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May 23 - Jun 17 2023 - 20 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to announce Making Tracks, an exhibition of new paintings by Robin Feld. The exhibition will present 11 paintings made between 2021 and the present. Feld has created a body of work that has in common a linear element that burrows and weaves its way through the evolving layers of shape and form found in her nature-based abstraction, exploring the influence that line quality has on a painting. She describes this linear element as a pulse, a representation of motion, a segment of energy, a skeleton, a structure, a mysterious force, a bending of musical notation. In Buried Line, Calmer Vista Feld explores the use of a line that creates a delicate pathway or footprint that sneaks, scurries and pirouettes across the canvas; periodically diving into larger forms and re-emerging to continue its journey. Howling, in contrast, has a darker, more expressionistic line, heavier in nature, which forms the skeleton, soul and spirit of the painting and defines its movement and structure. Ghosts of a linear grid emerge in Weather Report 2, providing a slight visual shift / breaking point for the sinuous lines / forms that tumble across the canvas. The calligraphic line weaves in and out of the layers of the painting, almost inseparable from the larger forms. Feld works out of her studio in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown at the Painting Center in New York, Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, Kent State University, Curate NYC, Art Fair 14C, Paramount Gallery at LIU, and the Monmouth Museum. She has been featured in Jason McCoy Gallery's online Drawing Challenges XV & XVI. Feld attended the High School of Music and Art (LaGuardia High School) in Manhattan, received her BFA at the City College of New York, and studied at the Art Students League. For more information on the artist, visit: robinfeldstudio.com.

May 23 - Jun 17 2023 - 20 days left

Patti Samper’s latest painting series, Atmospheric Layers, will be exhibited at The Painting Center in the exhibition Atmospheric Layers. With atmospheric layers, Samper’s paintings explore harmony with nature as we face the precariousness of existence within climate change. In the overlapping, slow-dancing transparencies of Patti Samper’s latest series of paintings, natural phenomena and the human symbols derived from them coalesce. These syntheses become reminders of our physical and ontological boundedness to our environment—amidst much of the population’s alienation from it. A beguiling gentleness permeates this work. Gossamer yet vibrant, Samper’s abstract forms evoke the vitality and vulnerability of nature’s cycles, patterns, and structures. As environmental collapse looms, works in Atmospheric Layers consider humanity in relation to nature, without anthropocentrism: the ordered meaning of spiritual symbologies organically merging with, rather than subjugating, their surroundings. The series is born of the Colombian and French, Montclair, NJ-based artist’s most recent return to Palomino, La Guajira, the region of her father’s farm. She stayed for several weeks, deepening her ongoing relationship with members of the Arhuaco Indigenous community, whom she had grown up amongst. She spoke with the Mamos (spiritual leaders) about the imprint of climate change and the damage of enduring extractive colonialism in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: their home, the heart of their spiritual world, and Earth’s highest coastal mountain range. Its glaciers are rapidly melting, its weather patterns have become mercurial, and its subsurfaces are the apple of local mining companies’ eye. Samper’s serene new paintings interpolate Arhuaco spiritual and cosmological natural symbols of caracols (urumu), snakes (haku), and tree leaves (kanzachu) into abstract ecosystems. The paintings’ fragile tranquility simultaneously calls to mind an unseen, underlying chaos—what our world faces if we refuse avenues to harmony with nature. In the recurring shape of the caracol, one may feel the comfort of nature’s cycles, or the disquiet of a world spiraling out of control. Samper’s previous series, Transitions, Picture Element, and Degrees—all comprising the larger series Technology—portrayed a world reconceived by pixels and iPhone screens, mitigated by a profusion of anti-anxiety spinners. Atmospheric Layers actively omits technology’s omnipotent presence as it turns to natural forms—but its process of creation nods to the possibility of balance. For these works, Samper first photographed natural scenes across multiple seasons and locations, then used graphic design techniques to visualize how she wanted colors—vibrant harvest yellows and oranges, soily browns, tidal and airy aquamarines—and shapes to meld in affective natural scenes. She then neglected the screen, moving on to setting oils to linen canvas in a durational and deliberate process, with transparencies taking a minimum of three weeks at a time to dry before the next could be layered atop the others. The artist says, “Negative forces which have been altering nature’s cycles, have tremendous implications on our environment, our emotional and physical health, and our humanity. Nature opens our senses and preserves our soul. Keeping her thriving is essential to our own humanity and existence. My work seeks to find balance. My work seeks to stop time in the viewer’s day.” Patti Samper, born in Bogotá, Colombia, exhibits her paintings throughout the USA and internationally, with works in private collections. Samper is a represented artist member of The Painting Center in New York City, and has her studio in Montclair, New Jersey, USA. Samper earned her BFA in Photography from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts.

May 23 - Jun 17 2023 - 20 days left

“What my little visit to your studio did, it restored my faith in art.” - Jonas Mekas, in a letter to Gordon, 1995 The Painting Center is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings Dana Gordon. Gordon, one of the founding members of The Painting Center, is an American abstract painter who began his art career working as assistant to Tony Smith and George Sugarman in the late 1960s in New York. He was a professor of art, lecturer, and set designer for the New York Opera Ensemble. His avant-garde films have been featured in international festivals and at MOMA. Today, Gordon continues the exuberant work he has been making for decades. With compositions that explore the potential of line and gestural mark-making, Gordon’s paintings find footing in a revitalized appreciation of abstraction and its connections with the old and the new, with the geometric, the minimal, and the maximal. The images evolve and shift in a rhythmic automatic study of both the physicality of the process and his own interaction with space and materials. Gordon's first New York solo show of painting was at the Ericson Gallery in 1982. Since then, he has had multiple solo shows at the Andre Zarre, 55 Mercer, and Sideshow galleries in New York City, and Galerie Metanoia in Paris, France, among others. Gordon's work is in many public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, M.I.T., Adelphi University, and the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and of Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Hilton Kramer. His art received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Fdn., Rauschenberg's Change Fdn., and university research grants, and residencies at the Edward Albee Fdn., the Triangle Workshop, and the Millay Colony. In 1978 he was the "runner-up" for the NEA's US/UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship. Critical acclaim for Gordon's work has included Linda Gross, in the L.A.Times, 1978: "... for purists and pioneers in pursuit of new perceptions." John Russell in the New York Times in 1987 "...well worth seeking out...a painter of whom it would be good to see more." Helen Harrison, NYTimes, 1994: "...beautiful paintings, filled with the controlled exuberance of a carefully orchestrated spectacle." Grace Glueck, NYTimes, 1997: "... a very lively eyefest." James Panero, in the New Criterion, 2014: "While many artists paint widely, Gordon paints deeply.... Gordon knows 'what only painting can do.' " David Cohen, of Art Critical, David Cohen, of Art Critical, on DG’s Paris show, 2018: Lucky Paris.” Gordon has written about art for The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The New York Sun, Commentary, Delicious Line, The Jerusalem Post, and Painters' Table. For more information on the artist, visit: danagordon.art.