Image courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen. Graphite and oil on panel, 23 ¾ x 31 3/4 inches. Xylor Jane, “Dissent (26 Nesting Prime Palindromes),” 2020. On view: January 31–MaXylor Jane at Parrasch Heijnen In line with this philosophy, Schlesinger and French prove that the utilitarian objects that we interact with daily can be whimsically sculptural, closing the fraught gap between art and design. The gallerist told me in an email that “furniture, lamps, stuffed animals, and toys” might share space with more traditional art mediums like sculpture and painting. The nascent gallery will continue to have a specific focus on artists with craft-based practices and is driven to exhibit work that has often been ignored in the contemporary art world. French’s clocks, molded into the silhouette of flowers or keyholes, are playfully exuberant - some of the clocks include shapes or symbols instead of numbers allowing for a whimsical interpretation of time. Each artist’s contribution brings innovation to utilitarian form - Schlesinger’s lamps sprout out of clean vase-like ceramic forms, their shades made with paper pulled taught around twisting bamboo frames. In their second show, Stanley’s has paired artists Bennet Schlesinger ceramic lamp pieces with Sara French’s papier-mache clocks. Photo by Victor Prieto.Ī new gallery in Chinatown has lit up Chung King Road, literally. On view: February 5–MaBennet Schlesinger and Sara French at Stanley’sīennet Schlesinger and Sara French at Stanley’s. “Writing in my journal every day is a documentary of the emotion and minutia of my world… As the bard of my little world, what I end up showing is the highlights and feelings more than historical accuracy and deflated reality.” She describes her journals, phone pictures, and painting scraps as “wet paint, half-formed palates I can piece together to fill out the vision.” I don’t let go in the sense of throwing something away, but I am able to cut and reimagine freely to keep my mind open.” As she begins a new work, Barbee often consults her own surroundings, pulling imagery from iPhone photos or books. She explained that the process begins with “a canvas that will be a painting, a canvas that is meant for a freehanded study, and then a bad painting that never makes on its own.” She said that while sometimes these “bad paintings” are made intentionally, for repurposing into a larger work, she also has found “new energy and creativity from propelling these ‘mistake’ paintings into something new.
I asked Barbee about her process of repurposing old paintings. Image courtesy of the artist and Kohn Gallery. Oil paint, cold wax, quilted pieces, embroidery string, and oil pastels on canvas. “I’ve started to really notice my chairs and daydream about architecture, occupying my nest,” Barbee told me. Various rooms of a house are depicted along with a female figure lounging within warm hues and floral details. In the largest work in the show, “Nesting” an interior life plays out across the canvas, with little scenes quilted together to build into a narrative tableau. During this very, ahem, domestic-focused year, many of us have become all too familiar with our own inhabited spaces and much of Barbee’s paintings focus on domestic space - house plants and plush couches mill about her floating figures. The embroidery thread encircling each painting scrap is applied in neat rows, creating dashed patterning across each painting that draws the eye in and out of Barbee’s lush painted scenes. With embroidery thread, Barbee sutures old onto new, collapsing imagery to create textural tapestries. The artist approaches each new work with a bevy of older “failed paintings” that she repurposes into her new compositions, cutting each piece along the silhouette of each painted head or potted plant. Just as her figures are deconstructed in a pseudo-Cubist style, her paintings too are cut apart and then stitched back together. In rosy paintings, figures swirl and mingle, limbs jut out at impossible angles. Image courtesy of the artist and Kohn Gallery.Ī new exhibition of paintings by Kate Barbee abandons the precious sanctity of the canvas.
Oil paint, cold wax, quilted pieces, embroidery string, and oil pastels on canvas 60 x 50 inches. This week’s art picks include an artist who gives failed paintings a new life as stitched-up pseudo-Cubist forms a new design-focused gallery lights up Chinatown and paintings that use palindromes to create stunning patterns.
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