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Jun 26 - Aug 01 2025 - 27 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce Ecstatic Earth, featuring new paintings by Marilla Palmer. This will be her sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception will be held on June 26th from 6-8pm. Palmer’s mixed-media works immortalize the temporality of nature. In all her work, but particularly the newest works on panel, nature is exalted in shimmering details that shift with light and movement. This is the first exhibition of her botanical paintings on panel, and also the first to include an underwater scene. Her deceptively serious still lifes become playful, fantastical tableaus upon closer inspection. Delicate watercolor brushstrokes are accompanied by plastic sequins, dried petals, sumptuous fabrics, gold leaf, and more. This juxtaposition is both humorous and lovely, theatrical and erudite. Palmer cultivates her own garden that she observes for both inspiration and material. She explains, “Working so directly with nature makes it feel like I’m collaborating, but with an unpredictable partner. Who knows what will appear in my studio garden? How will the petals change when pressed or if the wet watercolor, interference paint or sequins will capture the ecstasy of what I see?” Glittering collage elements and iridescent backgrounds add movement and lively energy to the static depictions and signify the growth and life associated with the imagery. In the work, insects, flowers, and leaves are frozen in time, their impending end suggested in the dried petals and leaves the artist incorporates. Tendrils stretch across the surface as if reaching for the sun. In her statement, when contemplating mother nature, the artist quotes Goethe, “We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret.” Palmer preserves the ephemeral and depicts exuberant abundance all at once.

Jun 26 - Aug 01 2025 - 27 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Stanley Bielen. This is his fifth exhibition with the gallery and features his intimate still life paintings. An artist reception will be held June 26th from 6-8pm. Bielen’s process begins outside of the studio with planting the flowers he will later paint. He brings the clippings he cultivates to his studio and renders them in voluminous, rich brushwork. The blooms are typically painted at scale in one session, immortalizing them in that moment. Reveling in the paint itself, Bielen depicts the objects with a sense of immediacy, as if glimpsed and remembered in an instant. Flowers, fruits, and vessels are modeled with gestural, loaded brushstrokes. The forms take on a dimensional, tactile quality as Bielen sculpts shadow, builds up dense backgrounds, or lays down generous daubs of paint to portray petals. Irregular, impasto shapes define structure, light, and shadow, making the work at once abstract and recognizable. Lush colors emerge vividly against stark black or white grounds. In subject and medium the paintings are traditional, echoing still-life conventions, but Bielen’s lavish paint handling and pared-down settings feel decidedly contemporary. His work draws on the dramatic chiaroscuro of the Baroque, channeling its theatrical lighting and deep tonal contrasts to intensify the physicality of each painting.

Jun 26 - Aug 01 2025 - 27 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Susan Mastrangelos, The Beat Goes On. This will be her first solo exhibition with the gallery and will take place in The Pocket Gallery at 179 10th Avenue. An opening reception will be held on June 26th from 6-8pm. Mastrangelo’s paintings are boldly sculptural, utilizing a variety of media to produce their abstract, biomorphic forms. Throughout her career, Mastrangelo’s oeuvre has shifted between abstraction and figuration and the most recent works marry the two. These paintings, while fully abstract, reference the body and its connection to making. Each canvas is a riot of color and texture as bold, bright hues intersect patterned textiles and loops of braided cords. Her assemblage-like paintings begin by creating a lyrical abstraction with upholstery cord. These looping shapes create a rhythm within the paintings as they swirl and meander through her world of pattern and color. Net-like, knitted yarn stretches over passages and twists around forms. Repetition and pattern appear throughout each canvas furthering the energy and rhythm that hums within each. Craft takes center stage in these works through large swaths of knitting. Mastrangelo explains the importance of this medium, “My grandmother taught me to knit, and consequently, the act of knitting has always brought me great comfort. The repetitive act of building one stitch upon another seems to synchronize with the beating of my own heart while I imagine it working to create a protective tissue inducing an internal healing process.” Working meditatively and intuitively through repeated motions and layered processes, she composes tender, emotive scenes.