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Mar 28 - May 04 2024 - 15 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is thrilled to announce an upcoming exhibition of new work by Nancy Cohen. The State We’re In will run from March 28 - May 4, 2024, with an opening reception on March 28 from 6-8pm. It marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first exhibition at the gallery’s new 179 10th Avenue location. The exhibition will run concurrently with Drawing on Memory, a group exhibition curated by Cohen. Please note that Drawing on Memory will be held at the gallery’s 20th Street location. “We’re in a state—it’s unavoidable. We look in, we worry. We look out, we worry more,” Cohen says. Nancy Cohen’s unconventional drawings, drawn with paper pulp and fritted glass, find their origin in her move to Jersey City in the 1980s. Along the shore and waterways, the evergreen vegetation thriving amid industrial waste sparked Cohen’s environmental awareness. Waterways, as subject and imagery, draw from personal experience and recur in her work as symbols of nature's ability to endure adversity. In "The State We're In," Cohen pursues the theme of survival, environmentally and personally. Cohen describes her process as “thinking with her hands.” Concerns outside the studio and challenges within are explored through physically pushing the boundaries of paper and glass. The materials serve as collaborators and provocateurs, where fused glass objects or a handmade paper are repurposed as source material and inspiration for later works. Cohen’s choices of materials and processes challenge notions of fragility and resilience. Like fritted glass undergoing transformation in a kiln, Cohen’s work focuses on strength and beauty in the struggle for survival. Nancy Cohen holds a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from Columbia University. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards and residencies, including 6 fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Cohen has been the recipient of various awards, such as the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the Yaddo Artist Residency. Most recently she was the recipient of the Studio Residency Grant at Women’s Studio Workshop and a Fellowship at MacDowell in 2023 where many of the drawings in this show began. She has also been an artist-in-residence at prestigious institutions like the WheatonArts and the Studio at Corning. Her work is included in several public and museum collections, such as the Yale University Art Gallery, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Hudson County Community College.

Mar 28 - May 04 2024 - 15 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is excited to announce an upcoming group exhibition curated by Nancy Cohen. Titled Drawing on Memory, the exhibition features four artists – Alexandra Athanassiades, James Esber, Margie Neuhaus and Debra Priestly. The exhibition will run from March 28th – May 4th at the gallery’s 529 West 20th Street location, and it will run concurrently to Cohen's solo show at the gallery's 10th Avenue location The works in this exhibition are united by the subtle ways that memory played a role in the artists’ development of the conceptual underpinnings. Each artist has an expansive practice where drawing is an essential element, allowing their ideas to travel across media. Its importance is apparent in each one’s larger body of work. Born and living in Athens, Greece, Alexandra Athanassiades’s work draws on the history of ancient Greek sculpture. The horse as a character and form has been present in her work for 40 years, standing in for her personal family history while simultaneously referencing her interiority and independence. The tenderness of her bronze sculptures evidences the found materials of their original structures and belies the solidity of the material. More recently, she has been responding to the 20 th century Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, whose work has been said to “hold the historical and erotic in a single embrace.” Athanassiasdes’s drawings on top of printed book pages and installations could be described in a similar way. While Athanassiades’s influences reach far back in time, James Esber mines a more recent and particularly American experience. His vibrant drawings and paintings both compel and repel us. It feels fitting that AI is among the sources used in deriving his unexpected juxtapositions. In contrast to the publicly accessible sources of his layered images are the relationships between the characters in his work, many of which reference memories from his childhood and, more recently, his experience of being a parent. The images in the work are familiar, yet somehow remain unnamable and indescribable. The lines between drawing and painting, figuration and abstraction blur in Esber’s work, where the line is electric and mutating forms are evident throughout. Margie Neuhaus’s subtly complex drawings and weavings share Esber’s connection to mark making and shape shifting. Neuhaus’s work explores continuity and change within a system, as reflected in natural and manmade structures. She invents systems to create two- and three-dimensional structures that test the boundaries of the systems they establish. A source of the transformations and empty spaces in her work are the memories of her childhood in the Catskills, where unused, deteriorating hotels and tilting hay barns stood in contrast to new construction. There is a bare, stripped-down quality in Neuhaus’s work, which evokes a sense of contemplation that speaks to empty spaces and abandoned places. In Neuhaus’s and Debra Priestly’s work, the silences are as important as the actions. Priestly’s work has the most apparent connection to memory, as its focus is a personal archive of family history, ancestry, and cultural preservation. Priestly exhibits a major diptych, McCoy and Veora Priestly, in which images of her parents softly emerge from an almost ghostly white space. Her poetic and restrained drawings are accompanied by three of Priestly’s newest sculptures—black clay figurative vessels that reveal a solidity and intimacy that also quietly and powerfully call the viewer to attention to notice the beautiful details and powerful metaphors.

Mar 28 - May 04 2024 - 15 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is excited to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings by Peter Hoffer, Impressions de la Région Toulousaine, ie. Impressions from the Region of Toulouse. It will be Hoffer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and will take place at the gallery’s 529 West 20th Street location from March 28th to May 4th, 2024. “When in a natural setting such as a forest, we are sensitized to our surroundings in a manner that we don't experience in any urban setting. The silence of a tree, blade of grass, or a moss-covered stone fills our periphery with a sense of familiarity and comfort.” - Peter Hoffer Hoffer’s paintings are more relational than representational - he explores trees as protagonists. His approach to each painting is narrow, he singles out a tree and positions it at eye level. As a result, he creates an uncertain vantage point of the tree's dimension - either the viewer is close to it and it is small, or further away and the tree happens to be massive. Regardless of the viewer’s perception, a confrontation happens that humanizes the tree itself. In Hoffer’s words, “the forest becomes a stage; the tree becomes an actor.” Each painting in the exhibition is coated with a layer of resin, simultaneously distancing and immersing the viewer. Surfaces have been marked, scratched, cracked, and seared, much like the terrain itself. The surface layers of these works are dynamic, balancing between the various states of the seasons. The random etching of the surface calls to task a questioning of materiality and value. The works fluctuate between rest and discontent. The preciousness of the objet d’art, as well as the peripheral landscape represented, is rediscovered like an artifact. The suggested neglect through time is salvaged, preserved, and displayed. The markings on the paintings, inconsistencies in the resin surface, and the unrefined finishing of the canvas structure allude to elements outside of the artist’s control. The result invokes a sense of abandon and a hint of a work in transition. As the paintings draw attention to areas of the landscape that can be considered “less than spectacular," they force the viewer to search for landmarks or meaning within the composition. Peter Hoffer lives and works in Montreal, Canada, and Paris, France. He exhibits extensively throughout Canada, the eastern United States, and internationally. His work is placed in private collections worldwide including the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montréal, the Musée Du Québec in Québec City, Bombardier, Royal Bank of Canada, and the corporate collections of Fidelity Investments USA, Banque Nationale, and Michelin Canada Inc.