KATHRYN MARKEL FINE ARTS ANNOUNCES THE SUMMER SHOW
New York Gallery 529 W 20th 6W
June 24 – August 21, 2021
Featuring New Works by Deborah Dancy, Susan English, Antony Densham,
Tucker Nichols, and Erin O'Brien
NEW YORK, NY JUNE 24, 2021 | Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce The Summer Show, in the tradition of group exhibitions for the summer season, the gallery will present new works on paper and paintings by artists Deborah Dancy, Susan English, Antony Densham, Tucker Nichols, and Erin O'Brien. Each artist will present works made during the past year, reflecting their studio practice in the context of the unprecedented global pandemic.
DEBORAH DANCY
Deborah Dancy is an abstract artist. Her paintings and drawings are sensuous provocations beset with marks that guide, then abruptly collide into confrontational slabs of color. There is an atmosphere of complex but urgent tension in her work, as she builds tangential linear demarcations, and abutting shapes, that provoke, entice and disrupt; -taking us everywhere and nowhere. From densely painted forms to more minimally declared images, Dancy’s work operates in the recognition that meanderings, intentional and accidental declarations are best when the beautiful and the disconcerting exist simultaneously. She is the recipient of John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Yaddo Fellow, and a National Endowment of the Arts NEFA award. Her work is in many collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum and The Detroit Institute of Art.
SUSAN ENGLISH
Susan English is an artist whose working process searches for unexpected colors and color relationships. Just as the space between two points on a line can be subdivided infinitely so it is between two colors. In the last decade, English has developed a process of pouring layers of tinted polymer on panel that has expanded the breadth of what she can achieve with color and surface. After pouring the tinted polymer, English manipulates the panel so the paint collects or cracks. The poured polymer mimics nature: a layer of polymer hardens like ice or mud – it’s thickness and viscosity impacting how the surface dries. The variations on the surface and the quality of the color are the result of a delicate and flexible relationship between control and accident. The artist assembles the poured panels into specifically calibrated horizontal or vertical sequences, creating a narrative of color, space and light. The surfaces range from dull to glossy - either absorbing or reflecting the light, existing always in relationship to the light in the room or the position of the viewer.
ANTONY DENSHAM
Antony Densham is a New Zealand-based painter whose work grapples with the intersectionality of representation and abstraction. His works seeks this middle ground: to confound the space somehow through the interchange of revealing and concealing.
TUCKER NICHOLS
Over the years, Bay Area artist, Tucker Nichols has created thousands of paintings of flowers and plants in their humble or extravagant vases and pots. Painted with a vibrant flat palette of household enamel, and a child-like but sophisticated simplicity, each, in a different way exudes a sense of freedom and wonder at the infinite possibilities of paint. Some of the flowers are strict and upright in their tight containers. Some are riots of energetic blooms spilling out of the picture plane. Nichols has spent his artistic career creating art in all media for audiences of all types. Wanting to see his art in the world, he has made print editions, designed t-shirts, illustrated books, and printed posters. During the pandemic, he began a project called "Flowers for Sick People" in which he sent a small flower painting - each one unique- to sick people. Anyone could go on his website and ask for a flower to be sent to a friend on their behalf.
ERIN O’BRIEN
O’Brien’s shapes are rooted in the world and tend to be based either on some form appearing in her life or negative space between forms. She then chooses a specific color to incorporate, a color derived from either photographs or other paintings. Those choices provide a starting point and then intuition takes over. She says “I choose the rest of the colors intuitively, in conversation with the painting as I discover what the different shapes want to do.” As the colors vary, so does texture and paint handling– some shapes are flat, others ethereal, but all are heightened by the stark contrast between paint and the areas of linen canvas that O’Brien leaves empty. It is these areas of raw, clean canvas are that gives O’Brien’s paintings the sense of a connected disconnection and work to create ambiguous space. Erin O’Brien has shown at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York; LaMama Galleria, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Green Street Gallery, Boston; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia. O’Brien is the recipient of residency fellowships from Weir Farm National Historic Site, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Media Contact
Sarah Brown McLeod
ABOUT KATHRYN MARKEL FINE ARTS
Established in 1975 with the belief that significant contemporary art can be beautiful as well as visually and intellectually rigorous, Kathryn Markel Fine Art is committed to the experience of discovery and collecting at the highest level. Committed to serving a deep network of collectors and institutions, Kathryn Markel Fine art showcases a diverse array of primary market artists, unified by excellence in their craft, compelling intellectual framework, and a love of the art-making process.
https://www.markelfinearts.com/
New York City
529 W 20th St.
New York, NY 10011
Bridgehampton
2418 Montauk Hwy
Bridgehampton, NY 11032
