NEW YORK, NY.- Nancy Margolis Gallery announces Small Works: More or Less, on view February 18 through April 2, 2016. For this group exhibition, ten artists were asked to create work no less than 10" x 10" nor larger than 16" x 20". How does size limitation have an impact on an artist's style and expression? Ten talented artists recalibrate their individuality and explore new possibilities in their work. This exhibition not only conveys how significant a role scale plays on expressing an artist's vision, but it also accentuates the palette of each artist which may have been harder for viewers to grasp in their larger work.
LAURA BERGER’s work is focused on exploring connections to ourselves and each other, and the idea of finding novelty and adventure in everyday life. She’s interested in and inspired by ritual, symbols, nature, dreams, travel, the quest for self-development, and how we piece it all together to create personal meaning and a sense of belonging to the greater whole.
LAURA BERGER, Chicago Il, received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 2002. She has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, and New Zealand. Some recent exhibits include Everything Is Coming to You, Rotofugi, Chicago, IL; LA Art Show, Artists Republic Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn Biennial, The Cotton Candy Machine, Brooklyn, NY; Proyecto Ensamble, The Outfox Show, Santiago, Chile; and Women of New Contemporary, Brandstater Gallery, Riverside, CA. Her work has been featured in Eight Magazine, Frankie Magazine, and Stay Wild Magazine.
ANNE CANFIELD, working small naturally, creates jewel-like paintings and drawings depicting a solitary place or quiet moment. In the paintings, she favors an appealing palette of bright, saturated color, giving a dreamy quality to the interior domestic scenes and landscapes. A front of a house, a bicycle left near a train station, miscellaneous objects on a shelf in a living room- Canfield transforms ordinary objects into timeless moments. People are strikingly absent yet surprisingly not missed. Quiet, immobile, and tightly painted, these landscapes, interiors, and exteriors suggest another genera of painting: the still-life. In spite of their diminutive size, Canfield’s paintings command attention equal to a much larger work.
ANNE CANFIELD, born in Bethlehem, PA, lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in 1999. During her studies there, she attended Yale University’s Summer School of Painting and Music. Recent exhibitions include Anne Canfield & Gary Peterson, Mount Airy Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; Anne Canfield & Hiro Sakaguchi, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY; Privacy Made Public, New Hope Arts Center, New Hope, PA; and Small But Not Restricted, Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia, PA. She was the recipient of the Fleisher Wind Challenge Award and a visiting artist and critic at Moore College of Art & Design and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in Fresh Paint Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fine Art Connoisseur, and The Philadelphia City Paper.
EDWARD DEL ROSARIO makes meticulous oil paintings that create a drama around imaginary characters in a stage-like environment. The figures tell a story. They expose an event, a happening, a mysterious state of enigmatic ambiguity. With the mood somber to playful and humor tongue in cheek, the work begs the question of what is really going on. Is it beginning ort ending? Is it a serious confrontation or simply an innocuous game? Del Rosario’s main theme is the struggle for power, and in this make-believe theatrical presentation, the viewer is challenged to interpret, learn and comprehend. The artist works with flat planes, minimally drawing figures and giving careful attention to realism and detail. The painting is composed and placed in a surround of color. The artist’s color palette, always rich in hues deep and soft, is applied with thread-like brushes, making it obvious that this style of painting requires endless hours of work and patience.
EDWARD DEL ROSARIO, born in St. Louis, Missouri, currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in painting from the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS) in 1993 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) in 1998. Recent exhibitions and fairs include It’s All Fun and Games, The Flat-Massimo Carasi, Milan; Melted City 3, Blanc Gallery, Quenzon City, Philippines; SCOPE Miami; Miami Project; and The Armory Show, New York. He is part of several permanent collections, a few of which are Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, The Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn Collection (New York, NY), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and the Blake Byrne Collection (Los Angeles, CA).
