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Sep 17 - Oct 31 2026 - 5 days left

Kate Berry Brown, born in 1978 and raised in Evanston, Illinois, studied fashion design at Washington University before finding her way to drawing, a medium she embraced for both its immediacy and meditative repetition. Her earlier abstract ink drawings on cut paper eventually prompted a desire to give those forms physical dimension, leading her into several years of carved wood and paper sculpture. Now, Brown returns to paper with that sculptural experience embedded in her hand. Bringing a heightened sense of volume, weight, and edge back to two dimensions, she builds each form through dense accumulations of colored pencil and ink—thousands of minute marks that coalesce into singular shapes. Brown thinks of these works as portraits, because each asserts itself as an individual presence: squat or elongated, solitary or paired, upright, folded. Their differences begin to feel almost temperamental. At the same time, their swelling contours suggest vessels—forms organized around an interior. Brown imagines that unseen space as a repository for the memories, stray thoughts, wasted hours, private griefs, small joys, and inherited ideas that accumulate inside a life. Hovering between body, object, architecture, and abstraction, the drawings resist fixed identities and reward sustained looking.

Sep 17 - Oct 31 2026 - 5 days left

Leopold Strobl, born in 1960 in Mistelbach, Lower Austria, has been devoted to art since his early twenties and has attended the open studio program at the Gugging Art Brut center for more than two decades. Working almost every morning and typically completing one drawing a day, Strobl has developed a visual language of remarkable consistency and mystery. His deliberately small works begin with photographs clipped from local newspapers, which he transforms with graphite and layered color. Strobl heightens selected elements of the underlying image—roads, horizon lines, woods, architectural details—with restrained layers of green, gray, yellow, blue, and ivory, while figures are absorbed into dense graphite forms. These dark masses, resembling boulders, mountain peaks, or prehistoric eggs, do not simply erase the bodies beneath them; they retain the weight of what has disappeared, arresting motion and muting narrative. The transformed scenes hover between the familiar and the otherworldly, as ordinary details acquire a new visual and psychological weight.

Nov 05 - Jan 09 2027

Ricco/Maresca welcomes Marcos Bontempo back with Among the Living, an exhibition of recent works on paper in which hybrid creatures and finely drawn human figures share a world of improbable encounters. Restless brushstrokes and mottled pigment give his creatures substance, while supple contours make a human figure’s slightest gesture expressive. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1969, Bontempo grew up in Ronda, Spain, where his family settled following the military coup in Argentina. His strict Catholic upbringing provides a backdrop to images in which earthly longing and otherworldly presences meet with disarming intimacy. Fields of black, rust red, and ochre gather his figures into rooms and small stages, where a couch can assume the gravity of an altar and one body can become another’s support. Cages suggest confinement, yet an open door offers no assurance of departure. Solemnity and absurdity keep close company in this private theater, whose inhabitants seem to know more about their exchanges than we do. Bontempo gives each invented being the attention and presence of a living subject, making the impossible feel intimately familiar.