 and 2013.

Archival Impulse takes its name from art historian Hal Foster’s idea that by confronting the archive new systems of knowledge can be created. In this case Jackson confronts late 19th and early 20th century imagery of non-European bodies. To do this, the artist draws on images sourced from the Duggan Cronin collection created in South Africa, the works of unknown photographers practicing throughout the global south at the time, as well as documentation of reconstructed villages and “native” performers that were touring in Europe’s Human Zoos.

The artist’s process involves identifying reoccurring motifs in the original images, interrogating them, performing them and reconstructing them. Her primary intervention is in her deliberate choice not to situate the “subjects” in the scenario. The separation of the bodies in the foreground from the background image is done first to bring attention to the fact that these early photographs are theatrical performances written and directed by the photographer and subject alike and as such are fictitious, second to ask questions around the photograph’s potential as an agent of propaganda, and last, if not most importantly, to transform this theatre into a space where new narratives might emerge.

In an essay about Jackson’s work, theorist and political scientist Achille Mbembe, Ph.D., a political scientist, states: “Exploring archival material is a way of walking through time’s thickets in the footprints of the past. And this is where Ayana V Jackson has chosen to begin her audacious journey…Positing herself as the Other, she re-walks the paths of those who have preceded her, and adds her image to theirs.

The artist exhibits her stylized body with immodest reserve; its fine contours radiate beauty and grace. There is no need for metaphor, even when semi-nude or staged with sensuality.

­­­

These pictures of a body – a Black body – provoke a logjam of feelings. The viewer is inclined to feel seduced while faced with fundamental ambiguity. Is the person portrayed identical in all respects? She can be viewed in detail but is she truly seen? What does this glistening, black skin of this libidinous body signify? When does this body, simultaneously displayed for all eyes to see and embodying others, stop being a subject and become an object? And how is this object the expression of forbidden pleasure?”

Based between Johannesburg, New York and Paris, Jackson is currently a NYFA Fellow for Photography. Jackson has exhibited her work in association with Gallery MOMO (Johannesburg, RSA), Galerie Baudoin Lebon, (Paris, FR), Galerie Sho Contemporary (Tokyo, Japan), the San Francisco Mexican Museum (USA), Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA), USA, and the Philadelphia African American Museum (USA). She has also participated in the 2014 Casablanca Biennale and the Bamako Encounters, African Photography Biennale. 

Michael Steinberg Fine Art, in conjunction with 33 Orchard, presents Bathers and Others, a show of paintings and works on paper by Graham Durward. Opening on May 8th, and running through June 8th, 2014, the exhibition focuses on two recent bodies of work.

Within the images identified as “Bathers,” the viewer encounters a group of four men, always posed in identical relationship to each other. But while the formal composition of the paintings remains nearly static, a broad and evocative range of emotionality is evoked by Durward’s painterly nuance. Color and gesture, alternately intense or ghostly, combine to generate a complex variety of moods and subjective experience. Whether one reads the men depicted in the paintings as anxious or serene, fulfilled or longing, may well be a reflection of the viewer’s own emotional state. The artist skillfully positions each work in a psychic borderland, charged with ambivalence and potential meaning.

“Others” makes reference to works in which Graham Durward depicts single figures whose identities are disguised, distorted and disfigured. More overtly “anxious” than the “Bathers,” each of these “Others” inhabits an isolated and atomized space that is frequently menacing. Brought by vigorous and sometimes violent gesture to a point of near anonymity, they are simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. Painted incarnations of Gyorgy Lukacs’ concept of transcendental homelessness, they seek specificity and achieve abstraction.

“Take Out” was shot in Beijing’s Olympic Park during a two-month residency in the fall of 2011. This series, shot in a temporary food court set up inside the park, reveals a visually and viscerally overloaded fast-food culture that may make some mouths water and other bellies ache. Hitzenberger concentrates on the saturated visual displays of the food stalls and the way the environment contrasts with the boredom of the workers, offering an insight into some of the contradictions in contemporary Chinese culture. Hitzenberger has effectively captured the flavor of the time.

Food and consumption has interested Hitzenberger for some time. She is inspired by the work of authors Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“In Defense of Food”), who write about eating habits and the way society deals with food.

In addition to exploring food and how it can affect people’s lives, this current series fits in with Hitzenberger’s ongoing project “The Body and Space,” in which she photographs people in architectural surroundings.

Anja Hitzenberger is a photographer, filmmaker and video artist whose work focuses on the body and its relationship to architecture and space. She travels extensively across the globe and her work often features people from around the world. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows, as well as at film festivals and on theater stages throughout Europe, the United States, South America and Asia, and published internationally in magazines and books. She has received numerous grants — among others a Swing Space grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council — and has completed residencies in Rome, Paris, Warsaw and Beijing. She is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, where she teaches personal vision classes. Originally from Salzburg, Austria, she divides her time between New York and Vienna.

“Take-Out” is presented by Michael Steinberg Fine Art, an independent advisory, curatorial and publishing organization The Works published by Steinberg’s MS Editions are in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Public Library; the Hood Museum, Dartmouth, New Hampshire; and London’s Tate Gallery and the British Museum. Forthcoming projects will be released under the heading of a newly formed division: Eminence Grise Editions LLC