ANDREA DEZSÖ masters a multitude of materials in the execution of numerous projects: graphite drawings, book illustrations, mosaics, cut paper, ink drawings, flat glass drawings, murals, etc. A long list reflects Dezsö’s exceptional gift to take on any challenge and her talent to translate her ideas to any medium. Growing up in communist Romania, Dezsö found art and literature an escape from the harshness of life under a brutal regime. Her art, deep and personal, moves in many directions. In her drawings, paper cutouts, and paintings, she tells stories, created with traditional techniques to express non-traditional content, that range from mystical to absurd. Choosing embroidery on canvas for this exhibition, Dezsö wished to make small, colorful, exuberant pictures that freely combine the visual and material, the representational and abstract, and the color and line within a single painting. The elements to make embroidery are similar to drawing on paper: the needle like a pencil, the thread like lead, a stitch like a pencil mark. In each case, movement between the stitch and the pencil mark fill in the space to create form. Dezsö starts with a white canvas, not knowing where it will all go. Stitch by stitch, element by element, she continues until the picture is fully delineated and formed.
ANDREA DEZSÖ, born in Romania, lives and works in Amherst, MA. She received her BFA in Graphic Design & Typography and her MFA in Visual Communication from Moholy-Nagy Hungarian University of Art & Design in Budapest, Hungary. Currently an Associate Professor of Art at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Dezsö has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. She has installed several permanent public artworks, including Buttonbush at Wichita Falls Independent School District Office Building, Wichita Falls, TX; In The Air at BMCC’s Fiterman Hall, New York, NY; Blueberry at the US Embassy, Bucharest, Romania; and Natural Rail at the 62nd St. Bensonhurst, BK subway station, commissioned by the NY MTA Arts for Transit. Recently, she has illustrated The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published by Princeton University Press.
NATE ETHIER draws on the traditions of Twentieth Century formalism and hard-edge abstraction. His flamboyant geometric abstractions celebrate both the bucolic and post-industrial world. The exchange of interchangeable modular structures through synchronicity and symmetry is the bedrock of the work, while rock and roll, the rolling surf, and poetry whisper in the background. Creating compositions that allow for the optical emphasis to alternate and reverberate with unequivocal intensity and grace, the mechanics of Ethier’s paintings function as perpetual, philosophical, and visual motion machines.
NATE ETHIER, born in Providence, RI, received his BA in Liberal Arts from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT and his MFA in Painting from Boston University. Recent exhibitions include Checkered History: the Grid in Art and Life, Outpost Artist Resources, Ridgewood, NY; Polysolaris, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA; 20 x 16, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; and Pulled, C2C, San Francisco, CA. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at Nancy Margolis Gallery this spring. In 2014, he received the Sharpe-Walemtas Studio Program Award and was a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant Nominee in 2013. His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, NY Arts Magazine, and Providence Journal.
GREGORY HAYES, known for his multi-colored dot paintings, has embarked on a new series of paintings making its first appearance as a part of this exhibition. In making the new series, Hayes experimented with a new process that utilizes strips of paint with ¼” widths and approximately equal lengths placed side by side. These strips are formed by laying down a continuous flow of different colored paint, which create a swirling gradient from one line to the next. After the paint has dried, he considers his work to have begun. He peels the strips off their smooth resting surface and arranges the ribbons of paint onto a canvas, placing them in the order that they were made, partially overlapping each one like layers of earth building over time. Though he tries to place them straightly and evenly, his inconsistencies and variations guide the process as well. The overlapping creates a texture, and the variation in line and color create an optical effect, ending in a landscape of softly shifting colors. These paintings reveal that even a slight variation in the order of a process can create new pictorial complexity.
GREGORY HAYES, born in Buffalo, NY, lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in painting from Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in 2006 and his MFA in painting from Brooklyn College in 2011. He has been featured in several exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery: White I Black, Shooting Star (solo exhibit), and Stay Gold (solo exhibit). His work has been shown in several notable art fairs, including Miami Project, SCOPE Basel (Switzerland), SCOPE Miami, and AQUA Art Miami. Publications such as The Creators Project, Arte Fuse Magazine, Wall Street International, The Brooklyn Review, Denver Post, and Huffington Post have featured his work.
