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Apr 02 - May 09 2026 - 31 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce Pattern of a Pattern, an exhibition of new mixed media works on paper by Jacquelyn Strycker. This will be her first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception will be held on April 9th, 6-8pm. Strycker’s practice explores the relationship between decoration and function, and the possibilities of material transformation through handicraft. She creates ornate collages that move between drawing, printmaking, and textile construction. Strycker begins by hand-drawing patterns and quilt squares. Using a risograph duplicator, she prints scans of her drawings on fabric and fiber-based papers. The risographs are then cut, collaged, folded, and sewn together in a process the artist likens to quilting. Strycker notes that the choice to use an outdated office machine makes her process “absurdly inefficient, and that inefficiency is part of the point.” Strycker’s visual language references functional textiles like quilts, rugs and tapestries; however, their materiality resists function. The constructions she forms range from two-dimensional to sculptural. They are decorative, yet demand the same labor-intensive processes as the functional forms that inspire them, emphasizing the tension between utility and ornament. She finds humor in the “stubbornness of labor-intensive work.” The accumulation of incidental marks – misaligned registrations, vestiges of a fold, haphazard stitches – becomes evidence of the involved process. A multitude of patterns becomes the predominant motif, building repetition across the surface and emphasizing the act of making and re-making. In the artist’s own words, “A pattern of a pattern is not a lesser thing. It is its own record of having been made, and made again.”

Apr 02 - May 09 2026 - 31 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce The Arboreal Life, an exhibition of new paintings by Katie DeGroot. DeGroot’s work transforms trees into expressive figures, staging them in scenes that reflect human relationships with nuance and humor. This will be her third solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception will be held on April 9th from 6-8 PM. DeGroot paints trees as individuals. Each is marked with scars, growths, knots, and kinks, revealing their uniqueness and individual histories. In the artist’s own words, “Trees grow to survive, they adapt to their given environment, producing oddly shaped limbs as they become contortionists to get to sunlight…They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways, they are similar to us, part of a larger community.” DeGroot anthropomorphizes her muses, imagining them in scenes as families, couples, cocktail parties, and individually as portraits. The branches, collected on frequent hikes, are arranged to suggest interaction. Each limb is painted from life at scale, giving it a distinct physical presence. Some are intertwined; others lean into one another or stand parallel, as if at attention. DeGroot captures personality while implying narrative. Titles like “Family Matters” act as gentle prompts, framing the scene and inviting a human reading, often with a touch of humor. These portraits are not realistic depictions but instead quirky interpretations that play with color, pattern, and stylization. She immortalizes their colors, textures, and the moss and fungi that adorn them as they begin to decay. One branch will be depicted over and over again and, much like us, its aging can be traced as its colors fade and its shape changes. The verticality of her subjects, combined with their meticulously patterned facades, creates a rhythm that enlivens each composition.

Apr 09 - May 16 2026

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Anthony Falcetta. Falcetta’s abstractions center on color, surface and process, where what appears as form gives way to evidence of its making. The exhibition title Understories reflects this approach, evoking the forest floor and its accumulated layers. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on April 9th from 6-8pm. Drawing from his surroundings, Falcetta uses color and material to suggest both natural and built environments. Color relationships recall familiar spatial conditions, like an object resting on a surface or a form set against the sky, without becoming literal. Deep, saturated tones contrast with brighter passages of color, while shifts between warm and cool create depth. High-key accents activate the surface. Working with a combination of acrylic paint, spray paint and gypsum compound, he builds and textures the surface to reinforce these contrasts. Each painting accumulates layers of revision where marks are erased, covered, and reworked over time. Driven by a “desire for structure,” Falcetta builds toward balance only to disrupt them, using what remains to inform the next move. The surfaces allow the viewer to trace the process of creation, as the artist notes “finished surfaces always hint at those deeper layers.” He further describes the work as one in which “time gets bent and shuffled, layers interlock and obscure each other, and edges become inconclusive,” reflecting his translation of observed environments into abstraction.

Apr 09 - May 16 2026

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce Sea Violet, an exhibition of new paintings by Tess Michalik. Her work explores material and its relationship to gesture. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on April 9th from 6-8pm. Michalik’s floral paintings move between abstraction and naturalism, drawing on Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, and 18th-century decorative patterns and textiles. Working alla prima, forms emerge through quick, voluminous layers of impasto, with individual marks remaining distinct as single daubs of paint transform into petals and leaves. Shaped by touch rather than description, the paintings depict flowers in various states of bloom, what the artist describes as the “zenith of their short-lived existence.” The flowers are set against flat, often single-color grounds that recall wallpaper or fabric. These backgrounds create stage-like spaces where the subject hovers rather than settles into depth. In some paintings a visible smear interrupts this flatness, pulling gesture across the surface and complicating the distinction between figure and ground. Michalik’s paintings hold both pleasure and transience in view, evoking a quiet memento mori. As she writes, “They are small protestations to the drudgery of the mundane and the pain of existence. These are little love letters to the warm days of ecstasy that are captured by the autumn bouquet or the first blooming of the spring crocus, the first bit of purple to pop out of the snow.”