Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is thrilled to announce an upcoming exhibition curated by Fran Shalom. The group exhibition will run concurrently with Shalom’s solo show, Taking the Backward Step. Both exhibitions will be on view from October 26 - December 2, 2023.
JJ Murphy, a film author and art critic recently wrote: “There are two different approaches to curating a group show. One is to choose a theme and then find artwork that fits. The other strategy is to choose works and then attempt to discover a theme that will link the assembled pieces.”
Shalom was inspired by Murphy’s second approach - “the artists were chosen more for their unique, distinctive ways of art-making rather than for sharing a common theme. But there remains great commonality among their work,” she says.
In the realm of Zen Buddhism, there is a koan (a type of non-conceptual riddle found in the Book of Serenity written in 1223) that speaks of being “alive and frisky.” It encourages us to embrace life with a sense of liveliness, energy, and a zest for experiencing the world as we encounter it. To be “alive and frisky” is to cultivate a deep awareness of the present moment and engage wholeheartedly with whatever we do. These four artists exemplify this in their process - whether through mark-making, repetition, found objects, or language.
Meg Atkinson's paintings create a world that is distinctly both psychedelic and formal. She is influenced by comics, medieval painting, and hard-edged abstraction. She says, “There is a pattern to what I do. First, I make a discovery, then I recreate it, then I toss it aside. Once I get bored, I start to mess around and take risks. It’s like solving a puzzle and that’s where the payoff is.”
For Jimbo Blachly, the discovery is much more literal. “I am continually searching for an intimate correspondence between the landscape and myself, an attempt to record both a sense of time and an aspect of space,” he says. “A desire to create a marker, a memento of an experience of a particular place.”” This context is what makes his work feel like an experience rather than a landscape.
A Pierogi Gallery press release describes Sharon Horvath’s paintings, stating that, “they reveal her exuberant, uncanny mind/landscapes that simultaneously suggest realities and invented worlds. A mindscape that includes bits and pieces from everything she comes in contact with. As she says, the work deals with “the emotional language of objects.”
And lastly, Leslie Roberts writes: “I diagram ephemeral language into geometric color structures. Lists of words in my paintings reflect my life and the world. Paintings may chronicle a journey, record intimate conversations, document headlines, or catalog names of streets. The lists are artifacts of twenty-first-century culture, which I translate into highly visual forms.”
Media Contact:
Abbie Knight
abbie@markelfinearts.com