FERNE JACOBS, an innovator in the fiber arts field, is known for her unique, three-dimensional sculptures constructed with a simple traditional weaving technique: waxed linen thread wrapped around a cord with a color that has been in the artist’s mind. Multiple stitches grow one by one, row upon row, creating amazing idiosyncratic surfaces and forms. Jacobs works without a preconceived plan, meaning she has no idea what the work will look like until it is finished. This labor-intensive hand-stitch moves the work slowly and intuitively, not revealing where it will end. For Jacobs, a pact is accepted in the making of these sculptures to forgo certainty for risk by allowing the work to morph into its own surprising, emotive forms.
FERNE JACOBS, living and working in California, received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1976. Recent exhibitions include Extreme Fibers, Muskegon Art Museum, Muskegon, MI; Repetition & Ritual, New Sculpture in Fiber, The Hudgens Center for the Arts, Duluth, GA; and All Things Considered IV, Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA. Her work can be found in several public collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
ALIZA MORELL’s quiet, sensational abstractions possess a certain physicality. Subtly shifting colors are rendered with broad, visible marks. Whiplash gestures drip and drag through wet layers of paint beneath. Despite a palpable economy of moves, it is hard to tell how or in what order the paintings are made. As she describes, “Painting is a way to embody ambiguity. I draw from my surroundings, distilling the parts that mesmerize me. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is an influence—the electric signs, the infinite 'patinas' on worn surfaces. But I’m looking for more elusive inputs, too. Florescent light on fog, the glistening of wet pavement, shadows crossing shadows- these things affect me in a very visceral way. They become clues for how I handle the paint."
ALIZA MORELL received her BFA in 2005 from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, during which she attended the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy. In 2014, she received her MFA from Rutger’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, NJ. Recent exhibitions include 50 Shades of Red, Herter Gallery at UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA; Summer Show, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY; Treasure Trove, Trestle Projects, Brooklyn, NY; and Transcandescent, Comfort Station, Chicago, IL. She has been featured in several publications, including Fresh Paint Magazine, New American Paintings, and ARTslanT.
MELODIE PROVENZANO’s title of her works on paper series “Through the Trees” stems from both the placement of the trees as though the depicted objects are in a forest with the viewer looking through that forest, as well as the transparency of the glass trees. A profound experience in Provenzano’s life was seeing the 14,000-year-old Niaux Cave paintings in the south of France. Seeing the artistic spirit as it was expressed so long ago was extremely touching and impressive. In her “Through the Trees” series, she taps into her own connection with this spirit. The objects chosen for this glass forest are contemporary versions of cultural things thought to have symbolic meaning. Now, profundity can exist hand in hand with banality: a candle in the form of the Venus of Willendorf, a ceramic salt and pepper shaker in the form of a totem pole. For her, there is inspiration found in the feeling of being part of nature in all its inexplicable vastness.
MELODIE PROVENZANO, born in Kinderhook, NY, lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1996. Recent exhibitions include Stealth Peace, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY; Raw Ribbon, University School of Nashville, Nashville, TN; Still Lifes: Perceptions of Inanimate Objects, Evelyn E. Jorgenson Gallery, Moberly, MO; Rock Center, Lyons Weir Gallery, New York, NY; and Drawn Together: Melodie Provenzano & Philippe Simille, The Marketplace Gallery, Albany, NY.
HIRO SAKAGUCHI’s work is influenced by two divers cultures: Japan, where he grew up, and the US, where he now resides. In his paintings, Sakaguchi creates a universe filled with contrasts that are playfully and metaphorically presented. The theme of war is shown whimsically, a child’s game. Children’s toys become the iconographic instruments of war and destruction, and motion within the painting suggests a chaotic, out of control world. His drawing defines the structure of the painting, coupled with soft pastel hues to complete its form. A mix of memory, dreams, fantasy and reality are present, revealing the core of the artist and his magical inner world.
HIRO SAKAGUCHI, born in Nagano, Japan, currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) in 1993 and his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA) in 1996. Recent exhibitions include Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine, Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Avert, Escape or Cope With, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; and Vapor Trails of Debris, Galerie Hübner and Hübner, Frankfurt, Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of Woodmere Art Museum and the Philadelphia Art Museum and has curated several exhibitions, including I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Caution Art in Here, Cerulean Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and Useless Weapon, Green Lantern Gallery, Chicago, IL.
