CONVERSATIONS

December 12, 2024 - January 25, 2025

From December 12 to January 11 the gallery will host an exhibition of work by gallery artists entitled Conversations. The visual parallels that exist among several of our artists are undeniable. Serendipitously, a brilliant blue ceramic assemblage by Joan Bankemper with cups and flowers, birds and antique plates speaks to an abstract painting by Frank Owen of the same palate, and similar though abstract energy. A Jody Guralnick painting entitled, Dandelion, informed by the walks in the mountainous woods surrounding her home, with lacy forms of tiny lichen, seed pods and a dandelion about to burst its seeds against a mossy green background, compares references to organic forms of nature with another Bankamper ceramic, Piedmont, also green with tiny hand-built flowers and garlands that surround the vessel form.

An expansive conversation is about the grid for which the gallery has many artists actively engaged on the subject. Nicole Phungrasamee Fein’s sensitive watercolors often engage with the grid in a geometrically refined fashion as in her recent pastel of pinks, yellows, greens and pale blues, the entirety like a gentle weaving speaks to Jody Uttal’s primarily red watercolor title Elemental 1, a grid painted free-hand without a straight edge, reminding us of Annie Albers. Nancy Koenigsberg’s Chroma is a grid of the “color chart,” each square woven in a different color wire creating a dynamic ensemble.

Lucy Mackenzie’s tender June Roses, an intimate scale oil painting of roses in her June garden captured at the most sublime moment in bloom converses with Joseph Raffael’s Elegy III of a yellow rose in its fulness, bathed in golden light – both works pure celebrations of nature’s bounty. And Carolyn Brady’s Rose for M.C., two perfect red roses brighten a day in a silver vase, the focal point of a summer luncheon. Another motif with many voices; the circle; Nicole Phungrasamee Fein in watercolor, Jesse Small in steel, Rupert Deese in oil on wood, and more. Conversations offers a range of styles, a range of works, a range of opportunities for connection.