Nancy Koenigsberg

LINE AND SHADOW

February 1 - March 16, 2024

Nancy Hoffman Gallery will present an exhibition of sculptural works by artist Nancy Koenigsberg from February 1 through March 16, 2024. This is her first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will include approximately 25 works, made between 1998 and 2023, focusing on wire sculpture. Her wall pieces and installation works are woven, knotted, crocheted, or otherwise manipulated from various weights and colors of copper, steel, and aluminum wire. Woven or knotted grids are shaped and layered. Materials are shiny and dull, fragile, and industrial strength. The various combinations and contrasts challenge and engage the viewer both visually and conceptually.

Koenigsberg says the grid featured in much of her work reflects the city streets she knows so well and is a “part of her DNA” as a New Yorker. As the work employs the regularity and repetitiveness of the grid, it also includes the nuances and intricacies found in both urban and natural environments and in the textile world she’s been immersed in for decades.

Koenigsberg has a rich history of study and work in textiles. She founded a custom design needlepoint business which thrived for many years in New York City. With a desire to focus more on her own work, she closed the business and became a student again, studying for three years at The New School for Social Research. Her studies were life-changing and set her on her present course. To ensure the continuation of an artistic exchange, she and fellow students began the Textile Study Group of New York in 1977, holding monthly meetings for lectures, presentations, and demonstrations. They invitedartists from around the world whose work was well-known and well-regarded internationally to present their work. Occasionally, presentations of historical importance or technical expertise were invited ensuring group members of a broad range of knowledge from ancient to the most contemporary textile practices. Koenigsberg is today President Emerita and still deeply involved in the group’s ongoing programming.

Koenigsberg writes about her work:

“As I move ahead with my work, I reflect on my inspirations and beginnings. I’ve lived most of my life in an urban environment and find that the grid of New York City’s streets and the regularity and repetitiveness of the building facades has become part of my DNA. For those willing to look closely, the city also offers an endless array of distinguishing detail. Changing light is filtered through narrow shafts between buildings and through the leaves and branches of trees insistent enough to thrive here. Taxies, buses, crowds, and solo walkers, all contribute to the constant animation of the city.

“The grid and a variety of detail were also an important part of my early work with fiber, a first love that continues to engage me though I’ve moved from yarns to fabric to industrial materials.

“I now use copper and steel narrow gauge wire and traditional forms of weaving and knotting to create two and three-dimensional structures and textiles. Even as I create my drawings in metal, I’m fascinated with the interlocking lines and the spaces they form.

“Lace-like layers allow for transparency, the passage of light and the formation of shadows. In other works, multiple layers become almost opaque. Lines cross and re-cross to create complex fabric and a lively tangle of light and shadow. Works become a study in paradox offering an appearance of delicacy and fragility juxtaposed with the strengths of steel and copper employed in their making.”

About the Artist

Nancy Koenigsberg lives and works in New York City. She was born in Philadelphia in 1927. She has an extensive exhibition history in the United States, Europe, and South America, and has completed numerous commissions. Her work is included in collections in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Museum of Arts & Design, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT, among others.

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LINE AND SHADOW by Jeanine Falino

ArteMorbida by Maria Rosaria Roseo

Jody Guralnick

TELL ME A SECRET

February 1 - March 16, 2024

IN THE NEWS

Nancy Hoffman Gallery will present an exhibition of paintings by artist Jody Guralnick from February 1 through March 16, 2024. This will be her first exhibition with Nancy Hoffman Gallery. The exhibition will include approximately 15 works, made between 2022 and the present. Works in the exhibition range from 12 x12 inches up to 60 x 144 inches.

The paintings depict the winding patterns that lichen forms on rocks, as well as the branching hyphal patterns of fungal growth. The lichen, painted in acrylic in rich and alluring impasto, stands in bas-relief against an oil background evocative of nature’s palette.

Guralnick says: “As muses go, yeast, mold, mushrooms, and lichen have a lot to offer. When fungus grows, it casts these lacy mycelial threads. It’s so baroque and over the top.” Guralnick paints these ornate, “over the top” alluring patterns in her latest series.

Guralnick moved to Aspen, Colorado in the mid 80’s after nine years in New York where she was intrigued by the detritus of the City: cigarette packs, paper scraps, litter, etc. When she moved to Aspen, she realized “the woods have a different type of litter.” Thus began her lifelong fascination with and commitment to nature as well as scientific studies. The microscopic universes she discovered at her feet became fodder for dissection and categorizing. The intricate patterns and ecosystems invited close examination. The ephemeral nature of nature itself, its cycle of growth, deterioration and rebirth became a metaphor for life and its fragility in the artist’s hands.

She is a Master Naturalist specializing in lichen with the Forest Conservancy in Aspen. Her Conservancy studies inform and inspire her new paintings, which look closely at complex networks, symbiotic relationships and processes that occur throughout nature, which she transforms into beguiling abstract paintings that appear to suggest another universe.

Her studio is brim-full of lichen, mushrooms, bits she finds on the slopes as she hikes trails; along with paintings that spring from these natural treasures. While the paintings are not portraits of her collections from the ground, what she sees and studies is the springboard for the works on canvas.

Jody Guralnick / Statement / October 2023

As an artist I attempt to serve as intermediary, merging many worlds: the world of insects, animals, plants, fungi, microbes and the man-made. I invite indoors the creations of the outdoors in order to form a new hybrid made by hand, paw and claw.

I am engaged in a partnership with these materials, alternately transforming, observing, seed saving, elucidating.  I am studying them botanically, naming, categorizing. By using both the tools of science and art I hope to explicate a time and place in three dimensions, a time and place that is rapidly undergoing climatic change, social change, change at the human level and change planet wide.

By applying traditional rules of taxonomy overlaid with new combinations, I am making hybrids that speak of both past present and future.

In my practice, I attempt to collaborate with the world rather than create something with no past, no history. My work is about dissection and classification in order to transform, to disrupt in order to know, to join two things that do not easily cohabitate.

This work is about memory and amnesia, mosses and lichens and fungi, alchemical plants and the rapture of the tiny. It is about amazement, longing, definition, and comprehension. It is about the forgotten detail, and blurring the line between the microscopic and the macroscopic. It is about shock and the quotidian, just as it is about the space where nature and domesticity rub up against each other. I try to work at the point where two worlds touch; where there is a call, and a response.

I am not taming wilderness, I am making new introductions.